Thanks for the info guys. That begs the question.... what's the longest that you've seen a submariner on patrol go without a shower? 90 days?

Um.. no.. If someone went more than a DAY without a shower we would have 'helped' him get clean. There is enough stink on a boat without someone intentionally being a dick.


You ALWAYS get a shower after EVERY watch unless something bad happens. You never knew when it was going to be your last for a while. Taking a shower filles the san tanks with water. When they are full you have to pump (or blow) them over the side. This make NOISE. Noise is BAD. If you get into a situation when you can't afford to make noise you secure the showers fairly soon.

Sea Story time:

We had ONCE, the failure of both the rainmaker and the baby rainmaker. These are the primary distilling plant and its much smaller emergency backup.

The main plant broke on the back watch on a sunday and would not clear the salinity alarms. We fired up baby and it would not clear ITS salinity alarms either.

To those other bubbleheads reading this, yes, we performed the sacred rites, chicken bones and all. We made the proscribed sacrifices. The naked rain dance failed to correct the issue as well. I have a photo SOMEWHERE around here of 15 or so guys dancing naked around the the evap. It is funny as hell as we did not know our chief had a sense of humor and he took the photo and had a bajillion copies made.

Anyway, we could not make ANY fresh water and that is a bad thing. Drinking water you can do without for a bit, but the PLANT had to have a supply if we were going to keep steaming.

I was pulled off the watchbill monday morning with 4 others with the expressed duty to get ONE of them running. Yep, they dropped the whole MM side of the engineroom to port/starboard watches to get this fixed. We decided to dismantle and rebuild BOTH of them at the same time. Ambitious guys huh??

You have to understand, we were UNDERWAY at the time. We could not just 'pull in' and get it fixed and we were a bit distant from the nearest support facility. These are industrial grade pieces of hardware. Fixing them in port is a pain. Doing it underway was even worse.

The whole crew was put on no showers, double and triple up before a flush (I know.. EWWWW), watch what you drink, etc etc etc.

You have NEVER heard such a whine from the sonar boys. They would come back and tell us to do our jobs so they could take a shower.

Anyway, come FRIDAY morning, baby clears it salinity alarm and we can put water forward to the potable water tanks. About 2 hours after that the big guy clears its alarms and we are back in biz. High fives all around. We were the freaking GODS and we knew it. Nothing could touch us after we got BOTH of them fixed.

About 20 minutes later they announce the weekly friday Field Day.

Up till that point I had not realized that I had been awake and functioning since I came on watch monday morning for the balls watch (midnight on monday morning when the logs say 00:00). It was now 08:00 friday morning and we were expected to start cleaning up the engineroom. Ahh.. the stamina of youth. Except for the coffee and the occasional sandwiches we had worked non-stop on this.

Anyway, we get it running and we were NOT allowed to take a shower nor get to sleep. That is till doc found out that we had been going non-stop. He put his foot down and we got a hot hollywood and unlimited rack time till we woke up on our own.

Just out of curiosity, was that (i.e. the NOT showering ,etc.) the idea of an officer or a NCO?

The Eng was the one who said it was an "all hands" evolution and it would be over in 4 hours anyway. With the berthing lights on he felt we would have been unable to go to sleep anyway.

I don't remember my head hitting the pillow.

More thanks :up:...

... and more questions. The evaporator makes me wonder. Seems like a fairly energy intensive process to evaporate enough seawater per day for the crew. Does anyone know if diesel boats use evaporators too or do they carry all their freshwater with them from port?

Dude, this is a nuke boat. We had power to spare. We could make FAR more water than we could use in a day. The reason for the large capacity?? You do not have to use it as long to meet your needs thus less time to make noise.

As for the desiel boats, well, the baby rainmaker was essentially the same one that was used on the non-nuke boats. It is electrical while the main evap uses steam. Why a different power source for evaporation? If the plant is down you could still make water. It was efficient enough we could use it when on the diesel in the event of a main plant casualty. Also, if the power plant is down you do not NEED to make that much water.

