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Originally Posted by flycessna
I've followed aviation quite a bit...both russian and us. We pretty much had it all over them as far as technology goes....
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I prefer to think of their tech is different not better of worse, so much as different.
When a consortium of engineers can manage to agree to any one design, then later groups of engineers want to 'up-date' that design. They can never disregard the work of the previous.
Science does this too. We have spent centuries with teachers propounding 'junk' science, because once a group of authorities agree to the junk, it takes huge piles of evidence proving they were wrong before the system can correct itself.
So it is with many areas of life.
Today our FDA has staked it's claim on one level of Iodine as being the appropriate RDA, and saying that anymore and it becomes toxic. While Japan set their RDA for Iodine at 100 times higher than ours. The difference? We have a 10 times higher rate of glandular cancers then they do, due to our lack of Iodine.
So it is with our naval engineers. Our naval engineers like the idea of sub hulls that have flex. They think that spring steel is cool. Our hulls can be four inches thick, but when diving deep they compress like the spongy springs of an old Ford. So all of our decks are suspended from shock absorbers, and nothing is solid mounted to the hulls. Because the hulls must be free to change size at will.
Since everything is suspended, they noticed that less sound gets transmitted to the hull. So they went crazy suspending things within frames that were already suspended, just to see how much of the vibration could be dampened. Then 'tuned' weights to dampen the vibrations even more. Then rubber mounts, then, ...
The idea of shrinking hulls just scares the heebies out of Russian sailors and engineers alike. They want hulls that are hard and braced and would not flex under any conditions. So they use a high Titanium alloy. So much so that they ran the world's supply of Titanium low. Their hulls don’t flex either and they mount everything solid to those hulls.
While we have Steam turbines and HUGE generators all suspended in the air and they will occasionally bounce. Theirs are encased by mounts and bracing.
We each followed totally different schools of thought in how to develop subs.
Their subs are hard [and brittle] and transmit every vibration, every door slam, and every grinding pump bearing.
Our subs flex so much that with repeated deep dives the hulls become brittle and subject of fractures.
We developed the science of sonar. We like sonar, so we put sonar on everything, including on our torpedoes.
They developed ion-tracing. Anything that moves through the water will leave a wake of 'disturbed' ions. So they put that stuff on everything. Including their torpedoes.
Our torpedoes can go into a spiral with their sonar actively looking for any target. When they discover a target, they kick into high speed and go. [Better hope it was not you that it decided to lock-onto]. So we need high-tech math to calculate where we think an enemy is. We send the fish out to that area, then let it do it's own seek program to find who is in that area.
Their torpedoes 'wake-follow'. They run in a straight line, until they cross a wake, then they turn 90degrees into the wake, they will zig-zag back and forth across that wake right up until it hits your screw.
Two completely different schools of thought.
And even though they have done wonders with wake-following, our authorities insist that it is junk science and stupid, "it will never work". Yet it clearly does.
As for our ASW, I am an ET, and while I do understand the theory of a Bernoulli hump in the water. I can not picture any SLAR radar that is honestly going to detect a hump in the water that is a 1/16 inch tall in the center, 50 meters wide with sloping sides, and that moves at two knots. My own internal B.S. meter pegs any time that I have read about that entire 'technology'. You can only see it from looking at the curvature of the earth, you must be 100 miles away from the area that you are focusing on, and you need glassy smooth seas.
Any time that an airplane wants to go down three to eight thermal-layers to listen for the sounds that are channeled in those layers, they certainly are welcome to try.
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... I was wondering if their approach to subs was the same....mass production of good but not great subs...and if the best way to track them..was with another sub.
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I like foil-fencing. I have competed, I have a few trophies, and I have coached a high school fencing team. When competing in ‘Olympic-style’ foil-fencing you are on a court that is roughly three foot wide and thirty foot long, and you compete with other fencers. Foil against foil. When I have practiced for a few months I become very confident in my fencing ability, and I feel that I could take on anyone.
However if I were to face someone else who is equally good with a sling-shot [me with a foil, him with a sling-shot] and we were not restricted to an ‘Olympic-style’ fencing court, then it may well be an entirely different matter.
So it is with subs.
We have team trainers, control room simulators where the entire control party of one sub can practice. The entire room looks and feels like a sub, it tilts and yaws, it shakes, it does everything. And we will go into these trainers and ‘train’ against the computer through various casualties. They can program the trainer to react exactly like your sub, so whatever you do, however you try to handle a scenario it will follow through appropriately. Or two sub crews will go into trainers next door to each other, and the computer will ‘put’ us in the same pond so we can hunt each other. It is pitting our high tech, against our own high-tech. Identical sub against identical sub. Or 688 American sub against 640 American sub.
We have developed our own styles and techniques, using our technologies.
However they play against each other too, and they have developed entirely different styles that are determined by their technologies.
When I have pointed out that we should be practicing against their subs which use their techniques, I have been reminded that I am not an officer, I am a mere peasant and we do not need to practice against that since our tech is so much superior to theirs. The aristocracy knows much better how to fight battles.
The two fleets have done a great deal of cat and mouse with each other.
Our officers tend to feel very much superior with our tech and our abilities.
However in the deep blue we do not always come out the superior.
For some reason our ‘superiority’ is not enough to gain consistent wins. In fact it rarely gains a 'win'.
I have examples though I am not at liberty to discuss them.
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Very interesting stuff!!
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