26 Comments on “I Don’t Know What You Were Doing With Your Day, But Personally I Was Watching a Whole Bunch of Videos About Submarines”

1. Subtle hints and clues. Hmmm. Let’s parse this out…

   A “submarine” is also a type of sandwich… does this mean your burrito monstrosities are going to morph into a new form?

2. Were any of those submarines small enough to fit inside a human blood vessel?

3. Is it submarines are the closest things to life in deep space we have on this planet? Nah, it’s probably just because they are cool.

4. Interesting, but they’ve mixed-up the two quite different Russian Akula-Class subs. The earlier and larger, known in the West as the Typhoon Class, was over 600 feet long, nearly twice as long as the later class. The fictional “Red October” was the most famous Typhoon.

5. So, is that your plan to ride out the pandemic? Subs are mobile, hard to detect, and give you access to a majority of the Earth’s surface. Sounds better than a cave or bomb shelter.

6. Is it so hard for people to not draw sonar displays as a rotating radar sweep? It doesn’t even work close to that. It can’t; the speed of sound is too slow.

7. I build subs so it’s a pretty good video.

   Also, fun fact, the term “submarine sandwich” actually comes from Connecticut and my shipyard that builds the subs. A lot of Italians in CT and there was a sandwich shop that catered to the shipyard and the nearby sub base too.

   Except we don’t actually use the term “sub sandwich” in Connecticut. It’s called a grinder in southern New England.

8. Just finished 20 Million Tons Under the Sea. Very good book about the capture of U-505, the sub at The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

9. I spent six years in the US Navy on subs. Or rather one sub that was home ported out of Pearl in the early 90’s. Remember, there are two types of ships; submarines and targets!
   johntshea is correct pointing out the video mixes up Akula and Typhoon. Other than that seems pretty accurate to my knowledge of US submarines and WWII sub info. The video is okay for sound bites but isn’t very substantive for life on a sub or submarine missions.
   I’d be happy to answer any questions (that I can speak about).

10. I like this old training film from the US Navy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCBJ_0vX3AQ&list=PL-Qr-DFO64x1JZGK4faTauBufzgFsmiVY&index=20&t=3s). If you haven’t seen it and are also interested in early subs, it’s pretty cool!

11. Hopefully one of them was the Beatles Yellow Submarine. Blue Meanies!! I loved that movie…

12. Here is an interesting read, a manual completed after the war on Balao class submarines. https://maritime.org/doc/fleetsub/index.htm

13. I grew up on the lake in Idaho mentioned near the end, lake Pend Oreille. The navy does sonar testing there but with small scaled down submarines, and there’s definitely no underwater passage from that lake. There’s a dam at the western end and you can’t even sail out of it towards Washington.

14. One day my favourite cafe waitress was both very rushed and very unhappy. So I spoke in sound bites each time she went past:

    I bought a toy submarine today.

    The conning tower pops off so I can put baking soda in.

    Then the submarine dives and surfaces.

    People are so dirty minded.

    I can’t invite a lady up to my bathtub to see my submarine go up and down.
    … waitress happy.

15. Time to re-read Frank Herbert’s “The Dragon in the Sea.” Written well (both senses of the word) before “Dune.”

16. I found Herbert’s book moving. I had the original Avon paperback. Later it was titled Under Pressure. The book captured the sense that the world had been at war for many seasons before the story opens. The viewpoint character is married, (I think his wife is in the service) he is not a dashing action hero, and yet he has to go undercover in the silent service. I won’t forget the line by someone at headquarters, “I grieved when the British Isles were destroyed.”

    … …

    Herbert’s plot involved subs sneaking into enemy territory to pirate oil. During the cold war the National Enquirer occasionally ran a story about the Swedish navy circling over a flying saucer in one of their fiords. Too easy to repeat the cover story that it was a Soviet submarine mapping the fiord. The only problem with the story, given the number of UFO’s being circled down the years, was that decades after WWII the Russians would have surely had all the fiords mapped ten times over. This was common sense, leading logically to… UFO’s.

