标签： Historical Inspirations

Hi everyone! It’s Tautog again. I want to answer one question that popped up a few weeks ago. Translated, it’s something like…

“Japanese submarines had aircraft on their submarines. I was wondering if American submarines did the same?”

Well, the answer is yes. For a very limited time, the U.S. did briefly think about using airplane scouts on the submarine! We tried it on the S-boats earlier, as you can see below.

This is a photo of S 1 carrying a floatplane. Plane buffs will recognize the aircraft as a Martin-MS. A better picture from NavSource can be found below – you’ll recognize that this looks very similar to what we typically imagine as a “floatplane.” It’s just a whole lot smaller. This is the mid  1920s after all!

They also had the Cox-Klemin XS as an alternate plane that they tested.

Now, this goes back to our prior discussion on submarine cruisers. When General Board was designing that big minelayer-cruiser boat, they really wanted to see if we could fit a couple of planes onto it.

“Well, V-4 was pretty big, why don’t we try that?”

Well, there ended up being a few problems.

One, a plane is going to need a pressure-proof hangar to live in as the submarine submerges. With how many mines the Argonaut was going to carry, there just isn’t any room.

Room wasn’t the only issue though. By the way, weighing in at about a thousand pounds (the Navy asked for a two thousand pound scout plane), the planes tested were very small planes (the Zero, by comparison, was about three thousand seven hundred pounds give or take). Even these tiny things were a pain to design with, because if you think about it, adding what would basically be a big box of air really messed with your ability to stay buoyant or to go under water.

What did a submarine need? To dive or submerge as quickly as possible, of course. So to put a big hangar is already going to make your submarine bulkier and therefore more noticeable. But we’re not even talking about just having more mass. What happens if say, your hangar got damaged and you couldn’t close the door? What if the depth charges broke your pressurized hangar and causes a leak while submerged? None of those would be good for the submarine.

Of course, that wasn’t all the issues the plane faced. For starters, it took the crewmen several hours to assemble and dissemble the plane. Our floatplanes at the time couldn’t go very far either, and we had serious concerns about whether or not they can fly out the few hundred nautical miles they’d need to scout a Japanese base (remember to basically multiple any estimates you make by two since well, you want the planes to come back!), whether they would be fast or stealthy enough to get away/hide from (some) enemy aircraft, and whether they could operate well under worse weather conditions.

Secondly, the plane would need to carry a radio to signal back to the sub, “okay, bad guy here” or “everything’s clear, go,” right? How is the submarine supposed to pick up that signal safely? If you pop an antenna out that’s almost as obvious as having a periscope!

To top it all off, if the enemy detects the scout plane, it’s certainly going to lead them to the sub. If the submarine is already going to dive slower as a result of this, what would they do?

So, as you can see, while the General Board didn’t completely write off the possibility of a better submarine scout plane coming into existence later (so we could put a plane on a sub), they really didn’t try very hard after that to get a plane onto a submarine. The benefits simply didn’t outweigh the costs, and the Navy soon found other priorities that they wanted to work out.

Hope that answered your question! See you next time.

Hi, Tautog here. Morgane wanted me to explain the basics about sonar.

There are two types of sonar – passive and active. Passive sonar is like a giant microphone – you listen for the sound of ships and the direction they are coming from. Modern sets can even identify different types of ship just from the sound they make! We’ll probably talk more about this later, but this is what one looked like in World War 2.

Active sonar is the stereotypical pinging sound you hear in movies. You send one of those pings towards an object, the ping bounces back to you, and you measure the time it takes to bounce back. Since the speed of sound in water is known, with a little math you can find out just how far something is.

Submarines generally just use passive sonar. Active sonar is rarely used as it also broadcasts your location to anyone else who is listening. Not a smart move if you’re trying to stay hidden! Not that there’s no use for Active sonar – During the cold war Soviet submarines would rapidly ping American submarines so they couldn’t hear anything with their passive sonar.

Now that you know a bit of how sonar works, I figured it’d be a good time to explain how to counter it. The counter to passive sonar is quite simply to make the boat quieter.

(A note from Cusk. This is easier said than done, of course…)

Whether that means putting rubber noise-dampeners around the equipment, turning off non-essential equipment, or telling the crew themselves to shut up doesn’t matter. If the boat is quiet, passive sonar has a harder time listening in. Normally submarine crews are trained to rig the submarine for “silent-running” – this means that all non-essential equipment is shut off, the submarine restricted to very low speeds, and the crew going hush-hush.

Alternatively, since passive sonar has a limited range, you can just dive deeper.

Active sonar is harder to counter, since it relies on sound waves bouncing off of you instead of just listening for you. One way is simply to reduce the surface area the sound waves have to bounce off of you. If you point your bow directly on to the enemy ship, you give the sound waves less to bounce off of than if you were side-on. Modern subs have a sonar absorbent coating around them, which absorbs the sound waves so they can’t bounce back. The stuff’s largely classified, so I can’t really tell you how it works. Sorry.

And, as with almost everything in the submarine world, you can always just dive deeper. 😉

“Are these still called Tautog’s Sub Corners?”

