[HN Gopher] Underwater ears everywhere
___________________________________________________________________
Underwater ears everywhere
Author : lonk11
Score : 414 points
Date : 2023-07-16 19:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (computer.rip)
(TXT) w3m dump (computer.rip)
| saqadri wrote:
| Amazing read, convincingly explains a lot of confusion around the
| aftermath of the search operation. And kind of mind blowing that
| IUSS exists primarily to detect submarine movements around the
| world.
|
| I would love to learn more about the technology -- are these
| wireless transmitters? Undersea cables all around the oceans of
| the world?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Historically the hydrophones were attached to cables that were
| laid using AT&T cable-laying vessels, so technology extremely
| similar to the transoceanic cables of the time (thus AT&T's
| involvement). The change to IUSS added the ability of mobile
| sensors to report into this system, so there's apparently
| something available there (I would assume satellite). We also
| know that the Navy possesses buoys that trail hydrophones, and
| I would assume these can be integrated into IUSS as well. The
| modern details get to be classified though.
|
| As I understand it most of the original SOSUS arrays are still
| in operation, but I think they're more useful for scientific
| research than submarine surveillance at this point just because
| the newer arrays are much more sensitive. The locations of the
| original SOSUS arrays aren't totally public but you can put
| together some pretty good inferences about a lot of them, for
| example based on the NAVFACs that had similar cover stories and
| then closed at around the same time. Each one would have been
| the landing station and control point for a '60s array.
| samwillis wrote:
| On this:
|
| > _Instead, the battle of submarine silence has mostly revolved
| around obscure technical problems of fluid dynamics, since one of
| the loudest noises made by submarines is the cavitation around
| the screw. I don 't know if this is true today, but at least
| years ago the low-noise design of the screw on modern US
| submarines was classified, and so the screw was covered by a
| sheath whenever a submarine was out of the water._
|
| I wander if they are Toroidal or "tipless" propellers? They
| create less turbulence and cavitation.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_propeller
|
| Previous posts on HN:
|
| > Toroidal propellers turn your drones and boats into noiseless
| machines
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34571282
|
| > Sharrow MX-1: Tipless propeller
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33949895
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5867831
| maxbond wrote:
| Somewhat tangentially, I've been wondering why the Soviets
| weren't able to locate K-129. From what I've read, they searched
| in a location hundreds of miles away from where SOSUS detected an
| implosion - why didn't the Soviets pick it up? Surely they had a
| hydrophone array?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Well, one answer is that US hydrophone technology was probably
| superior at the time - but that's not necessarily a well-
| established fact, mostly an assumption. Still, it would stand
| to reason. SOSUS benefited greatly from cutting-edge research
| into acoustics that Bell Labs had been performing for other
| reasons, the Soviet Union probably didn't have the hydrophone
| technology or the undersea cable technology it relied on.
|
| There's a more interesting answer if you want one, although
| this is decidedly a conspiracy theory with, I would say,
| "medium" credibility within the realm of conspiracy theories.
| Some believe that both K-129 and Scorpion were sunk by enemy
| action, K-129 having been sunk by an accidental collision with
| the Swordfish and Scorpion having then been torpedoed in
| retaliation. The story goes that the admiralty of both
| countries, agreeing this situation could rapidly escalate into
| an undesirable war, agreed to suppress information on the cause
| of both incidents. The Soviet search for K-129 and American
| search for Scorpion could both have been cover operations.
|
| Yeah, it doesn't make total sense, and the evidence supporting
| this theory is a combination of circumstantial and
| recollections of people in their 80s. Besides, in the later
| sinking of the Kursk, Russian leadership immediately blamed a
| collision with a US submarine. But obviously the Russian
| political climate of 2000 was very different from 1968. It's a
| fun conspiracy theory.
|
| A more interesting conspiracy theory is that K-129 was on a
| rogue mission to launch nuclear weapons on the US and was
| torpedoed by the US (once again perhaps by Swordfish, it was in
| the right place at the time) to prevent this after being tipped
| off by by the USSR. If that sounds a bit like the plot of _The
| Hunt for Red October,_ well, it does. The evidence for this
| story is not nonexistent but it 's pretty limited, and no one
| takes it very seriously.
