Quote:
Originally Posted by joegrundman
The principles of surface and subsurface optimisation were well understood before the outbreak of world war one, and several world war one boats were designed for sub-surface optimisation, in various navies.
This was proven to be an ineffective design concept. This goes for the S-boat, in that it is not a boat that is designed to operate effectively for long periods underwater, and the attempts to do so also harmed its performance on the surface.
All other boats were designed to be divable surface cruisers for good reason, with hydrodynamic optimisation focussing on reduced drag when on the surface.
The late war german boats went back to earlier design principles of optimisation for sub-surface operations for they were the first boats designed completely to operate underwater at all times, therefore not requiring efficient performance on the surface.
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Correction. The first boats to be designed to operate underwater at all times were the US nuclear boats. Operating on snorkel cannot be called submerged operation. However there is some justification that it made an underwater optimized design more feasible. There are many who claim that the underwater optimization was the revolutionary breakthrough of the Type XXI. As you have said, it was not, as the principles were already well understood by all.
Snorkel operation is just as affected by surface conditions as operating with the entire boat up on the surface, as it is kinda important that it suck air instead of hydrogen dioxide. In addition the boat was not well hidden on snorkel, as it was a large and prominent radar reflector having no value to keeping the submarine hidden. Our hunter killer groups learned that early on and used it to great advantage when hunting the few U-Boats that were so equipped. The snorkel's effect, then, was to blind the submarine crew, giving them a false sense of security. Advantage Allies.