As for carrying your water from port, do you realize just how MUCH water you use in a day? I mean really, think about it. You use it for EVERYTHING. Your food, sanitary, drinking, equipment operation, etc all use soe amount of water. You could not carry more then two or so days with you. And that would be with rationing. Then you would not have room for food, parts, etc.

I guess we could crutch through the numbers.

An average person will conservatively need about 2 liters of total fluid intake per day. If you take "sponge baths" you will need about 3-4 liters per day for cleaning yourself which adds to about 5-6 liters per day per person. Most diesel boat crews are about 30 persons, so your looking at about 150-180 liters per day of clean water. An average diesel patrols for about 50-70 days at a time, meaning 150x50 to 180x70 which equals 7500 to 12600 liters per patrol. One cubic meter of H20 equals 1000 liters so we're looking at about 7.5 to 12.6 cubic meters of space to store the H2O. 7.5 cubic meters is about a box 1.9 meters per side and 12.6 cubic meters is a box about 2.6 meters per side just for sizing.

Seems doable for a 2000 ton boat.

I guess if its not too energy intensive to make fresh water then it would better housing more diesel fuel (since all the energy of the submarine will ultimately be supplied by the diesel one way or another) to make more water than to carry the water itself. Question that would need to be answered is... how many liters of water can a liter of diesel fuel make...? If a liter of diesel fuel can make 2 or more liters of water than it would be better to carry the fuel I guess... so yeah your probably right.

Those numbers might work in an ideal enviroment, but a sub is far from it.

I can think of several factors that would increase the water usage listed by a factor of 10.

To be honest, the still (the correct name for the electric powered one) is VERY energy efficient and once lit off and making water would consume VERY little electricity. It would be more than sufficent for a small crew.

There are other technologies such as reverse osmosis that are even more energy efficient and in fact are passive rather than active water purification.

Anyway, small water tanks means more room for fuel, food, or whatever else you might need that you could not make out of the material all around you.

And this is why we called them "Shower Techs" ("ST" being the abbreviation of their rate) :haha:

TG

Thanks for the stories btw. Good stuff. Sorry for the randomness of the questions, they just come to me out the blue after I read something/see something and I don't know any RL sailors/submariners to ask.

Here's something I've always wondered about. On the Sturgeon class and LA class boats, how did the commanders keep track of all the contacts/ranges and actual tatical geometry that was happening around them. I found myself in DW mostly needing the NavMap to keep everything straightened otherwise the contacts all get confusing... do RL commanders on the LA/Sturgeons use a NavMap type of aid to keep things straightened out or was everything just kept in their head?

One the Sturgeons we had a "Dot plotter". This was for a tracking party. Bearings on contacts were called out periodically and a grease pencil was used to mark the track which was positioned over a map. The Nav team also had a layout map for the CO or OD to view.

Our washer and dryer on the Archerfish really sucked. Ultra quiet definitely mandated not using them or even using (flushing) the crapper. Under the polar ice cap the dryer was forbidden because the damn thing caught fire all too often. Our blue coveralls were called "poopy suits" for a reason.:arrgh!:

:haha::up:

The best thing for maintaining a tactical awareness IMHO was the Geoplot. Basically a table that had a mechanical light (we called the bug) that moved around the table based on ownships course/speed.

We would use a ruler attached to an arm on the table to draw bearing lines onto the paper placed on top of the table. The plot coordinator (one of the jobs I did) would then lay down various solution possibilities using rulers calibrated to different speeds.

After changing courses and speeds some solutions would be eliminted until the actual solution would remain. Even with all the fancy computers this tool was very popular with the most talented of the OODs.

^^^
The old subsim, Fast Attack simulates that nicely. There's no picture of the drawn plot shown in that review but based on your input, Rip, it functions just as you described. What I never understood was how in the hell did you find a good solution on a track. It seems like there could be an infinite number of course/speed solutions you can find using your speed strips.

Just managed to get fast attack and even to run in dosbox. Generally the plotting screen is more or less same as on FFG in DW right ? Except it can be zoomed and moved at will. It's pretty tricky to really make solution like this. I ended shooting torpedo at actual target bearing and leaving it to the seeker. Then I used the wire to measure the exact range .. it was 60% off. :)

So no funky tactical map as we know it from the Hunt movie ?