The only reason I could think off would be the buoy which is on the surface end of ther cable (and where the nice antenna is) would be washed over to often to keep up a good data stream, but then this is just guessing.

Diesel Boats Forever! :smug:

Excellent! :lol: This could easily be a Clancy line. Hey, if you see it in his next book, ask him for some money. :up:

By the way...excellent discussion...

That's it i think. I remember a german submariner telling how difficult it is to send a radio message via the radioantenna mast. One little contact of the antenna with the water and you can forget your message. For buoys it must be even more worse. Not only the waves but also all the spray flying around near the surface and the atmospheric humidity right above the waves should be also high. It seems very resonable to assume that the transmission would be wracked havoc. High waves could also interrupt the direct transmission line betwin the buoy and plane/helo.

And:

While the hydrophone of the buoy hangs deeper below the surface wouldn't the buoy cause it to move up and down with the waves ? And wouldn't that cause flow noise or is this insignificant ? And can this affect the bearing accuracy when the buoy and hydrophon hanging on it turns ? Isn't there a mechanism in the buoy that tells where the hydrophon points to ?

BTW: Up to whitch sea stat can helos start and land on the deck ? I guess that also depends on the size of the ship.

That all could be very favourable for the Kilo.

Deamon

Something nobody has mentioned yet...the difference between the improved Kilo (636) or the Iranian 877. Would that make a real difference on anything?

This may not sound very politically correct, though on the Itanian Kilo, wouldn't prayer times give away it's position? You do realise they MUST pray at certain times, five times a day and if they couldn't it would surely be bad for morale so would work against them in that regard. Either way...I don't think an Iranian Kilo would be that successful.

I believe the kilos would make several kills before getting killed; for the simple reason that they will, as long as possible, attack "value ships" that are not escorted.

THEN comes the "escorted supertanker convoy" type scenario that this thread began discussing.

Now that's just being rediculous.

The Iranians may be completely crazy but they are definately not stupid. You don't have to be stupid to be crazy. Give them more credit.

Giving the boat position away at prayer times is nonsense. They are not just going to start broadcasting their location every day at 5pm sharp, all 50 or 60 people on the boat at a time. Come on!

Diesel electric subs are still a VERY dangerous threat and are the only reason ASW continues to be studied and improved on to this day. Who else is going to present a threat? All the other nations with nuclear submarines are either A) Allies or B) Far behind in nuclear quieting technology.

Allied forces could make due with what they have right now to detect any enemy nuclear submarines may be out there. That is definately not the case with the SSK's and continual advancements are being made because there is a legitimate threat to shipping from SSK's, EVEN in open ocean.

It would have to be very loud speaker indeed to carry that kind of noise outside the people-tank.

It would be no different than using MC circuits on american boats, something we do constantly. The engineering spaces on a nuc can actually be quite loud: we just learned how to keep the noise inside.

American has been loaned a diesel submarine from sweden a whole year its been practicing with the americans and what happend no one could find the dam thing, in the end i heard the war games were scripted to give the acctualy american fleet something to do.

Well when it comes down to diesel submarines the us navy establishment is very very paranoic.
Some years ago (but maybe this trend continues to this day) the american navy forbade us naval shipwards from accepting foreign contracts to build diesel subs.
Maybe one day they'll realise that abbandoning completly convential propulsion in subs was a mistake.

Well it does serve some purpose, for one it prevents the sheep of congress from demanding that the US navy decomission all its nuke boats and switch to diesel. Sounds far fetched but you can be sure someone would try to make it happen. :yep:

...damn hippies made us build two oil burners after the Enterprise. What the hell were they thinking? :nope:

Well I'm not saying it's entirely a good thing, but it does have its uses, like protecting the jobs of thousands of shipyard workers.

Kitty Hawk is a bit of a different issue since its range and speed is far greater than that of a diesel sub, plus it's needed to be based in Japan where they really won't tolerate a nuclear carrier in their waters.

Kitty Hawk was before the Enterprise. I'm bitching about the America and JFK.

Japan's already acquiesed to the Washington. Too bad it wasn't the Truman or Nimitz, eh?

In all honesty I fail to realise how this would be possibile.
Rickover's ghost must still be lingering in congress and the pentagon. :rotfl: