Future Heavyweight Torpedo Development

Scott Kenny said:
I mean, the combat system is kinda important to be able to do all the other things a submarine is supposed to do.

I still think that the US should have continued developing 65cm torpedoes (or whatever the large bore Seawolf tubes actually are), and installed the larger (and most importantly LONGER) tubes into Flight II or III Virginias.

There was a weird glitch in the autoloader for the torpedo room that reshuffled the room every midwatch.
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So the tubes on Seawolf are wider but not longer?

The VA autoloader has a ghost?
 
tychosis said:
Well, from a combat systems perspective (hey, it's a warship and no one matters but us) there are approximately zero things that were carried forward to VA. BSY2 was an abomination and (fortunately) was left in the past where it belongs.
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Well the ARCI systems were coming on just about the same time as Seawolf was getting to sea.

What was the fascination with ADA?
 
Bruno Anthony said:
Well the ARCI systems were coming on just about the same time as Seawolf was getting to sea.

What was the fascination with ADA?
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Ada was kinda forced onto all the contractors because DoD wanted a single universal programming language. I'm sure it caused a lot of the headaches at the time. Fortunately all those remnants are dead now and BSY-2 as a monolithic system doesn't exist anymore, just front-end segments of it.

Software issues aside, I spent years working on BQQ-10 for Seawolf and even at an interfacing hardware level some of the design decisions just didn't make much sense and weren't very forward-looking. They pretty much abandoned everything that had been done in BSY-1 (and that eventually proved far, far easier to modernize) and seemingly just went off in a dozen random directions. Even the unit numbering system was cryptic and didn't make much sense.

An operator could probably come from a BSY1 or Q5 boat and get up to speed, but the poor maintainers would have been completely lost. (Another valid consideration when developing a new platform, you really don't want it to be too difficult for someone to transfer from an older system to a newer one.
 
tychosis said:
Ada was kinda forced onto all the contractors because DoD wanted a single universal programming language. I'm sure it caused a lot of the headaches at the time. Fortunately all those remnants are dead now and BSY-2 as a monolithic system doesn't exist anymore, just front-end segments of it.

Software issues aside, I spent years working on BQQ-10 for Seawolf and even at an interfacing hardware level some of the design decisions just didn't make much sense and weren't very forward-looking. They pretty much abandoned everything that had been done in BSY-1 (and that eventually proved far, far easier to modernize) and seemingly just went off in a dozen random directions. Even the unit numbering system was cryptic and didn't make much sense.

An operator could probably come from a BSY1 or Q5 boat and get up to speed, but the poor maintainers would have been completely lost. (Another valid consideration when developing a new platform, you really don't want it to be too difficult for someone to transfer from an older system to a newer one.
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I’m not and have not been on the inside so to speak but what I’ve read said the Seawolf was designed to fight in the Soviets backyard so it broke away from the Thresher/Sturgeon/LA pattern.

HY100 (later ones supposed to have 130), the torpedo room, quieting, etc. Seems impressive. USN said they wanted SSNX to be a similar leap.

Are US sonar “front ends” comparable to the Thales 2076?
 
Bruno Anthony said:
Are US sonar “front ends” comparable to the Thales 2076?
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I dunno what their actual interfacing architecture looks like, but there are only so many ways to do it. It's ultimately just a bunch of hydrophones and not particularly complex unless you make it complex. The Large Spherical Array on Seawolf was unnecessarily complex and many of the pieces are unobtainium. (Which makes it painful when you go crashing the boat into things.)

In fairness, the BSY-1 front end has also been effectively obsolete for a while, but there's a big enough pool to keep them running for a few more years.
 
Bruno Anthony said:
So the tubes on Seawolf are wider but not longer?
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That's what I understand, yes.

Though even the Ohio tubes are two different lengths due to how their outboard angle intersects with the curve of the hull and how low they are in the hull. Upper tubes are 10-15ft longer than the lower!

Where the length matters is in the stows more than the tubes. The tubes are longer than any weapon in the US inventory.

