Ask a nuclear submariner.

In My Humble Opinion
141

[QUOTE=robby]
When I was in, you could receive up to ten 50-word “familygrams” per deployment (usually 6 months long). They were like telegrams, and were censored to prevent a sailor from getting upset in the event of bad news. (i.e. No submariner would get a “Dear John” familygram.)

Death announcements and the like were handled on a case-by-case basis. Often the family member would have to explain the situation to the squadron before the message would even be sent. If the sailor could be transferred off, they often would be.

Not sure how e-mail, etc. works on subs these days, as there was none of that when I was in. I suspect that all of that is limited to when a sub is on training exercises. On deployments, all outgoing transmissions were severely limited and had to be approved by the CO.
[/QUOTE]

LOL

You should have been there [actually you may have been …] when I had to move heaven and earth to get SubRon2 to bother letting mrAru know that he had to get checked for what the rest of the crew was calling sheep HIV Caseous Lymphadenitis is transferrable to humans and pretty nasty. Luckily we didn’t have to cull him out of the herd as he was negative for it, but it took me crawling my way up the chain of command and finally getting the base hospital in on it as well.

I know they aren’t supposed to give them bad news but fer jebus sake a serious medical issue is pretty damned important. But then again, they made him go to sea with a brand new case of pneumonia, and another time with the no shit full on influenza. And I understand he was pretty amusing going up and down ladders with a broken foot back on the Spadefish out of Norfolk.

142

[QUOTE=treis]
I’m surprised that this isn’t all controlled by computers nowadays. Is there a reason that it isn’t?
[/QUOTE]
When something goes wrong with the computer controlled systems, you pull out and replace the entire circuit card. Might sound nice compared to hours of troubleshooting and replacing a $2 relay in some 1950s Rube Goldberg Futurist fantasy contraption the size of a small refrigerator… but you can stick 500 spare relays in a locker, overflow a high pressure drain into it for a month, and half of them will still be fine. Supply may only give you two or three spare (many $1000s each) circuit cards and if there’s anything wrong with anything on it, you can’t use it.

There also the matter that it’s a retrofit for Los Angeles class subs… they aren’t really designed for it. Virginia class incorporate a lot more gadgetry and anticipate upgrading.
[QUOTE=robby]
Every time we hit a wave, the bow came out of the water and slammed back into the sea. I was convinced the hull was going to fail with all of the noise.
[/QUOTE]
They figured out that, eventually, the hull would fail after enough of that and tend to encourage keeping the boat in the water. The EMBT blow PMS testing is also way lame, too, now. You can tell when we reach the surface but I doubt it’s as spectacular as this. Angles and Dangles is more fun.
[QUOTE=Shirley Ujest]
HOw often do submariners receive communication and whatnot from family?
[/QUOTE]
Seems about every three days or so for e-mail during normal operations. If we’re actually doing something, non-essential communications are suspended for the duration.

I’m not terribly fond of the Sailormail program used for e-mail. I’d have written it as a plug-in for the e-mail programs used aboard ship for better integration and the availability of a sent items archive and an address book. It’s a bare bones webmail form disconnected from the normal methods of sending e-mail on-ship… that just re-formats the message and sends it to a shipboard e-mail address for further processing!
[QUOTE=TheTyrant]
A lot of old-school submariners initially cringed at the thought of fly-by-wire onboard submarines, but it worked beautifully. During trials, it really did prove itself to be a relatively bulletproof system.
[/QUOTE]
How well does it work when seawater temperature is in the low 90s?

143

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
Obviously, C&C is one of the factors limiting the Arsenal ship concept. And I’d think that any control problems for an unmanned surface vessel are going to be magnified greatly dealing with an armed DSROV. Wire controls are problematical, ELF signals require a long time to send any complex message, compared to more conventional radio, AIUI and SONAR signals can be jammed fairly easily. I don’t think it’s going be near as simple as taking a Predator’s C&C suite and transferring it. (Which, obviously, is one reason you’re putting the timeline for the replacement at 50 years, not 10.)
[/QUOTE]

And that’s precisely it. C&C becomes a big problem when realtime communication between the weapon platform and the controller is virtually impossible. Ultimately, any unmanned submersible we send off to engage in combat at sea is going to have to communicate sporadically, just as we do now. That requires a fair amount of autonomy, and that’s going to be a hard sell. Especially if it’s under nuclear power.

