USS Torsk

[PaulH513]

A few shots of the USS Torsk in Baltimore Harbor

http://baltomaritimemuseum.org/museums_usstorsk.php

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/4193/008efq.jpg (http://img189.imageshack.us/i/008efq.jpg/)

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/2102/019qii.jpg (http://img16.imageshack.us/i/019qii.jpg/)

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/7927/024dgv.jpg (http://img16.imageshack.us/i/024dgv.jpg/)
http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/5359/023pea.jpg (http://img35.imageshack.us/i/023pea.jpg/)

[Coopz]

Nice pics:)

[0167]

one of the more advanced subs of WWII for the allies :D

[Sledgehammer427]

Actually, it was a modification done to many of the surviving fleet boats of WW2, after we got a hold of the german type XXI, brilliant stuff to read about

[AVGWarhawk]

Don't know nothing about it:03:

[Rockin Robbins]

Again, there were no modifications to American submarines made to conform in any way to the design of the Type XXI. Our guppy boats were about a knot and a half faster on the surface and submerged than the Type XXI, had a longer range and were battle tested. They were unmodified fleet boats which were streamlined for underwater optimization. The Type XXI never saw combat and doubtless dozens or hundreds of flaws in the design remained undetected as a result.

Why people paint the Type XXI as some kind of submarine epiphany is beyond me. It did nothing that wasn't already accomplished in our World War I S-Boats: a hull optimized for underwater streamlining, giving up surface performance in the bargain.

The US correctly saw the submarine as a surface torpedo boat which had the ability to submerge in an emergency or temporarily to stealthily attack the enemy. They consciously abandoned the principle of underwater optimization and with the purpose of maximizing the effectiveness of the weapon, not because they were building stone-age boats compared to the Type XXI.

The Type XXI was built because the allies made it impossible to fight a submarine as an effective machine on the surface. They were forced to transit from fight to fight underwater, or the fight came to them and they died before engaging any targets. It was a desperate gambit which wouldn't have worked, but it was all they had. It was too little, too late. At the end of the war they were still many months from seeing service.

[Jimbuna]

Nice shots Paul. http://www.psionguild.org/forums/images/smilies/wolfsmilies/thumbsup.gif

I suppose it's possible to see a partial similarity in the sails between her and the XXI looking at that photo you've posted http://www.psionguild.org/forums/images/smilies/wolfsmilies/pirate.gif

[Jimbuna]

Don't know nothing about it:03:

@Chris

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showpost.php?p=1134216&postcount=15

[Task Force]

yea, the bottom of the conning tower is shaped like the XXIs tower... but the top is not...:yep:

[AVGWarhawk]

@Chris

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showpost.php?p=1134216&postcount=15

Missed that exchange Jim. Paul was seeing the Seabees welding on new supports to the superstucture last Saturday. Obviously I missed Paul. :x

So far I have met Growler and Dave Grayson on the Torsk. Anyone coming please PM me and I will meet you there. Grand tour guaranteed on Saturday mornings. :03: I have to ask Neal to make this a standing order. In Baltimore visiting the Torsk? PM Warhawk for a one on one grand tour. That includes you Jim....damn it.

While supplies last:D

[Jimbuna]

Missed that exchange Jim. Paul was seeing the Seabees welding on new supports to the superstucture last Saturday. Obviously I missed Paul. :x

So far I have met Growler and Dave Grayson on the Torsk. Anyone coming please PM me and I will meet you there. Grand tour guaranteed on Saturday mornings. :03: I have to ask Neal to make this a standing order. In Baltimore visiting the Torsk? PM Warhawk for a one on one grand tour. That includes you Jim....damn it.

While supplies last:D

Does that mean you know where the golden rivet is located? :hmmm:

[AVGWarhawk]

What is the golden rivet?

[Jimbuna]

What is the golden rivet?

It's one of the many old sailors tales you hear during tour travels.

A young naval cadet/rookie or the like is shown around the ship by an older crewman. He takes him down into the bowels of the ship and proudly points at something on the floor stating it was the first rivet used during the shipbuilding process and as such it is made out of gold to commemorate the fact.

The youngster bends over and peers at the floor and not being able to see it he asks where it is.