|
| Still, it gets at one of the oddities of K-129: the Soviet
| Union searched for it in its assigned patrol area, but the
| wreck was ultimately found far away from its assigned patrol
| area. I don't think anyone has a really good explanation for
| this. It was not at all typical for Soviet submarines to go off
| on their own, Moscow kept very tight control of them. So it
| seems that either Moscow didn't know where K-129 was (perhaps
| suggesting some kind of plot, whether of defection or rogue
| attack who knows), _or_ they knew where it was and searched
| elsewhere to avoid showing their hand (suggesting K-129 was on
| some sort of very secret mission). I tend to suspect the latter
| is more likely, K-129 may have been ordered to leave its patrol
| area and approach the US as a show of force (this happened at
| other points in the Cold War) and when it was lost the search
| was conducted in the normal patrol area to avoid revealing that
| had happened. All indications are that SOSUS was successfully
| kept secret from the USSR for quite some time, although
| certainly not all the way until 1991.
|
| Tom Clancy seems to have based The Hunt for Red October at
| least in part on rumors about K-129. Yeah, I watched too many
| submarine movies and read too many submarine books as a kid.
| What can I say, I had a middle-aged father.
| apawloski wrote:
| Re: Scorpion, I've been persuaded by the argument put forth
| In Blind Man's Bluff, that a faulty torpedo battery
| overheated and kicked off a sequence of events ultimately
| resulting in sinking and implosion.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| I'm about 3/4 of the way through Blind Man's Bluff. Highly
| recommended if you have any interest in Cold War history;
| it's a gripping read.
| maxbond wrote:
| Gotcha. Thank you for the detailed response.
|
| I think maybe I'm underestimating the complexity of the
| technology. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard, I'm
| kinda imagining something like a weather station or a
| seismometer. But one thing you've helped me realize is that,
| at minimum, that comparison fails to account for the
| complexities of operating in a marine environment.
|
| And the undersea cables operative to passive sonar? Or are
| they more to prevent the stations from being identified and
| their signals intercepted, as would be the case of if it were
| over radio?
|
| > The wreck was ultimately found far away from its assigned
| patrol area
|
| Maybe I'm just naive to submarine stuff, I know very little,
| but this doesn't seem that weird to me. If everyone died
| onboard from, say, a fire, the vessel might keep steaming for
| a long time. Presumably, the CIA has a good idea if that's
| the case, for all the good that does us.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I think one of the big challenges at the time was how to
| install the hydrophones, although as I recall there was
| also a novel type of hydrophone being used. AT&T had
| invested a lot of effort into figuring out how to not only
| build long cables that would survive in undersea
| conditions, but also deliver power on those cables to
| active equipment (repeaters in the case of undersea
| telephone cables, hydrophones in the case of SOSUS). This
| involved putting several-kV (I think into the tens of kV on
| long cables) DC onto elements of the cable, and it was hard
| to design a cable that was reasonable to lay but could take
| that potential without dielectric breakdown. Remember this
| was in an era where paper was still a popular insulating
| material on communications cables, if not lead. DC had to
| be used instead of AC because on these extremely long
| cables the capacitance between the two current-carrying
| elements would end up eating up most of the power you put
| into it.
|
| Between Bell Labs and Western Electric, AT&T had a lot of
| practical expertise in designing and manufacturing some
| really complex cable bundles with high voltage and
| sensitive communications pairs nearby. This pretty much all
| became obsolete as soon as fiber started taking over in the
| '80s, but it was pretty incredible how many coaxial pairs
| AT&T was cramming into a buried cable (along with power for
| all the en route equipment!) in the '70s. Hell, AT&T
| famously held off on fiber for years because they had a
| plan to bury long microwave waveguides like cables!
| etimberg wrote:
| The book Red Star Rogue by Kenneth Sewell goes in depth on
| the theory that K-129 sank while on some kind of mission to
| launch a nuclear weapon.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I kind of wanted to say Sewell but I wasn't sure I
| remembered the name right and I guess I was too lazy to
| look it up---but that's the one. Sewell is a big advocate
| of this theory but I think most people, even conspiratorial
| ones, think of him as kind of a crank. I haven't read the
| book so I won't judge too harshly, I just know that the
| rogue nuclear mission theory sort of hinges on a lot of
| political currents within the Kremlin and KGB that aren't
| in evidence elsewhere.