    I asked syndicated journalist Gwynne Dyer one day, and learned that he had in fact asked the Swedish navy about the UFOs. Since none of the UFO’s were ever captured, they only had a theory: They laughed to say they thought the Russians were sneaking in and out merely to prove their manhood.

17. So are you consulting on the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea reboot then? I’m just gonna assume you are, but it will be set in SPACE!!!! Voyage to the Bottom of an Alien Sea?

18. I suppose you’re subconsciously gearing up to write something more about it ? I suppose you’ll keep it under your hat till you have a first draft ?

19. So if someone can answer this question I have about submarines, which is quite SF-related.

    How is air circulated in submarines? And how would one seal off a compartment in an emergency?

    SF relation: if your spaceship has an air leakage problem, all the airtight bulkheads automatically close. (Happens in so many SF stories.) Okay, but what about ventilation ducts? There’s something else you have to close off, which is an additional point of failure.

    Or, air ventilation and circulation without ducts would mean keeping doors open all the time, with obvious problems of privacy and security.

    This is not so much a problem with surface ships, that can get ventilation down from above with no impact to watertightness between internal segments. But that doesn’t work for submarines or spacecraft.

20. If this actual research, I have a friend who’s husband is a submariner out of Pearl. I don’t know how much of his work he could talk about (or even if he wasn’t out to sea at one time or another), but I could put you in touch.

21. That video has an error that reveals an unfortunate level of ignorance that, being an old fuddy-duddy, I think is all too common. Error # 26 has the narrative “After the end of World War I a German submarine washed up onto a beach in Hastings, England.” It shows an image of a submarine with a Nazi swastika on the conning tower, which is an anachronism. That event occurred in 1919.

    Although a few Germans had been promoting different forms of the swastika since the early years of the 20th Century (from ancient times the swastika was using in many cultures as a symbol of luck and good fortune), the Iron Cross was the primary German military symbol during World War I. It seems that a few German airplanes had a swastika late in the war, but it was not done in the style that was adopted by the Nazis in the early 1920s, and that was predominant as a military symbol after their rise to power. The Nazi swastika would not have been on any World War I submarine.

    Well, I guess if something has to do with both Germany and war, it must mean that a swastika is called for.

22. I will take our host’s word for it that there was no special reason, no ulterior motive for saying to himself, well, what about submarines? After all, I do it all the time, about all kinds of things. Sometimes it connects up with something else and sometimes I just satisfy my momentary curiosity. I hope that those of you with specific technical knowledge do have a forum and friends to share it with. I like knowing there are lots of sharp readers out there.

23. PS, I also doubt very much the bit about the underwater passage from Idaho to the ocean.

24. Addendum to my earlier post: if you want a video about the perils of high-pressure underwater toilets—and how quickly everything can go wrong in the complex interlocking systems of a submarine—watch this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfr0nsh0Ghc).

25. Ed, to answer your question regarding ventilation within the submarine…
    Submarine’s ventilation systems (at least the 688 class that I am familiar with) work much like the HVAC system of a house with central heating/AC. There is a central “fan” room that has powerful fans that circulate air to all parts of the ship through normal duct work.
    To your question about airtight bulkheads, you are correct. The 688 class sub has two compartments (technically three but since no one goes into the reactor compartment when it is ‘hot’ and air isn’t circulated there, we’ll leave it to two), the forward compartment and the engine room. These two compartments are separated by a water tight door for crew to move between them. There is a ventilation duct that also connects the two compartments and it also has a water tight valve that would be closed during casualties (fire, flooding, steam leak, etc.). I suppose you could call it another point failure but they are designed to fail closed.
    To your point about keeping doors open (without ducts), the crew water tight door was normally kept closed when underway and only opened to allow crew to pass.

26. > Ed says: JULY 21, 2020 AT 10:22 AM
    > So if someone can answer this question I have about submarines, which is quite SF-related..

    Dunno, but thanks for inspiring a random wonder: Not @whatever but another popular blog might open a focused topic to use an alias (such as Ed) to mine collective wisdom?