The older guy tells him to look closer and as the youngster bends over a little more, his total attention transfixed on looking for the golden rivet, the older guy manouvres behind him and......I'll leave the rest to your imagination :DL

[AVGWarhawk]

I have not heard that to be honest. I would not want to be the receiving end either:o

[Jimbuna]

I have not heard that to be honest. I would not want to be the receiving end either:o

Most definitely.....tis a funnel, not a tunnel :salute:

[PaulH513]

A few more shots showing how well the sub is kept in tip top shape due to the efforts of the volunteers like AVG. A true labor of love....


http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/5809/017quz.jpg (http://img36.imageshack.us/i/017quz.jpg/)

http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/9441/022hjg.jpg (http://img10.imageshack.us/i/022hjg.jpg/)


http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/862/018qhn.jpg (http://img20.imageshack.us/i/018qhn.jpg/)

http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/5900/006kqk.jpg (http://img199.imageshack.us/i/006kqk.jpg/)

[ReallyDedPoet]

Nice, thanks for sharing :up:

[mookiemookie]

Lookin great. Good job Warhawk!

[AVGWarhawk]

Thanks Mookie. There are a dedicated few that deserve a lot more kudos than I. These are the real diehards. Paul, that nasty green paint you see on the engine control panel? Say bye bye to that. She will be going gray. The original color. The panel opposite of this one in the AER is currently being stripped of paint by Tim Calvert and myself. Tim was an engine man on the sister ship of the Torsk. His boat was the Diablo. Tim said there is nothing like hearing 4 Fairbanks at full tilt. He said you could pretty much talk normally around them and when the main induction was open with the engines rolling the air that would rush down the pipes to feed the engines was like taking an air shower. Fun time for Tim on these boats. Sorry I missed you. Please, PM me if you are coming and I will meet you there. There is so much more to see on a submarine other than the usual walk through for visitors. :03:

PS. Just don't ask me to meet you at the Torsk this weekend or next weekend. I'm at the beach scanning the horizon for targets..I mean, vacation. Me and my daughters are playing with jet skis this week. :yeah:

[Coopz]

Does it still work? Do any surviving WW2 subs still run?

[Torplexed]

Does it still work? Do any surviving WW2 subs still run?

Most likely no. Check out DaveyJ576's #287 post here to see the myriad reasons why they pretty much will survive only as museum pieces.

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=147577&page=15

For a private organization to put one of these boats into service and take it back to sea would be a monumentally daunting task, to put it mildly. The financial requirements alone would be light years beyond the capability of a privately funded museum. Even if you could fix all the gear and get everything running again, you have to remember that the Navy decommissioned these boats because they were no longer serviceable. They had been run hard during their service lives and were plain worn out. Thousands of compression/expansion cycles from diving and stresses put on the hull from decades of heavy seas leads to severe metal fatigue. Welded joints weaken, the hull dimples in between frames, and corrosion becomes a major concern.

[AVGWarhawk]

Does it still work? Do any surviving WW2 subs still run?


Just before the Navy hands over the boat it looks like they take a chainsaw to the electrical wiring. If you pull open the panel in maneuvering you will see all the cut wires. Much the same throughout the boat. Go below and see the brushes pulled out of the motors. The Navy does not want them running ever again. However, it does not mean the volunteers does not get things working again.:03: For the Torsk, although she floats and is pulled by tugs to drydock, yes, she could run again. It is a daunting task as Davey said. You have to realize that the wiring is old and just working on radios in radio without a slow power up can make for a lot of burnt wires and smoke. I have opened things like the bearing temperature guage box for restoration and the wires just crumble away. Also, the Torsk is missing a prop. It is at a memorial in Philadelphia. The main induction is stuck open about an inch and not to mention the dog houses cut into the hull so visitors can enter and exit. If the Torsk were to submerge it would most definitely be her final one! We can't go ruining her record now as the most diving boat on the planet...and the most to surface also:D And as Davey mentioned, cash. Cash is king. Needs lots of it. Just to dry dock the old girl for hull scraping and panel repair is over a million. That cost was back in the 80's. It is probably double now. However, she is scheduled to go to drydock in the near future. NavSea makes inspections every year and the Navy diver has found a small hole in the hull and some soft spots. She will get a new sheet of steel in those areas when she goes in. In our situation there are other boats to mind after for the Baltimore Marine Museums. USS Taney, Constellation and Lighthouse Chesapeake. So there is a bit of push and pull for cash.