| rvba wrote:
| [flagged]
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| When I say that these are conspiracy theories, I guess I'm
| saying that I don't intend to convince anyone. I mostly
| just provided them for entertainment value. To my knowledge
| only the first has ever had widespread interest, and does
| potentially explain some of the odd circumstances around
| the loss of the Scorpion and K-129, but it doesn't explain
| all of them. For example, one of the most materially odd
| things about K-129 is that it had something like a dozen
| crew members on board who were not part of the normal
| compliment, and in some unrelated event the crew manifest
| was lost, so we don't know who they were. That certainly
| fits with a general pattern of Soviet behavior, suggesting
| that there were intelligence officers aboard (besides the
| routine intelligence officer included as part of standard
| compliment). But that doesn't mean there was some kind of
| rogue KGB plot or something as some believe; it's more
| likely that K-129 had some kind of special but relatively
| routine intelligence assignment. It could support the idea
| that the USSR searched in the wrong area to conceal a
| secret assignment for K-129, perhaps close-range
| observation of US naval exercises. That makes some good
| sense in the political context as, both before and after
| the loss of the K-129, the Soviet Union had been extremely
| critical of the US and UK for performing close-range
| submarine surveillance of Soviet exercises---they wouldn't
| be keen to admit they were doing the same.
|
| But these are all just theories. The evidence doesn't
| provide an especially conclusive explanation for the loss
| of K-129 or Scorpion, and it is doubtful that we will ever
| really know what happened. But there are theories to
| explain both losses that are more likely than KGB schemes
| or dramatic events of secret military history. Both may
| have been lost to malfunctioning torpedoes that armed and
| detonated in the tube or were even fired and targeted their
| own ships---both known hazards at the time, and in fact
| something that the Scorpion had survived once before. There
| are possible mechanical failures that could have caused
| either sinking. Extensive investigation of the Scorpion
| incident lead to design changes in later submarines to
| address some possible factors in the loss.
|
| This is all good to keep in mind in the case of the Titan.
| Undersea losses like this happen very dramatically and the
| evidence is difficult to recover and analyze. We may never
| have anything but speculation as to the exact failure
| chain.
|
| One of the reasons these theories exist is because four
| submarines were lost in 1968. That's a substantial portion
| of the total noncombat submarine losses ever. It's
| obviously appealing to come up with some kind of unifying
| theory, but as far as anyone knows it was just a
| coincidence.
| maxbond wrote:
| If you want them to provide sources, just ask nicely.
|
| They made it very clear that these explanations weren't to
| be taken very seriously and were mostly just interesting to
| think about. There's not a whole lot of value in
| enumerating the evidence of a conspiracy theory that isn't
| worth taking very seriously (in fact, I'd argue it's not
| very responsible to do so).
|
| And let's just not agonize about whether HN is "becoming
| Reddit," it's a conversation so overwrought it's
| discouraged in the guidelines.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| A question about ELF and VLF for whoever knows:
|
| I just finished reading _Thunderstruck_ (Erik Larson, author of
| _Devil in the White City_ ), which I don't recommend. It
| ineffectively juxtaposes the story of Marconi with Hawley
| Crippen, a murderer in London whose case became famous around
| 1910. (I say "ineffectively" because their stories really don't
| intersect, IMHO) The book goes on and on about all the demos and
| tests he ran for years and years, to the point of being eye-
| glazingly boring. All that aside...
|
| Anyhow: at the very end, the author tells us that Marconi
| discovered near the end of his life that higher frequencies
| obviate the need for the gigantic transmitters and receivers he'd
| been using. Yet he never tells us what frequencies Marconi _was_
| using! Does anyone know?
| js2 wrote:
| I loved _Devil in the White City_ so it 's too bad to hear that
| you didn't find _Thunderstruck_ very good.
|
| Marconi was working on developing microwave transmission at the
| time of his death. Microwave antenna are small but are only
| good for line of sight transmission.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I found I'm alarmingly ignorant of the development of radio.
|
| People had household radios in the 20s. Marconi was still
| alive then. From this admittedly unscientific book, he seems
| to have been resolutely ignorant of other people's work in
| the field.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I think he was using MF and HF for most of his work, but I'm
| not sure[1]. The story about discovering higher frequencies
| remove the need for longer antennas lat in his career seems
| garbled since the he discovered early on that longer antennas
| allowed for longer distance communication.
|
| 1: His first claimed transatlantic transmissions were
| definitely MF.
| stall84 wrote:
| I guess I'm feeling a little dumb and outlying on my immediate
| theory to the delay between USN officially reporting hearing the
| implosion, but here it is anyway: It would make sense to me that
| in the vast world of US Intelligence, especially when combined
| with signals-intelligence (like listening on what channels in
| Russia or China are communicating internally to each other), that
| when you have an event like Titan imploding, relatively close to
| US waters, you would want to not show those cards, and listen to
| hear _if anyone else reports hearing anything_ .. Kind of like a
| sophisticated game of counterespionage .. That way you can get an
| idea of whoever else might have equipment in the water very near
| your own. But idk .. just the first thing that came to mind. Love
| this read btw
| dundarious wrote:
| Related but off topic (so I could understand being flagged,
| etc.), but in all likelihood, these capabilities could say a lot
| about what happened surrounding the Nord Stream pipeline
| explosions. I think it's a reasonable assumption that the US has
| these detectors beyond the borders of the US -- I've seen others
| claim as much: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nord-
| stream-pipeline...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Sonar would tell you that there was a boat down there, but not
| necessarily who was driving it, right?