I don't think the USN could make a reasonable supercavitating torpedo within the ~21ft Mk48 length reference. The Shkval is ~27ft long, and I'm happy to grant that the Russians know what they're doing with rockets and energetics in general. So I don't think that a "USN Shkval" would be significantly shorter in length.


Bruno Anthony said:
The VA autoloader has a ghost?
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Seawolf autoloader. Every midnight, it shuffles the stow positions around. Some bug in the code that would take way too long to chase down when there's only 2.5 Seawolf boats in service. If there were 32 Seawolves it'd be worth doing.
 
One thing I have heard for the reason that the Seawolf has 8 tubes.

It was so it could have 4 missiles/special types, Tomahawk, Harpoon, MOSS Sub simulator, SUBROC, other.

And still 4 torps loaded. Which it could guide, and Irc it can only do 4 at a time.

This was cause at the time there was still push back on the VLS deal that the later LAs got, and the feeling that you can carry more weapons, up to 50 missile to the Virginia 14 in the Torp bay. With it being more flexible as well.

Later testing and training basically proved that that wrong which is why the Virginia went back to the VLS and now VPM. Which I fully expect the SSNX to get, and have 6 tubes with a big weapons bay.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Though even the Ohio tubes are two different lengths due to how their outboard angle intersects with the curve of the hull and how low they are in the hull. Upper tubes are 10-15ft longer than the lower!
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This seems rather unlikely. Tubes are large heavy components, and need to meet subsafe requirements. Making them longer than needed, especially by that much would be just plain dumb, and would have a real cost in weight and $$$. I can see where there could be difference in length between muzzle and shutter because of the hull curvature, though I doubt it's more than a couple feet.

Firefinder said:
One thing I have heard for the reason that the Seawolf has 8 tubes.

It was so it could have 4 missiles/special types, Tomahawk, Harpoon, MOSS Sub simulator, SUBROC, other.

And still 4 torps loaded. Which it could guide, and Irc it can only do 4 at a time.

This was cause at the time there was still push back on the VLS deal that the later LAs got, and the feeling that you can carry more weapons, up to 50 missile to the Virginia 14 in the Torp bay. With it being more flexible as well.

Later testing and training basically proved that that wrong which is why the Virginia went back to the VLS and now VPM. Which I fully expect the SSNX to get, and have 6 tubes with a big weapons bay.
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Friedman's talks at some length to this. Seawolf was designed for one primary mission - break into Soviet SSBN bastions and quickly kill the SSBN fleet. A large number of tubes and automated reload system was due to the need to prosecute a large number of engagements in a short period. No connection to VLS or tomahawk. Seawolf was never designed for strike at all.
 
sdmuleman said:
This seems rather unlikely. Tubes are large heavy components, and need to meet subsafe requirements. Making them longer than needed, especially by that much would be just plain dumb, and would have a real cost in weight and $$$. I can see where there could be difference in length between muzzle and shutter because of the hull curvature, though I doubt it's more than a couple feet.
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It's half or more of the length of the shutter door.
 
Bruno Anthony said:
What was the fascination with ADA?
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Ada (no caps) was in many ways the next-generation of Jovial J73, which was the dominant defence avionics language until Ada appeared. It had the advantage over C of Pascal-like code (as did Jovial) that can be read much like English, and being a strongly-typed* language made a whole class of errors literally impossible, whereas weakly-typed C and its reverse-Polish notation made them both easier to make and more difficult to spot. Obviously if you're doing something safety critical then errors are a bad thing.

* Every variable in Ada has a type, you can only combine two or more of them if there is a defined function for combining those two or more types. So if you defined a type as altitude in metres with a range, you would also define + and - functions for combining two values of that type, and define how to handle going over or under the defined range, and there'll be no way to add something that's not an altitude to an altitude. Whereas C will happily let you subtract your heading in degrees from your altitude in metres and use the result as an index to a memory location.
 
