[Bubblehead Nuke]

Originally Posted by Kapitan

Well for a starters the USN has been itching to get its hands on an al'fa from day one, simply because the submarine is still the fastest submarine in the world and the americans dont seem to be able to grasp how to do it.

Please do not presume to speak for the US Navy. It was decided LONG ago that stealth is FAR more important than speed. Itching to get its hand one?? Maybe for the first few years, yes. Once we started to get intelligence of what was reallty there? Um.. no. We would not be more interested in the Alpha than in any other design.

It was like the MIG-25. It was accorded almost supernatural powers. Once they actually got one they saw that it was FAR more bark than bite. Basically it was a stainless steel brick that flew VERY fast. We went as far as build the F-15 to combat the Mig-25.

Another thing is the blended sail if you lok the sail is blended in nicely to the hull giving less drag effect, again this is where the americans are stumped.

Oh please.. we are so far ahead in computer aided design it is not funny. Yes, the blended hull design DOES help in going fast, it does not dictate final top speed.

Russia is still today the only country on earth that has made an entire submarine from titanium,

At the time, metallurgy was not as far along as it is now, thus the need for expensive and exotic materials. Also, with the help of CAD, you can build structures that are as tough without having to go to exotic and hard to work with metals. I am not diminishing the achievement that was accomplished by working with titanium, just that in this day and age it is not as hard to do the same thing with other materials if needed.

because when they do you can rest assured the royal navy and the U.S navy will be climbing over them and inspecting them with a tooth pick!

I would like to think that the soviet goverment realizes that once they do scrap them, the metal recovered worth FAR more than the money used to obtain such high level refined materials. Steel is cheap, titanium is not. Economics and not keeping secrets is what is going on here.

It maybe 40 years old it may be rotten to you it may not be at the level you expect in the USN but at the time it was made nothing on gods earth could touch the submarine and that counts more than anything so effectivly it was totaly invincible, now do you see why the americans went ahead and desigend the MK48 ADCAP? because if it wasnt for the al'fa then the ADCAPS would probably not exist.

See my comment above about granting things mythical powers. Lets see, The Alpha class was a carrier killer by design and by tactical employment. It was too noisy to be a SSN/SSBM killer. I remember sonar techs telling me how noisy the things were. You knew it was coming and just moved away from it.

Invincible you say? Really now? Going 44+ knots means you are TOTALLY blind. Yep, you can run fast, but you can's see squat. I know, it was a deep sea torpedo platform. It could shoot our carriers deeper then we can shoot at it. Shoot torpedoes at 3000+ feet? I did not realize that the soviets made titanium topedoes. Wait. It could lurk down at 3000+ feet and move quietly at 3 knots and listen and report back to the fleet headquarters where the carrier group was. Wait, did they bring a 3000+ foot long floating antenna?

See what I mean? For it to be a useful weapon of war it has to be functional. Yes, it is run deeper and ran faster than what we had. Back then it was about bragging right to the international community. We are bigger, badder, more advanced than the other guy. Mess with us and we will use our super weapons on you.

Back in the cold war we tended to go worst case when we see any new military platform. We had to look at it like this. If it can go so fast it must have some kind of new sensor platform. Otherwise it is useless becuase OUR sonar with worthless at these speeds. It can dive so deep. Well then, it must have some new kind of weapon launching system because our can not work at that depth. The weapons it shoots, well, the top secret rumor of this new super deep running torpedo that can go 60 knots and run for 100 miles. Well, that must be have been developed for this new platform otherwise it can not DO anything till it gets shallow to launch a weapon and then we CAN kill it.

Once we found out that this was basically a fast deep diving platform that did not have any super secret sensor/weapon/gizmo that exploited these capibilities then we saw that it was all hype and no bite.

ADCAPS were primarily to deal with the double hull designs the USN were going to go up against. Deeper depth and speed WERE done to address the deeper diving and faster sub at that time but that was not the sole reason that they were developed. There are other issues that mandated the development of the ADCAP torpedo that had more to do with american submarine designs than you may percieve.