| dundarious wrote:
| > A major concern in naval intelligence is the collection of
| up-to-date acoustic signatures for contemporary vessels so
| that IUSS can correctly identify them.
|
| Doesn't identify the occupants but could perhaps identify the
| vessel, depending on how extensive these databases are. Of
| course that's a massive open question and I don't want to
| claim it extends to small rental vessels, but I also don't
| want to claim it doesn't!
|
| The main thing to note is that OSINT types are working with
| poor quality manipulable data compared to what's available to
| US/NATO, even if we focus only on larger vessels with AIS.
| Which is not to say US/NATO should be trusted in their public
| statements.
| wongarsu wrote:
| You can also track the path of the boat, to figure out which
| port it came from and where it went afterwards. You can also
| correlate it with AIS, a mandatory tracking signal for ships
| (used for collision avoidance etc). Of course the ship could
| have turned it off, but if I owned a bunch of spy satellites
| I would pay very special attention to any ship that appears
| on satellite images but doesn't have a corresponding AIS
| beacon.
|
| Of course unless you are tracking a submarine back to a
| submarine base all of this won't tell you exactly who it was.
| Any state actor can just rent a fishing ship and deploy a
| remote controlled submarine from it. That's where more
| traditional information gathering comes in.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| If the ship is small enough, it wouldn't be required to
| have an AIS beacon. From an article someone else posted,
| the suspected ship is a 50-foot recreational sailboat.
| 01100011 wrote:
| That area of the ocean is probably one of the most heavily
| surveilled areas in the world. Intelligence agencies absolutely
| know the ships involved.
|
| I still maintain it could have been anyone with about $300k.
| Work class ROVs capable of planting the explosives at that
| depth are commonplace in underwater construction and
| maintenance.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| 300k ROVs still need a mother ship and pretty sure navies and
| intelligence agencies know which ships go where and when.
| 01100011 wrote:
| That's what I'm saying. That's the point of the first
| paragraph.
| Dah00n wrote:
| The German intelligence services has the ship involved and
| found explosive residue. As far as I remember it was linked
| to a Ukrainian business some time back but it could have been
| anyone of course.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-tells-un-
| nord-s...
|
| Edit: I didn't read the link posted above but I see it states
| the same as me. Nothing to see here.
| youngtaff wrote:
| > This system, called SOSUS for Sound Surveillance System,
| remained secret until 1991. The secrecy of SOSUS is no great
| surprise, as it was one of the most important military
| intelligence systems of the Cold War.
|
| I grew up in West Wales in the 80s, 'everyone' knew that the US
| Navy staff at RAF Brawdy were monitoring the cables that listened
| for submarines in the Atlantic
| doubledad222 wrote:
| > this writing is so clear and good > Today, IUSS automatically
| detects and classifies both submarines and wales.
|
| Do the British know ?
| ggambetta wrote:
| Of course the British know. Submarine and Wales is just two
| tube stops from Elephant and Castle.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I am proud to say I noticed that one about two minutes before I
| saw your comment. It's not that I _never_ copy edit, I just
| usually don 't do it until two days later.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| See, if you edit THEN copy, you'll get your corrections where
| you want them. /s
| [deleted]
| supernova87a wrote:
| An almost mandatory entertaining article, whenever topics about
| cables, ocean floor, submarines come up:
|
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
|
| "Mother Earth, Mother Board" (stories about laying undersea cable
| and the history of wiring the Earth up"
|
| (or unpaywalled: https://archive.is/ICkHe)
| absoflutely wrote:
| Sadly the unpaywalled version is also paywalled
| Davy_Crockett wrote:
| https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
| supernova87a wrote:
| Oh, sorry about that. If you roll back a couple versions it's
| here:
|
| https://archive.is/19Msi
| vGPU wrote:
| [flagged]
| zoltar wrote:
| He didn't take credit for making the wire, so no.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| Jesus man, will you ever get over Trump or is this going to
| be your entire discourse from now on?
|
| Edit: Btw, I upvoted you, because I want your words to be
| seen.
|
| If you have nothing else to contribute aside from, "fuck this
| politician who is long out of power", then you aren't really
| contributing.
| zirgs wrote:
| [flagged]
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| I assure you that non-Americans feel the same need to drag
| American politics into every discussion.