DWG said:
Ada (no caps) was in many ways the next-generation of Jovial J73, which was the dominant defence avionics language until Ada appeared. It had the advantage over C of Pascal-like code (as did Jovial) that can be read much like English, and being a strongly-typed* language made a whole class of errors literally impossible, whereas weakly-typed C and its reverse-Polish notation made them both easier to make and more difficult to spot. Obviously if you're doing something safety critical then errors are a bad thing.

* Every variable in Ada has a type, you can only combine two or more of them if there is a defined function for combining those two or more types. So if you defined a type as altitude in metres with a range, you would also define + and - functions for combining two values of that type, and define how to handle going over or under the defined range, and there'll be no way to add something that's not an altitude to an altitude. Whereas C will happily let you subtract your heading in degrees from your altitude in metres and use the result as an index to a memory location.
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So why all the hate later on? What code was COTS using that made it so much more appealing?
 
Bruno Anthony said:
Sounds like a good thing. Although they probably would have shot any Red sub they came across.
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They might, because any SSNs in the bastion area would be hunting them/protecting the SSBNs. But if you could get past the bastion guard subs and start killing the boomers first, that would be better.
 
TomS said:
They might, because any SSNs in the bastion area would be hunting them/protecting the SSBNs. But if you could get past the bastion guard subs and start killing the boomers first, that would be better.
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I don’t want to go off on the tangent of under ice Strategic ASW but unless ea US sub had a full library of then available Soviet sub signatures, they probably would have just shot whatever they found. Hence the 50 torp load for Seawolf.

How the going in force would’ve signaled back home how things were going is questionable. Does ea sub report back by making its way back out of the ice to transmit?

This was a high risk strategy with us vs them numbers not looking good.

https://cliosmusings.blog/2025/03/09/strategic-asw-in-2025-a-stunningly-bad-idea/
 
Bruno Anthony said:
So why all the hate later on? What code was COTS using that made it so much more appealing?
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Reputedly, because C is dual use, while Ada is pretty much confined to defence, aerospace and safety critical stuff, people thought C looked better on their CVs. Especially with better pay packets on the commercial side of things.

You'll hear people claim they couldn't get Ada-qualified software-engineers, but BAE Rochester and the University of Kent ran conversion courses for Rochester staff moving onto, or creating, Ada projects. If you can be up to speed in a week, with no pre-existing mentors, then there's no reason the whole defence/aerospace software engineering contingent couldn't have been brought up to speed.
 
DWG said:
Reputedly, because C is dual use, while Ada is pretty much confined to defence, aerospace and safety critical stuff, people thought C looked better on their CVs. Especially with better pay packets on the commercial side of things.

You'll hear people claim they couldn't get Ada-qualified software-engineers, but BAE Rochester and the University of Kent ran conversion courses for Rochester staff moving onto, or creating, Ada projects. If you can be up to speed in a week, with no pre-existing mentors, then there's no reason the whole defence/aerospace software engineering contingent couldn't have been brought up to speed.
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So the COTS code wasn’t necessarily better, just more widespread?
 
whatismoo said:
My favorite part of (mili)Radians is how many there are —nobody agrees!

Is it 6283.185 / circle? 6000? 6400? 6300? Who's to say!
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And angular/phase errors always always always manifest themselves in weird and perplexing ways.

One of those cases where you have a hunch that someone screwed up but finding where they screwed it up can take some time to unwind.
 
Remember not every target is a 50k plus ton carrier that needs 1000 pounds of explosive for it to even freaking notice its being hit let alone sink it.

Most targets are going to be sub 10k tonners that a 250 to 500 pound warhead will crack like an egg in one shot while even 20k tonners will be mission killed.
 
Firefinder said:
Remember not every target is a 50k plus ton carrier that needs 1000 pounds of explosive for it to even freaking notice its being hit let alone sink it.

Most targets are going to be sub 10k tonners that a 250 to 500 pound warhead will crack like an egg in one shot while even 20k tonners will be mission killed.
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Our SSNs first mission in any real war, not a Tom Clancy murder fancy, will be to take out the other guy’s SSNs/SSGNs. So once that’s hopefully accomplished, then I’d switch out torp loads. Not b4.

