Quote:
Originally Posted by razark
Considering the boats were designed and built in the '20s, I doubt they would have been worth upgrading. Swapping out engines would probably have been the easy part, but by the 1940s, the hulls were over a decade old, and there would have been no way to bring those up to current specifications. I'm not sure how fitting modern equipment into the boats would have worked. Off the top of my head, I don't know what equipment they were upgraded to during the war, but I would guess that some stuff would be hard to fit into such an old design. (Given what some sub skippers got away with, and the ingenuity of the shipyards, they probably would have found a way to make it work, though.)
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You're probably right. I mean I know they couldn't "reinforce the hull" in any way to make it dive deeper, or change its handling characteristics much. I just wondered if maybe someone here knew if the engines on these suckers could be upgraded enough to push a few more knots of speed and increase the range.
It is amazing the level of ingenuity some of the sub crews had. I was recently reading Medal of Honor recipient Eugene Fluckey's book Thunder Below and was amazed to learn that he managed to equip the Barb with a rocket launcher that he used to bombard Japan with - making it the first ever "ballistic missile submarine" lol.