U.K. to Launch New 'Super Submarine'

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by Skybird

The novice sitting at my end of the wire assumes that this is the detail to be aware of. I would not believe this capability to be the normal state of things in submarine operations, but being the result of several factors meeting in time and space.

Well I'll put it this way, in certain regions of the world like the North Atlantic or the Pacific where the waters are very deep its possible if you have a sensor also in the deep waters and the acoustic conditions are uniform. But there are many things that can mess it up like a current of warm water.

Lets take the locations of the SOSUS stations as a base.

Lets assume we would not design a system with any gaps, now draw a circle around each station (assuming the arrays are within a 50 or miles of the station on the edge of the continental shelf). Now lets remember back to the Cuban Missile Crisis where the Soviet Foxtrots were basically detected every time they snorkeled by SOSUS and it gave the Ship and ASW Plane commanders an area sufficiently small to search. That was 50 years ago, in the 1980s we started putting this on surface ships (SURTASS), its very possible today that systems of this scope are small enough to install on a submarine.