German made diesel electric submarine in service with Indonesia Navy lost since Wednesday.
Look at these performance specifications:
Is the wiki wrong and the surface/submerged speeds have been confused? I have always understood that for non-nuclear subs surface speed is higher than submerged speed.
Modern submarines are designed to be fast underwater as that's where they spend nearly all their time. WWII-era subs spent a lot of time on the surface and often had deck guns so they could attack surfaced, too.
But the streamlining and control surfaces that make a modern sub fast underwater make it slow on the surface, make large amounts of turbulence = drag
Things have completely flipped since WW2. Their sustainable submerged speed for any kind of distance was only 2 knots. Even their top submerged speed was very slow compared to a destroyer. If they were spotted by a surface sub hunter ship in any kind of proximity, it was over.
Can you imagine if they had subs like these in WW2, from which the design is not drastically removed in time? The outcome may have been very different.
The US was slow as molasses getting around to effective submarine defense after Germany declared war, almost as slow as with Covid.
My father was in his early teens at the time he said you could sometimes see ships burning at night off the coast of Cape Cod, the U-boats would come right up into Cape Cod bay, and off the coast of Boston, NYC and NJ and just blast the shit out of merchant ships.
Eventually after like six months of this or something someone decided it would be a good idea to TURN THE FUCKING LIGHTS OUT or at least black out the water-facing windows of buildings near the coast so it wasn't so easy for the U-boats to pick out ship silhouettes against the city lights.
The US learned though and later in the war the American sub fleet made life very unpleasant for Japanese shipping in the Pacific.
The subs of the time couldn't stay submerged for too long or dive very deep. I think most early U-boat kills were when they were surfaced, and once more effective sonar and magnetic proximity-fused depth charges became common underwater wasn't particularly safe for them, either, air-dropped depth charges took out a lot towards the end of the war I believe.
Only hope then was to get down under a temperature inversion the sonar hopefully couldn't penetrate very well and very quietly sneak away.
Well, once they got working torpedos they did.
A streamlined shape produces much less drag underwater than at the surface.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
It seems to be about half the size of a US WW2 fleet-type sub, with a bit more than twice the test depth. (Tang-class boats had a test depth of 612 feet iirc.)
A streamlined shape produces much less drag underwater than at the surface.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Nah. Fleet boats could do 22 knots on the surface, and a knot or two faster if they ran their turbopumps to make bubbles--not as fast as a destroyer, but faster than most other antisub vessels.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Whatever the reason it's missing it seems unlikely the crew made it at this point. RIP.
Conflicting reports about how much the US recovered when the Glomar Explorer raised K-129 as I recall. Some say they got nothing much, some say they got plenty. Probably still classified. Video of the funeral for the Soviet sailors recovered was released under FOIA:
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