You'll write letters to your wife that she can open once a week, and you can write stickies or notes you'll hide around the house for her to find while you're gone. Submarine Deployments - Stuff for your Kids Being on deployment or patrol is difficult on the family, and it'll be hardest on the kids while you're gone, especially when they're young, so you'll leave special pictures for them to carry around with them, or sometimes you'll make a video they can watch on TV.
After 5 lessons of the basics, we're finally ready for what you've probably been waiting for - we're getting underway! The first thing you'll notice is that the submarine isn't that stable on the surface. That's because it's got a round hull, while surface ships have a nice deep keel to keep them stable.
It rolls quite a bit on the surface in rough weather, so we can't wait to get into deep water and "pull the plug". The Main Ballast Tank MBT vents will be opened, allowing air to escape and water to flood up through grates in the keel, and the sub will gradually sink into the ocean. After a submarine is in port for a long maintenance period, supplies and spares are loaded, and diesel fuel and water are topped off, etc. It can be difficult to estimate the exact weight of the submarine.
This estimation and adjustment back to neutral buoyancy is called "The Compensation", and it's critical to get it right. If the submarine is too heavy, once the air escapes from the MBTs, the sub will continue to sink toward Crush Depth and the crew will have to "catch and carry the extra weight" with speed and ship's angle until the extra weight can be pumped off. If the sub is too light, is won't sink at all not dangerous but professionally embarrassing.
Underwater Ops - Controlling Course and Depth A submarine's course is controlled by its rudder, just like a surface ship. Its depth is controlled primarily by putting an angle on the ship, then "driving" the ship up or down through the water. This angle is put on the submarine by its Stern Planes, mounted on the back, or stern of the ship, near the rudder.
Underwater Ops - Going to Periscope Depth One of the most critical routine evolutions aboard a submarine is going to periscope depth. Sailboats, quiet warships, fishing trawlers with their engines idle, etc. The submarine's crew must simply convince themselves that none are close enough to pose a collision threat during the ascent to periscope depth. Underwater Ops - Surfacing and Emergency Blow Prior to surfacing, the submarine will proceed to periscope depth and take a look around to ensure there are no surface ship contacts that pose a collision threat while surfacing.
If everything's clear, the crew will use the submarine's stern planes and speed to drive the submarine as high out of the water as possible, then start the submarine's Low Pressure Blower, and start blowing the water out of the Main Ballast Tanks MBTs. In this case, switches are actuated in the submarine's Control Room which open valves that port pound air to the MBTs, forcing the water out of the tanks, making the submarine lighter very quickly.
The submarine races to the ocean's surface, like a cork held deep underwater and then released. Underwater Ops - How do you know where you are? As I mentioned in the Sonar Room post, submarines are blind underwater, and know what's going on around them only from what they hear.
So how do they know where they are as they drive around for months on end? They can go to periscope depth and obtain a GPS fix from satellites in orbit. But a submarine's primary means of navigation between fixes are its "inertial navigators". Two identical complicated machines that measure small changes in gravity to figure out in which direction the submarine is moving.
These updates are fed to a navigation chart and compared to each other. As long as they're both tracking together, life is good. These devices use small beryllium balls spinning around at thousands of revolutions per second, and variations of these navigation devices are also used on missiles. If you've heard the term ' "spinning up all missiles" as they're brought on-line for launch, it's a reference to their inertial navigators "spinning up" their beryllium balls.
Underwater Ops - Tracking Targets It's so much easier to file a missile than it is to fire a torpedo. Two sweeps of the radar - mere seconds - and you've got a target solution. Send it to the missile and fire. Why the difference? Radar delivers both bearing and range information. Submarines however, normally use passive sonar, which provides only bearing information.
As a result, when a contact is gained, you know what bearing it's on, but you don't know how far away it is, its speed, or its course.