Make sure all subs have at least 1 full reload supply of Mk 48s.
 
TomS said:
Again, this seems to be in doubt with the current Administration. Hell, they're double-tapping people in the water "just to make sure".
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The legality isn't in doubt? It's illegal. Also until SOCOM has torps, it's probably not worth worrying about.
 
Bruno Anthony said:
This was a high risk strategy with us vs them numbers not looking good.

https://cliosmusings.blog/2025/03/09/strategic-asw-in-2025-a-stunningly-bad-idea/
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I didn't see this blog entry before, thanks for the link. Dismukes knows his stuff and he puts forth a good argument here. Strategic ASW sounds good in principle, but may not be viable in reality--especially today where the acoustic superiority gap has closed.

I've said it over and over but it bears repeating... real-life submarine operations aren't like a video game. Most submariners with experience against other submarines have gotten their practice against compliant exercise units running augmenters, not against non-cooperative submarines that are actively attempting to elude. Tracking modern submarines is exceedingly difficult and often entails hours or days of intermittent detect and track with a moderately large area of uncertainty. Like he says--given that the SSBN threat is only a relatively small part of their overall nuclear forces... the juice may simply not be worth the squeeze.

(Now, I'm not saying he's right. I'm no expert on nuclear war and try to stay in my lane. I'm just saying that he raises some good points and that countering the SSBN threat is far more difficult than most would believe.)

Bruno Anthony said:
unless ea US sub had a full library of then available Soviet sub signatures, they probably would have just shot whatever they found
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Heh, the idea of an onboard "acoustic library" was another Clancyism--as was the magical auto-classifying "BC-10" they had onboard DALLAS in HFRO. A convenient contrivance to handwave the tedium that search and classification actually involves. These "libraries" were just little red books published by ONI haha.
 
tychosis said:
I didn't see this blog entry before, thanks for the link. Dismukes knows his stuff and he puts forth a good argument here. Strategic ASW sounds good in principle, but may not be viable in reality--especially today where the acoustic superiority gap has closed.

I've said it over and over but it bears repeating... real-life submarine operations aren't like a video game. Most submariners with experience against other submarines have gotten their practice against compliant exercise units running augmenters, not against non-cooperative submarines that are actively attempting to elude. Tracking modern submarines is exceedingly difficult and often entails hours or days of intermittent detect and track with a moderately large area of uncertainty. Like he says--given that the SSBN threat is only a relatively small part of their overall nuclear forces... the juice may simply not be worth the squeeze.

(Now, I'm not saying he's right. I'm no expert on nuclear war and try to stay in my lane. I'm just saying that he raises some good points and that countering the SSBN threat is far more difficult than most would believe.)


Heh, the idea of an onboard "acoustic library" was another Clancyism--as was the magical auto-classifying "BC-10" they had onboard DALLAS in HFRO. A convenient contrivance to handwave the tedium that search and classification actually involves. These "libraries" were just little red books published by ONI haha.
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Very welcome. This is an updated blog piece from the one he wrote in 2022.

I commented on his original entry and he said SASW was a high risk plan that was worth it to as a way to squeeze the WarPac armies. But not neede no as Russia “no longer has numerical superiority in its conventional forces.”

Except even the new entry may underestimate how much mobilizing the Putin Crime Ring (aka Russia) has done and is feeling/thinking frisky. I commented on the current entry that the UK and France may feel threatened enough to try it on their own.

So even today with modern computers, no database of sub signatures?
 
tychosis said:
Well, I didn't say that... just that they weren't really a thing 30-40 years ago.
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When you could track a boat or plane by specific tonals, you didn't really need the computer support.

"68hz tonal overhead, that's a P-3." To use a safe example.



Bruno Anthony said:
https://cliosmusings.blog/2025/03/09/strategic-asw-in-2025-a-stunningly-bad-idea/
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Greatly disagree with his section of Ecological damage. There is almost no situation in which a nearby detonation of a nuke will cause sympathetic nuclear detonations.
 

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