[Jimbuna]

It's truly amazing how many boats and subs are preserved in America. :yeah:

Your countries fantastic dedication and efforts in support of these vessels put the UK to shame.....approximately 10 years ago the last surviving WWII built RN destroyer HMS Cavalier was berthed in a dissused dock four miles from my place of abode. Despite numerous efforts to raise funds for the purpose of converting her into a floating museum she ended up being towed down south to Chatham by a charitable organisation.....and that was simply because they were prepared to meet the towing costs. :nope:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Cavalier_(R73)

[Akula4745]

Wow... great pics! Thanks for sharing!

[Kloef]

It did nothing that wasn't already accomplished in our World War I S-Boats: a hull optimized for underwater streamlining, giving up surface performance in the bargain.Thats a little short sighted dont you think?The S boats were not a clean design,they had a deck gun and lots of other deck features dramatically reducing underwater speed..they could only submerge for a short period..totally no comparison whatsover..

The type XXI was designed to run underwater all the time,not on the surface,3 times larger battery capacity and a snorkel system allowing those batteries to be recharged in 5 hours(!)

She could sprint away from trouble submerged and had a much smaller sonar signature..The Type XXI featured a hydraulic torpedo reloading system that allowed all six torpedo tubes, located in the bow, to be reloaded faster than a Type VIIC could reload a single tube.

The war ended and the design was never optimized,but it was so good that they raised one to be turned into a research boat in 1957,it had been on the bottom for 10 years...it was the first dedicated submarine,we call it onderzeeer(under the sea)because we recognised the fact that this was the first boat able to stay submerged all the time,we call the old boats duikboot(diveboat)...the U.S too realized that submerged was the only way to go in the future but it took a while to realize that,they clearly took the wrong route on submarine design..i guess they kept on running their old fleet realising that a redesign was too expensive..they probably stole any idea they could that was practically usable on the current subs untill they designed a new type.

Most boats were scrapped or scuttled after the war, but eight were taken by the Allies for evaluation and trials. The United States received U-2531 and U-3008, which were commissioned into the United States Navy.

Type XXI was light years ahead of anything like most German late war designs were but were not practical in use because of design flaws...

This is from the Type XXI wiki page:

"Type XXI U-boats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-boat), also known as "Elektroboote", were the first submarines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine) designed to operate entirely submerged, rather than as surface ships (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_ship) that could submerge as a temporary means to escape detection or launch an attack. "

"The Type XXI design directly influenced USS Nautilus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_%28SSN-571%29), the world's first nuclear submarine, USS Albacore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Albacore_%28AGSS-569%29), the first submarine with a teardrop hull (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teardrop_hull), the French Narval class submarine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narval_class_submarine), the British Porpoise class submarine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Porpoise_class_submarine), and the Soviet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union) submarine classes known by the NATO reporting names (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_reporting_name) Zulu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_class_submarine) and Whiskey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_class_submarine), although the Whiskey class was smaller and less sophisticated."


Needless to say most of the things were copied into U.S/Western and Soviet designs and the type was the Benchmark for more than 20 years,to not recognize that is like ignoring the invention of the piston engine..

[Torplexed]

It's truly amazing how many boats and subs are preserved in America. :yeah:

Your countries fantastic dedication and efforts in support of these vessels put the UK to shame.....approximately 10 years ago the last surviving WWII built RN destroyer HMS Cavalier was berthed in a dissused dock four miles from my place of abode. Despite numerous efforts to raise funds for the purpose of converting her into a floating museum she ended up being towed down south to Chatham by a charitable organisation.....and that was simply because they were prepared to meet the towing costs. :nope:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Cavalier_(R73 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Cavalier_%28R73))

You still have the HMS Belfast in the Thames as well. :yeah:

It breaks my heart that the ship that best symbolized the US effort in the Pacific, Enterprise was sent to the breakers in 1958. The veteran of every carrier battle except for the Coral Sea and by that time the only pre-war US carrier left. Here she is with her distinctive tripod mast cut away and left on her flight deck on her way to scrapping and oblivion. The name is still famous though.

http://www.cv6.org/images/e19580821.jpg

[Jimbuna]

You still have the HMS Belfast in the Thames as well. :yeah:

It breaks my heart that the ship that best symbolized the US effort in the Pacific, Enterprise was sent to the breakers in 1958. The veteran of every carrier battle except for the Coral Sea and by that time the only pre-war US carrier left. Here she is with her distinctive tripod mast cut away and left on her flight deck on her way to scrapping and oblivion. The name is still famous though.

http://www.cv6.org/images/e19580821.jpg

Yeah I know.....a Destroyer and an 8" Cruiser.......would gladly swap for a BB though :DL