[QUOTE=1010011010]
How well does it work when seawater temperature is in the low 90s?
[/QUOTE]

You know, the only problems we ever really had with SCS were relatively simple networking and CORBA problems. For example, I was in sonar. (Yeah. I know. Stupid cone.) :dubious: SCS was acting really flaky and the trim calculations were all off. We come to find out that the AN/BQQ-10 isn’t sending accurate sound velocity profile data to SCS. Further investigation reveals that, for some reason, the SVP is being calculated with a salinity of 0ppt vs 35ppt, so we went ahead and adjusted the salinity and the SVP curve faired right in and SCS was happy.

I will admit that if there’s any problem with the heavily-integrated systems on VIRGINIA, it’s that sometimes things aren’t terribly intuitive, and you have to dig pretty deep to discover what the problem is. It is being corrected, though.

I wish I could tell you more about Maneuvering, because I’m sure that would interest you more, but there are a few problems with that:

  1. I probably shouldn’t be discussing NNPI here.

  2. I couldn’t really tell you anything about it anyway, because after qualifying, I usually only went aft to POR the ASRU, to check on air banks as BDW when SCS was down, and to turn in the tagout audit on Saturdays. :wink:

144

[QUOTE=robby]
Hey Tyrant! Pretty neat description–but the link for the photo doesn’t work.

I mentioned this at the beginning of this thread, but I should repeat that all of my info is based on my service aboard a 688-I boat, as well as riding and/or tours of even older classes of subs. I can’t comment on the newer subs (i.e. the Seawolf and Virginia-class boats). I’ve probably been lax in using the present tense for all of my comments and forgetting that newer classes may be moving away from those tenets we old-timers lived by–the rules that were designed to keep water out of the people tank. :cool:

“Pilots” and “co-pilots” on a sub? Fly-by-wire? :dubious: You know, when the first 688-I boats were launched with the BSY-1 system (which integrated much of the electronics), we used to joke that a glitch with the fathometer could knock out the whole sonar suite. Now the ship control system is also electronic? :eek:

Oh well–it works for aircraft, so I guess it’ll work for subs. Of course, military aircraft crash pretty routinely, too. :dubious:
[/QUOTE]

Hmm, it seems navsource.org is being a little flaky.

Here’s an article from Undersea Warfare that includes that photo (albeit way too small to really see anything) and quite a bit more information. And here you’ll find a lot more photos (including the one I attempted linking above.)

I’ve never been on a BSY-1 boat, but all of the foward NPES systems (yes, redundancy) are tightly integrated, too. Everything communicates with everything else, from the SCS to the AN/BQQ-10 to the AN/BYG-1 to photonics. Amazingly, it all works.

Now, of course, there were a few hiccups from time to time, and it can be a maze to troubleshoot.

I would like to throw in that we still held the same tenets sacred that those who came before us did. You know, the whole keeping water out of the people tank thing, as you mentioned. :slight_smile:

But, you know. . .from my experience in the service, and my more recent experience as a civilian in the industry–sometimes I wonder how long we’re going to continue putting men on the boats. Quite frankly, I imagine that within 50 years submarines will no longer be manned.

145

I work at a submarine command, and I have heard conflicting answers on the topic of hazing. How much of it really goes on, and how does it effect the younger sailors? I have heard stories about some of the picked-on committing suicide… and have heard other guys say that it doesn’t happen.

Also, which submarine commands do you consider to be the best/worst?

146

[QUOTE=Charaille]
I work at a submarine command, and I have heard conflicting answers on the topic of hazing. How much of it really goes on, and how does it effect the younger sailors? I have heard stories about some of the picked-on committing suicide… and have heard other guys say that it doesn’t happen.