Yes, of course? I’m not a Pokemon, you know! Besides, I don’t think I need to tell EVERYONE what my sub corner is at this point. We’ve had like five or six of these!

Anyways. Today’s sub corner I have a friend with me again. This is Argo!

…Feels a little strange being introduced like this. *laughs* Though I guess if you’ve been reading these you know which subgirl I’m supposed to be, right?

So. Should I talk or do you wanna?

Go ahead, Tog. I’ll pipe in if we need extra comments.

Okay! So. Last time we talked about the V-boats and how they weren’t quite what the Navy had wanted at the time. We ended with two important points, which are:

1. The U.S. Navy decided it wanted long range cruiser type submarines to eventually meet the Japanese, which were now identified as the primary opponent. The reason why they wanted a long range submarine was taking into account War Plan Orange, where the submarine is envisioned to more or less strike out from bases far from the battle zone.
2. Due to the difficulties in the economy, however, Congress was very reluctant in building more warships, and that includes submarines.

I talked a little bit about the sometimes contradictory design premises that General Board put the engineers through. What ended up happening, though, was that the the U.S. settled on a few priorities.  In no particular order, these criteria included range, speed, fuel economy, size, and reliability.

What’s more, the U.S. decided to stick to the submarines and seriously develop its tactics. We aren’t too sure why or what made that decision for them – but given that we’re still in the 1920s, my guess is that abandoning the idea of the battlecruiser probably had something to do with it.

See, at the time, we thought that cruisers could be used to fight off screens. A battlecruiser could have acted as a scout, fought the enemy small-fries, and directly checked out what exactly did the other side have in terms of their capital ships. Now that the US firmly decided that there would be no battlecruisers, guess which type of ship ended up getting the job?

Submarines, of course. Now, airplanes weren’t entirely in the pictures yet. Neither were aircraft carriers. We did think about putting planes on a sub, but that’s another story for another time!

*laughs* They still ended up making a pretty big submarine.

Yeah, V-4 would be the biggest submarine we would ever build before the age of nuclear submarines. But, she had to be big. After all, we were talking about minelaying operations, so all the mines have to go somewhere! That’s what she was built for. Though, of course, like I said up there, she was supposed to scout too.

Do you want to say something about our own nutty designs? I thought the V-4 piece was going to be a multi-parter because of so many new concepts introduced.

Which nutty design? And, sure!

I’ll give you one. The submersible battlecruiser!

…

What the heck IS that?

Designed by one Lt. Cmdr. Craven, this was a literal underwater battlecruiser. She was supposed to have 4 (though I like the one with 6 personally, teehee) 12” guns, 10 torpedo tubes in the bow and 4 in the stern, a surface speed of 25 knots, and resistant to 8” gunfire at 8000 yards. So yes, you’re looking at 6” of armor on the turrets and conning tower, and up to 6” of armor on the sides, too. 

The turrets would be enclosed in those hemispherical orb-looking turrets to better resist water pressure, and they’d be backed up by those 4” anti-aircraft guns. The idea was that we’re really going to get a real independent scout this time, so we might as well go all out and build the biggest thing we could think of.

And?

We didn’t build it.

Yeah. I know that. You’re standing here in your … ordinary gear and not 12” guns!

I mean, Congress was leery of funding 2,000 ton submarines. How kindly do you think they’d take to a 20,000 ton submarine? 

Wait. Hollup. Oversized main guns. Hemispherical turrets. Submerging to attack targets… Not to mention mostly impractical engineering…

…What, did we try to build Surc –

TAUTAU! Te voilà! 

…

WHY am I NOT in Silence Service book?? 

Okay, see you next time everyone! I’m gonna have to go on patrol now. Later. Bye!

Hi.

Sorry, it’s the weekend. Tautau’s off doing something fun, so I’ll be posting today’s update instead. 

I’m Trout. You’ll meet me later in the book, but for now, just know that I’m another one of STEC’s subgirls. My duties are the same as any other subgirl on base, but I work mostly in intelligence these days. As such, I’m admittedly not much of a techie like Tautog is. I’m better with what we call human resources –

Breaks are a thing, Trout. Have you rested yet?

I had five and a half hours. It’s sufficient. Besides, I get antsy when nothing happens on the site for a day. 

Okay, now you’re making me feel bad. Go get some sleep.

---

*yawn* Workaholic girl, that one.

Anyways.

I would like to say, however, that we’re creating more of these random expressions. It’s easy to use and it conveys mood a lot better than text.

But, come on. How many of you here are for cute shipgirls in bikinis –

…

Oh.

Well, uh. Okay, for the rest of you, today I’d like to keep on talking a bit about the earliest submarines. I think after you see the struggles the early submarine designers went through, you’ll have a better appreciation for history and how much effort went in to make the world into what it is today.

Last time we talked about the Ts and how they didn’t work out very well. Today, I’d like to bring up the famous V-boats. As I mentioned last time the V-boats ended up pretty different from one another, but we’ll talk about the first Vs today, V 1-3.

This clipping from a paper in 1921 talks about the size of these things. Look at it. 2000 tons! What’s more, the V-class boats were designed to go 21 knots so to keep up with the main battle fleet.