It could be a mile away heading east, or ten miles away heading west. So you can't shoot - just yet. You need to figure things out. There are ways to evaluate a contact's bearing and eventually determine its range, course, and speed. But it takes time. And if it maneuvers to a new course and speed while you're trying to figure it out, it makes it that much harder. When two submarines engage in a cat-and-mouse game hunting each other, each one constantly changing course and speed, it can be a nerve-wracking and time-consuming ordeal until one submarine crew decides they have a firing solution.
Now that we're underway and you've got the hang of how the submarine maneuvers and tracks contacts, we'll settle into the daily routine. First up - The Watch Cycle. Submarines operate on a 6 hour "watch" cycle. The crew is divided into 3 "watch" sections, and each section stands watch for 6 hours, then gets 12 hours off.
During those 12 hours off, a crew member eats, sleeps, trains, and conducts maintenance. As a result, the crew operates on an 18, vice 24 hour day. However, the submarine, and senior enlisted and senior officers, remain on a 24 hour schedule, which causes a bit of havoc with the crew's biological clock. So - they'll often be up for 24 hours straight without sleep, every third day. They'll try to catch an hour or two down here or there, but sometimes can't, depending on the ship's schedule or real-world ops.
The Daily Routine - Drills, Drills, Drills I mentioned drills during yesterday's post, and submarines run a lot of them. Engineering drills, Ship drills, and Fire Control Party drills. Drill after drill, with the crew combating a never-ending affliction of things going wrong.
In the Engineering spaces, the "nukes" - nickname for the nuclear-trained personnel - run drill after drill combating casualties that take down or cripple the reactor or propulsion plants, restoring them to full operation as quickly as possible. The Daily Routine -Training and Qualification When you're not running drills during normal working hours, odds are you'll be studying something, whether in a formal classroom style lecture on reactor plant theory for the nukes during department level training, "in-rate" topics for the divisions during division level training, or hours upon hours of self-study as you qualify first one watch station, then another and another, or learning practically every piping run, valve, and switch on the submarine as you qualify in submarines and earn the right to wear the silver or gold "dolphins" on your chest.
The studying never ends. The Daily Routine - Maintenance Never-ending maintenance. A submarine is incredibly complex with a lot of equipment, and a certain percentage of it always breaks. So pretty much every evening, real-world ops permitting, each division sets aside time for "Corrective" maintenance - fixing the stuff that's broken.
Luckily, submarines have a lot of redundancy and can function with broken equipment while it's being repaired. Sorta like taking your car in for an oil change every 15, miles. A good portion of a crew member's hour "off time" is dedicated to maintenance. The Daily Routine - Off-Watch Pastimes When you're not doing drills, training, maintenance, or studying, you might be able to squeeze out some time for relaxation.
Normally that'd be every third day, coming off the afternoon watch, when you've got the evening and mid-watch off. One of the traditional naval card games is cribbage, although the photo looks like Saturday night poker, The Daily Routine - Working Out Is there time to work out on a submarine and the equipment to do so?
There won't be much equipment on board however. There's no standard equipment either - each submarine jams whatever they think they can fit aboard - typically one or two stationary bikes, maybe a rowing machine, a versa-climber, sometimes a treadmill. Some of the SSBNs, which have more room, have a universal style weight machine, and a lot of submarines will have a work bench with adjustable dumb bells, maybe a weight bar. Everything is focused on cramming as much utility into as little space as possible.
The Daily Routine - Sledding, Anyone? Okay, so submariners are still Big Kids, looking for ways to entertain themselves. When operations permit and the submarine is making depth changes with a steep angle - and assuming they been given a head's up and have the proper equipment although it doesn't take much, as you can see in the photo you can go sledding on a submarine.
By now you're probably hungry, so we finally get to the topic of - Food! What's the food like aboard submarines? We'll start with - The Loadout. The loadout is critical, because if you don't loadout properly, you'll run out of something critical, and you can't run to the local grocery store or So, like Santa, the cooks make their list and check it twice, and it includes a LOT of stuff. A typical loadout for an SSBN patrol includes: - pounds of coffee - pounds of butter, and - 22, eggs Due to space limitations, many items are baked aboard the submarine rather than brought aboard already made.