Also, which submarine commands do you consider to be the best/worst?
[/QUOTE]

Charaille
New guys get picked-on a bit but it isn’t anything dreadful. The FNG gets to run for coffee, can’t watch movies until his qualifications are done, and similar low-level annoyances. There are also some practical jokes that get done on new guys, mostly just embarrassing stuff. I had several jokes played on me that I still blush when I think of them.
At least in my experience, hazing wasn’t anything even remotely worth committing suicide over. People on boats have committed suicide but I couldn’t imagine them doing it due to hazing. My own suspicion would be that anyone committing suicide had some other, pre-existing problems.

Regards

Testy

147

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
Testy
<SNIP>

On the other hand, one reason that civilian workers can’t be trained to the same standards is simply the multiplicity of designs out there. A lot of the training that Navy nucs get is curtailed on theory - i.e. we learn a lot of operational conditions for the relatively few naval plants in operation. Even if, as was my case, I never saw an S5W plant, it had a lot of similarities to all naval plants. AIUI, after I got out of the training pipeline they shifted to the S6G plant, which would have had the same core I was dealing with on my ship, even though it was a surface plant. That kind of incestuous design features show up all over the place.

In contrast civilian power plants are a lot more varied. When I took some courses while in the Navy about civilian nuclear power (And learned something about my limits - dammit I still say that semi-conductor radiation detectors work by PFM!) they were forced to teach CANDU reactors, simply because there was no other single plant that they could teach from a north american standpoint that could be called exemplary.

Of course, what the nuc training program does is produces nuclear qualified technicians. Don’t get me wrong, that’s all that’s necessary to operate a plant. But it leaves gaps in our knowledge that a true nuclear engineering degree holder wouldn’t have. Forex - a nuclear engineer should be able to describe how you’d derive a heat exchanger efficiency equation, and I couldn’t tell you how to do that if my life depended upon it.

The sad fact is that for a number of reasons I tend to think that civilian nuclear power and naval nuclear power are at best only slightly related fields.
*Bolding mine
-Loki
[/QUOTE]

Loki
Maybe the split between civ and military reactors will decrease. Or, more likely, the civilian industry will start standardizing on a good design. AIUI, the civilian reactors running now are fairly old.
Besides, you shouldn’t need a full fledged nuc engineer just for standard operations. Maybe one or two for supervisory-type things but not standard ops.

Regards

Testy

148

How’s the “weather” when submerged? Not “How’s the climate control”, though that’s interesting also. Is the “sailing” smooth when submerged, or are there waves and bumps and turbulence? How is the roughness of the ride compared to a surface ship, or for a submarine on the surface versus submerged?

Do you think undersea cargo shipping would be technologically viable, as in Frank Herbert’s novel The Dragon in the Sea?

149

Given The Tyrant’s comment about unmanned boats with increase of sophisticated controls and data capture,any of you care to muse on the future of submarines in general?(Both military and peacetime)

150

[QUOTE=Typo Knig]
How’s the “weather” when submerged? Not “How’s the climate control”, though that’s interesting also. Is the “sailing” smooth when submerged, or are there waves and bumps and turbulence? How is the roughness of the ride compared to a surface ship, or for a submarine on the surface versus submerged?

[/QUOTE]

As a verteran of one short weeklong test cruise aboard the USS Newport News, I feel eminently qualified to answer this one. As far as I was concerned, there is no weather when submerged. In fact, we were so busy getting our gear installed and checked out we weren’t aware that we’d left the dock until someone told us two hours later. The only time we were aware that we were on a moving platform was when they tried some ‘angles and dangles’. That was fun for a minute or two but had to stop because the slushy machine tumped over.

Now, the “climate control” though was a different matter. For some reason they tried to simulate arctic conditions aboard this boat. The radio [del]room[/del] closet was the worst. Why they feel the need to pump hurricane force frozen air into that space 24/7 is totally beyond me.

