General Future Submarine Technology developments

[GTX]

Not linked to any particular type, country etc.

To start with:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S96oRLoE0Zk

 

[Scott Kenny]

"Traveling at a glacial 5 knots"

Should I admit how long I've spent at 5 knots? After 2001? But I've also spent about 3 weeks averaging 20knots speed of advance. Poor radioman had kidney stones blocking both sides... 1 week at a dead sprint towards the coast, a Pave Hawk escorted by 2x KC130s picks him up less than 5min after we popped up to the surface, then 2 more weeks at a dead sprint to get back where we needed to be.

"Photographing aircraft carriers is a submarine pastime..."

Yes, yes it is. Even my SSBN got a few. And that carrier was supposed to be looking for us at the time.

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They've been threatening to turn the ocean transparent for over 20 years. Oceans were supposed to be transparent in the 2020s, back in the early 2000s. So I'm not as positive as some of the others may be about the likelihood of that actually happening.

LIDAR as a sensor only seems to make the top 100m of water or so transparent. Ocean water just sucks up all the photons by then, even for the most-penetrating frequencies. Sucks for the SSPs and SSKs that have to stay close to the surface in general and can only occasionally dive deep, but SSNs won't be bothered too much. SSNs will just lurk deeper and get creative about detecting surface ships. You'd need a total LIDAR curtain about 15nmi across centered on the carrier group or merchant convoy to deal with the subs that would be hunting with torpedoes.

The bigger threat is definitely the fancy Synthetic Aperture Radars that can see the wake of the sub.

But look at that example again: an Ohio class doing 10m/s, at an unspecified depth, produces a 1.6cm disturbance on the surface. What happens when the Ohio slows down to 1m/s? 1.6mm disturbance on the surface? How much deeper does an Ohio have to go to get that disturbance halved in height? Twice as deep? Okay, so let's say they were 100m deep in the example. Slow to 1m/s and dive to 200m. 0.8mm disturbance height. Good luck detecting that. (yes, 1m/s is a bit slow for a sub, but is faster than the "screw barely turning" speed that is oddly very detectable because the shaft seal start squealing.)