There's a Night Baker assigned to bake the white bread needed for sandwiches and toast, along with dinner rolls, hamburger and hoagie buns, and all the pastries, cakes, and cookies. And nothing tastes better than pies and cookies right out of the oven. Submarine Food - The Menu and the "Meat Identifier" Submarines serve 4 meals each day - breakfast, lunch, dinner, and mid-rats, so that each watch section can eat either before or after watch.
For example, if you walk into the Wardroom and see applesauce on the table, you know you're having pork for dinner. Applesauce in this case is - the "Meat Identifier". Submarine Food - Fresh Veggies and Milk The 1st thing you'll run out of while underway is fresh fruits and vegetables.
You'll notice that when the salads disappear. Submariners look forward to port calls not just for the liberty, but for fresh veggies and milk! In the old days, the milk would go next, replaced by powdered milk yuk! Submariners afraid of irradiated milk? The enlisted eat in the Crews Mess while the officers eat in the Wardroom.
The officers are seated by seniority, with the Captain on one end of a rectangular table that seats 12 and the Supply Officer on the other end. The only exception is the 2 on-coming watch officers may eat ahead of the Captain, as they need to eat quickly so they can relieve the watch, and the two off-going watch officers eat at "second-sitting".
The most essential piece of gear aboard a nuclear powered submarine is the ice cream machine. Submarine Food - What do you do with the Garbage? Garbage is segregated into 2 categories - biodegradable and not. The stuff that will decompose gets compacted into the metal cans you see hanging from the wall, and dropped out through the TDU - Trash Disposal Unit - on the left, which is about a one-foot diameter hole in the bottom of the submarine.
Submarines - A Tasty Snack? I wasn't sure where to put this post, but it's too fun not to include somewhere. A polar bear took notice, and apparently decided the submarine looked like a tasty snack, and tried to take a bite out of the rudder. Welcome to Topic 9 of Submarine ! Earlier I introduced you to submarine food. Now it's Water and Air. I'll start with - Water. Submarines have to make all the water they need - for drinking, cooking, bathing, and most important aside from drinking - the propulsion plant.
However, evaporators have been replaced with new Reverse Osmosis machines, which filters out the impurities in the seawater. Submarine Air and Water - Where does the oxygen you breath come from? The answer is - submarines make their own oxygen. The oxygen atoms combine to form breathable oxygen O2 , and the hydrogen is pumped overboard. Submarine Air and Water - Carbon Dioxide "Scrubbers" Submarines have Carbon Dioxide "Scrubbers", which remove the carbon dioxide humans exhale, from the submarine's atmosphere.
In addition to Carbon Dioxide Scrubbers, submarines also have Hydrocarbon "Burners", which remove lots of other impurities from the air. If it's a diesel submarine, it'd be a diesel smell, but the U. So what's that smell?
It's most likely amine, a chemical we use in the Carbon Dioxide Scrubbers to remove the carbon dioxide from the air. Upgraded to one 5 inch caliber, one 40 mm and one 20 mm.
Batteries: Two cell Exide type. Each cell was about 4. Maximum Speed: Rudder: One balanced streamlined type, limits 38 degrees to port and starboard. Skip to main content. Buy Tickets Donate Today Shop. Search this site. A Los Angeles boat can carry up to 33 weapons for these tubes, including Mk. The submarines are equipped with another 12 missile tubes equipped with Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles each.
The four Ohio -class guided missile submarines top the new list. These subs, originally designed to carry up to 24 Trident nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, were removed from the nuclear deterrence mission as a result of a treaty limiting nuclear arms between the U. The U. Navy, instead of retiring them, traded their Trident missile silos for the ability to carry Navy SEALs and their underwater transports and Tomahawk land attack missiles. The four converted Ohio- class boats can now carry a whopping Tomahawk missiles, far more than any other platform.
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