Rich said:I'm not sure I ought to repeat his comments.
A bit of classified 101, if he told you; you can tell us.
Rich said:I'm not sure I ought to repeat his comments.
LOS ANGELES & OHIO subs tend to sound like a rainstorm on the ocean's surface (when no one's dropping toilet seats or wrenches, or slamming doors) and while surveillance assets may be out there they have to actually detect you. If you do it all submerged or with radar-absorbing masts and at night, then you're darn near invisible. If your periscope is submerged by wave slap and your radios transmit for microseconds in UHF frequency-hopping mode, then there's not much to work with. And when your mission has been pre-arranged for you to get everything without having to transmit and your antenna is a long wire floating on the ocean's surface, then there's nothing to work with.Azanon said:Interesting stuff again, but i was a bit surprised by your answer to my first question; about detections from one sub to another being so rare/never happening. I was thinking of WWII, and reflecting on some game simulations ive played, where it is dang near impossible to go a far distance without being eventually detected by something, especially if you're relatively close to land masses. Sure, more modern subs are a lot quieter and can go deeper, but i presumed those abilities were equally offset by improvements in detection equipment by other subs, surface ships, planes, satellites, and sonar nets.
Transits in the early 1990s were generally 20 knots unless there was a no-foolin' emergency-- a MEDEVAC or a high-priority mission. You could go faster if you really needed to but you'd burn a lot more nuclear fuel for not much more speed and you'd be sure to get Naval Reactors on your case about needing to show up early for those $750M refueling overhauls. Transiting at 20 knots was done deep enough (the UNCLAS number is 800 feet) to avoid everything & everyone and to minimize the sound that rose above the acoustic propagation layer. We had years of operating data on the Russians and others and didn't expect to run into them (so to speak) down there. U.S. & allied navies are informed of submarine water assignments and generally kept clear of them. U.S. SOSUS arrays would pick you up pretty reliably above 10 knots and you'd try to stay away (or stay very very quiet) if you happened to be near someone else's underwater detection arrays.Azanon said:So even the attack subs keep the speed/depth down so low as to keep not being detected priority #1? So i guess silent running speeds were pretty much the standard practice, and normal propulsion (~20kts or more for los angeles) was actually rare?
You have to follow the rules of engagement or be ready to explain yourself to a board of inquiry. (Of course some would prefer to live for the latter than to die for the former.) And if it's not detected by your target then it can't be construed as hostile. Turning toward & going active wouldn't be considered hostile action although it's certainly not polite. Flooding a tube can be done before you leave port or absolutely silently if you have a few minutes (and we used to practice that skill). Being detected opening an outer door, of course, leaves an unmistakable impression. But the act would have to be taken in context because it's remotely possible that someone was just doing maintenance or training.Azanon said:What would be considered a hostile action in a sub by the US? going active on a nearby sub? Turning towards an enemy sub? Flooding a torpedo tube? Opening a tube? Of course i presume a torpedo in the water is hostile =p. (not to mention, signifies your last 1-4 minutes of your life probably 4 out of 5 times)
One U.S. submarine ran aground in the 1980s basically because everyone thought everyone else knew what they were doing. The OOD gave an ordered depth greater than the charted depth while the CO and another senior officer were in the control room. The quartermaster thought the CO was going to step in and correct the mistake. The CO didn't realize that the charted depth was so shallow (he'd been doing other things and had lost the big picture). The senior officer didn't have any info about the water depth or the ship's usual operating depths. The OOD had forgotten that his max depth was shallower.Leonidas said:I would love to know how the Navy trained the junior sailors and their officers to make that system work. In my profession it runs maybe 50-50 with small unit leaders and commanders who are confident and smart enough to not only encourage, but demand participation in critical decisions from all ranks.
The physics doesn't work that way. Active sonar generally has a much shorter range than passive. The transmission loss doubles (the return has to get back to your sensor) and the ambient noise is raised by all the scattering & reverberation. However it's very difficult to model this on a computer in real time, so most simulation programmers cheat by designing an iso-acoustic ocean that has no semblance of reality. Submarine training centers didn't get a "real" ocean until the late 1990s, and that was on networks of costly Sun workstations. In the real world your passive sonar and some 10-knot ranging maneuvers (especially for nuclear subs but not so easily for diesel subs on battery) would develop a good enough fire control solution for a MK48 torpedo's active sonar to take care of the rest.Azanon said:The only reason i thought it might be standard for an attack sub, is because perhaps stealth isnt as important in an attack sub. It seems that if active sonar gives you greater range than passive, it might make sense to have it on when looking for boomers. For instance, i would think that it might be a good idea to turn it on for 5-10 minutes every 4 hours just to scan the area.
Absolutely. Technology and training made all the difference, even when spies were giving it away.Rich said:Suffice it to say, he felt our side was way more effective in doing our job than the Soviets had been.
Azanon said:I just wonder how useful passive sonar is for finding a boomer at depth and not moving much. I'm assuming.. not very.
I've never read any of them, but the submarine force seems to love the guy-- from the photos posted on his website he has more sea duty than me!2soon2tell said:I've read several of Joe Buff's submarine novels. How realistic are they?
I read "Deep Sound Channel" and "Thunder in the Deep", and I'm going to read the other four soon. Good military techno-thrillers like Tom Clancy's earlier novels.2soon2tell said:I've read several of Joe Buff's submarine novels. How realistic are they?