Astute vs. Virginia
 

Been thinking about it since my last post and realized the UK has some darn good subs and sailors. I will withhold judgement until the Astute becomes operational. Too bad the Royal Navy gave up Pusser's rum :arrgh!:

Bow design will be a trade off between minimising drag and generated flow noise around the bow area.

Extremely useful if your goal is to deter amphibious assault or keep aircraft carriers at arms reach. Regarding the power projection question, not all diesel electric boats are so constrained in range and speed. The Germans sent diesel electric boats all the way across the Atlantic, remember. These days, though, in all likelyhood, if they wanted to deploy a submarine extremely far from home they would either tow it or transport it on a heavy lift ship.

SQ I tried to address the issue of 'power projection' deploying Kilos far from home, in my scenario 'Twitcher' at Bills. The need, I think, would be for more covert methods than those you suggest. I think a little lateral thinking ,outside the box, could reveal several possibilities. ;)

I would say Virginia class is superior to Astute because of three reasons

1- Astute class is based on Virginia class simply because without technical assistance provided by Electric Boat, the BAE Systems would never have completed the project
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2930237.stm

2- Virginia class is a reduced version of USS SEAWOLF which is the most sophisticated nuclear sub ever built. One SEAWOLF (9600 tons ) cost more than a Virginia class and Astute class combined !

3-The Electric Boat has invented the nuclear sub in 1954 when they launced the USS NAUTILUS.. Britain learnt from the US how to build a nuclear sub.
The first British nuclear sub, the HMS DREADNOUGHT had a Westinghouse nuclear reactor , all other British nuclear reactors made by Rolls Royce were based on US technology.

Astute class being the most complicated sub is nothing more than a BAE SYSTEMS marketing mambo jambo in order to make more palatable an extremely expensive and delayed programm to British tax payers, this is what they want to hear.

Welcome aboard :salute:, and what a necro thread it is.

FWIW - my money is on Astute as that is clearly amphibious, as proven in October 2010. :D

:haha::haha:

In my humble opinion, I'd say most, if not all, of us here aren't really in a capacity to effectively judge this. Yes, I realize this is all in good fun. Having said that, I think it would mainly depend on the quality of the Captain/crew in each boat at the time of "engagement," among other things.

Here's a quote I found from Wikipedia about a recent exercise between the Astute and the latest Virginia, USS New Mexico:

Welcome aboard !
 

This was always one of my favorite threads, we had some real Navy men here.:salute:

Basically those are two different boats with different specialisation.

Astute class has a complex hull shape, huge side mounted sonar arrays and a relatively strong torpedo armament. This makes Astute the best 4th gen ASW hunter-killer.

Virginia on the other hand is a mass produced, technologically simple multirole sub - jack of all trades but a master of none, the sub that follows the lineage stretching back to 50s.

Hence I would say that they should not be compared directly. A better comparison to the Astute would be... Seawolf class, as Seawolf is also ASW specialised 4th gen submarine. Overall I would say that Astute is better, due to the larger sonar apertures.

What other 4th gen subs you get? Baracuda class - a "minimal" French SSN and the massive Yasen class - the death star with more than twice the weapons capacity of Virginia.

Some good points but has anyone taken into account the crew quality/training?

Now that is a debate all by itself.

"Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!"[
 

I think the crew training and competence is on about the same levels.

In my opinion the area where the USN and RN approaches to SSNs differ is that of the fleet size. Ie USN has a large (many times more than RN) inventory of the SSNs. USN also projects its power all around the world.


Which is why, in my opinion, USN went for a relatively cheap, easy to produce general purpose platform set up (ie LAs and Virginias) while RN went for a more min/max ASW platform set up (T-class and A-class).


The set up is thus dependent on the Navy and the Country of origin, hence making direct comparisons difficult.
For example the late Soviet concept of Yasen class, the class intended to replace Oscars and Akulas (and be produced instead of 3, 3 Mark! classes of submarines designed in the 4th gen) had to have a lot of weapons to cover for all of it's intended roles - now Yasen has more than twice the weapons that Virginia class carries.
French on the other hand were looking at minimal SSNs and that is what they are building - small, cheap, good enough to conduct their mission set SSN platform.