151

[QUOTE=UncleRojelio]
Now, the “climate control” though was a different matter. For some reason they tried to simulate arctic conditions aboard this boat. The radio [del]room[/del] closet was the worst. Why they feel the need to pump hurricane force frozen air into that space 24/7 is totally beyond me.
[/QUOTE]

Oh, that’s simple. In the effort to maximize discontent, and to be able to say things like the average temperature aboard naval vessels average to being nicely temperate - they have to chill the radio room (and other computer/electronics spaces) to make up for the steam plant in the engineroom.

One of the most amusing WTF moments of my service was just after watch change in the Caribbean. In the afternoon, after sweepers, if you weren’t on watch one had free time before supper began to be served. Usually watchstanders would come up out of the ship to the weather decks to chill, refresh in the fresh air, and simply relax. I came out of the enginerooms, which, as I mentioned, are steam baths, because of all the steam involved. I saw the ERS from my watch standing at the rails, next to a radioman. Joe was coated in sweat, still - we’d done drills on top of normal watchstanding, so we got a good workout. The radioman was still in foul weather gear, shivering after his watch in the radio room. He’d opened up his jacket to allow some of the ambient warmth against his skin, but he wasn’t quite ready to come out of his cocoon.

So, you had one man taking off his t-shirt, coated in sweat, enjoying the cool of the Caribbean afternoon, standing next to another man in a winter coat enjoying the same afternoon’s heat. :smiley:

152

[QUOTE=Carson O’Genic]
Given The Tyrant’s comment about unmanned boats with increase of sophisticated controls and data capture,any of you care to muse on the future of submarines in general?(Both military and peacetime)
[/QUOTE]
“Photo of Dr. Richard Daystrom launching the US Navy’s newest nuclear ballistic missile submarine, the USS Alamogordo (SSBN Pu239). The Alamogordo is fully autonomous, with the latest M5 multitronic computer making all decisions. Dr. Daystrom represented the prime contractors for the project - HAL Labs and Skynet.”

153

[QUOTE=Typo Knig]
“Photo of Dr. Richard Daystrom launching the US Navy’s newest nuclear ballistic missile submarine, the USS Alamogordo (SSBN Pu239). The Alamogordo is fully autonomous, with the latest M5 multitronic computer making all decisions. Dr. Daystrom represented the prime contractors for the project - HAL Labs and Skynet.”
[/QUOTE]

Heh.

154

[QUOTE=Charaille]
I work at a submarine command, and I have heard conflicting answers on the topic of hazing. How much of it really goes on, and how does it effect the younger sailors?
[/QUOTE]
Hmmm. It seems like there’s a constant patter of verbal abuse. It’s not mean spirited, though. It’s a nuclear powered men’s locker room. There may be a disparity between New Guy that hasn’t settled in and figured out he’s free to give as good as he gets. And you get the occasional Qualified Guy who never figured out himself that New Guys are free to give as good as they get and takes the whole “Shut the fuck up, NUB” thing a little too seriously.
[QUOTE=Charaille]
I have heard stories about some of the picked-on committing suicide… and have heard other guys say that it doesn’t happen.
[/QUOTE]
It doesn’t seem to be a factor in any of the cases I know about. It’s usually more a problem with there being no high spec on working hours and no low spec on sleep (or at least no one has to write a letter to Squadron or NAVSEA explaining in excruciating detail how and why they exceeded the operating limits of human equipment.)
[QUOTE=Charaille]
Also, which submarine commands do you consider to be the best/worst?
[/QUOTE]
The turnover of personnel makes this question practically meaningless.
[QUOTE=Typo Knig]
How’s the “weather” when submerged? Not “How’s the climate control”, though that’s interesting also. Is the “sailing” smooth when submerged, or are there waves and bumps and turbulence? How is the roughness of the ride compared to a surface ship, or for a submarine on the surface versus submerged?
[/QUOTE]
From smoothest to roughest for a given sea state: Submarine submerged > Surface Ship > Submarine surfaced. A submerged submarine rides about as smoothly as a moored submarine.

[QUOTE=Typo Knig]
Do you think undersea cargo shipping would be technologically viable, as in Frank Herbert’s novel The Dragon in the Sea?
[/QUOTE]
It would never be economically viable, so the technology aspect isn’t much worth considering.