Now, remember last time I said that the T-boats had issues with multiple power sources to the shaft? They fixed that this time around by putting in two more powerful diesels (at 2250 bhp) and coupling them directly to the twin shafts. As a back-up (handy for charging batteries on the surface), there were two smaller auxiliary diesels. If the commander had wanted, the crew can redirect power to the shafts for a total of 6200 bhp. Some say that this submarine is the beginning of the diesel-electric propulsion system in submarines: using a diesel engine to charge the electric generator which go on to, well, power other things!

Then, weapons. One single 5 inch gun, and twelve torpedoes in total. This might sound like it’s a lot, but many of the other boats at the time carried more guns and still displaced less. The various Japanese Kaigun-dais and the British cruiser boats often carried heavier loads and could go further, and they had just as much territory (in theory) to cover as we did.

And, as usual, we found that what works on paper doesn’t always translate to results. See, even with the very simple strategy American commanders had in mind, the first V-boats just weren’t for the task. America figured out very early on that its primary enemy was unlikely to be Britain, but Japan with all of its highly aggressive moves in Asia. What America needed was a submarine that could go very far and have submarines possibly fight near Japanese waters. The V-boat ended up only able to make 6000 nautical miles at 10 knots.

To put things into perspective, if a submarine sails from the West Coast and head to Asia, it’s going to take this submarine (going at 10 knots) 33 days. The sub’ll probably run out food and it’ll definitely run out of fuel – it’s gonna need to cover about 7500 to 8000 nautical miles. That really won’t do.

The engine was not very good either, and they couldn’t make 21 knots – the Navy would be lucky to get 19 and they ran mostly at 18-18.5. The gun was bad, too, and they ended up downgrading it to a three-incher because the ship was too top-heavy, which weighed the bow of the submarine down.

(V-1 with her first commander.)

I mean, these submarines served admirably, but you know, you can only do so much. All of them ended up decommissioned in less than a decade.

At this point you might be wondering. So, it took them five years. They only got three boats out of it. It had a lot of different problems. What did we get out of it?

Experience. Lots of experience. We got really good at building stuff, and we spent a lot of effort trying to figure out why the diesels were unreliable. We also learned a lot from watching the V-boats and got better at ship design. Perhaps most importantly, we started thinking about war in a smarter way.

That’s to say, we had to make the submarine independent. The Philippines wouldn’t be a feasible location to defend – the Japanese would take it easily enough. Even if we fortified Hawaii and used that as our main base, that’s still looking at a 4000 – 5000 nautical mile trip from Hawaii before we can get our submarines into the battle zone.

So, the General Board of the United States Navy (they’re like the navy’s general staff – a big group of advisors. Shortened to General Board in further posts) took a look, reined in their collective hard-ons for battleships and big battle lines (Yes… It may surprise you to hear that we thought like the Kantai E- er, I mean, Kantai Kessen Decisive Battle folks too), and said, we need a submarine that could stay out really far. We’re going to need a much better design than what we had before, and we’re going to have to seriously look at how to fix our deficiencies.

… Let me tell you a story.

Trout? Thought you went to bed.

The General Board first wanted a cruiser submarine. Then they wanted a “fast cruiser submarine” that could go to Japan and come back in the same go. Since it needed to scout, we planned for it to stay out there for a month and a half. Then we wanted to add distance, and now it needs to go 17,000 nautical miles at 10 knots.

Since we decided it needed to stay out for long, we had to get the biggest bang for our buck. Let’s add double the torpedoes the Japanese and British had to this thing. Make it eighteen. No, twenty-four. No, thirty. Since we’re going to be out there for that long, let’s add other capabilities too. Why don’t we make this cruiser submarine lay mines, too?

Yeah! Let’s throw sixty mines in the deal as well. Now we have a submarine that’s not only heavily armed, but also super useful! It can scout and attack boats and mine all in the same design!

Hmm, with such a potential load, we gotta make it go fast. Every day this submarine spends traveling means it’s one less day on patrol. Let’s make it go at least… fifteen knots. Fifteen knots on the surface. That’ll show the other countries who’s boss.

But people were thinking about using airplanes to attack submarines, and that runs against the principles of stealth.

Precisely, Tautau! So let’s make it so that it’d be tough for planes to get us! We’ll put our own aircraft on the submarine, so the submarine can see the bad guys nearby and sneakily attack the ships before planes will show up. Planes won’t be a problem if they can’t find us!

Let’s add more guns too. As big of a gun as we can fit. Actually let’s add more guns. Yeah! America!

 

…

…

I should step in to clarify that much of the fanciful nonsense were thankfully stopped by the design board before anyone tried to build this thing. So, lucky for us, much of the above stayed as ideas – paper designs – only. What happened in reality was that the Navy finally worked out just which one of those elements did they want (Endurance, yes. Everything else, meh) and showed up to Congress with their new budget. They wanted six dedicated cruiser submarines and six dedicated minelayer submarines for defense.

And?

Congress looked at their budget, laughed, and said you can have one. 

Hey, V-4 ended up being pretty good. But, honestly, we’re getting off topic. Let’s call it a day here. Thanks for visiting my submarine corner!