| danuker wrote:
| > wiring the Earth up
|
| Reminds me of the intro to The Expanse, where they wire up some
| celestial bodies as well:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y4wuVfV5G4
|
| The song also gives me the chills.
| alexvoda wrote:
| I wonder if an active sonar array would be desirable. It would of
| course be easy to locate the beacons but they would probably be
| relatively cheap. Also, that much sonar noise would probably be
| bad for marine life. Would it give us capabilities we currently
| do not have?
| Tepix wrote:
| It's not just the location of the active beacon that you're
| giving away. It also tells the enemy in which regions of the
| world's oceans you are listening.
| Vecr wrote:
| I really think SAR should be realistic about what's going on and
| quickly publish what they are trying. Otherwise you can get
| people who could help showing up with the wrong equipment, or not
| showing up at all, or people showing up who think they can help
| but can't and don't know it due to the lack of information.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Search and rescue authorities very much do not want people just
| showing up with equipment based on what they heard on the news
| ---if you are involved in search and rescue, disaster response,
| or related areas, one of the first things drilled into you is
| that you must never "self-activate." It puts an enormous
| workload on the people in charge of the incident if you expect
| them to keep the entire world informed about the state of the
| search, and an even bigger workload if people start showing up
| without having been asked. Organizations like the Coast Guard
| have a public information function to manage the press and cold
| contacts, and a logistics function to call upon resources.
| Volunteered resources are rarely useful if they have not been
| vetted and had operational procedures established in advance.
|
| My experience is only in wildfire and structure fire, but
| everything I've heard is that the situation is much the same in
| SAR and I can only imagine the issues with needing to having
| resources prepared in advanced are only more significant at sea
| where integration is very complex.
| schoen wrote:
| How does this interact with the norm of commercial vessels
| responding to distress calls at sea?
|
| I know distress calls aren't at all the same as search and
| rescue, but in some incidents both phases must occur.
| fredoralive wrote:
| There's a bit of a difference between a ship already at sea
| altering it's course to get near and assist a vessel in
| distress (where they might be first on he scene), vs ship
| going to sea especially for an event I guess? You don't
| want the area too crowded with "good Samaritans" who've all
| gone to sea just to assist.
|
| I recall some comments saying that operators of a
| submersible that could hypothetically rescue a sub stranded
| on the bottom being discouraged from deploying for the
| Titan by the coast guard, which perhaps means they already
| knew the fate of the vessel. Although it could be that they
| already had a suitable submersible arranged already and
| didn't want more in the area causing complications with
| coordination etc.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I would say its more of a function of not trying to have
| to rescue two submarines.
|
| The depths at work, and the ambiguity of where the lost
| sub was would result in the coast guard being careful in
| deploying resources until more concrete info was nailed
| down.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Ships nearby responding to a distress call is a matter of
| expedience rather than good planning - something is better
| than nothing. But typically once an organization like a
| coast guard gets involved, they start giving orders to
| other responding ships, including sending ships away if
| they aren't needed and adding to the fray. This general
| concept is called incident command or the incident command
| system (ICS) after a set of practices that I think
| originated in firefighting but are now broadly taught by
| FEMA to all sorts of disaster responders. Basically that
| there needs to be someone in charge of the incident and
| there need to be standardized and controlled flows of
| information, otherwise it's very easy for the response to
| be ineffective and even dangerous because of poor
| communications, miscoordination, etc.
| schoen wrote:
| Thanks! I studied ICS as part of a neighborhood emergency
| response training some years ago, but I don't feel that
| familiar with it anymore.
|
| So I guess the basic idea is that volunteers should
| provide aid as they can, but once a response coordination
| authority is established, the volunteers should either
| leave the scene or put themselves under that authority's
| direction? (Including potentially being directed to leave
| the scene.)
| grog454 wrote:
| An excellent read but one thing caught my attention:
|
| > The Navy did not withhold information on the detection for four
| days out of some concern for secrecy.
|
| I think it's more likely than not that the statement is correct,
| but what gives the author the authority to make the claim so
| definitively? The author's bio indicates he's a consultant and
| there is no indication of direct involvement in this or any other
| SAR effort.
|
| While the workings of the SOSUS and IUSS systems may be
| declassified, the deployments and capabilities (mostly range and
| computation related) of such systems most likely are not. And
| there is always the possibility that there is yet another system
| the author simply isn't aware of.
|
| IMO, it isn't negligence to value the secrecy of systems used for
| defense above some number of lives, in some situations.
| 7speter wrote:
| The author could have friends in high places, for all we know.
|
| What could also be possible is that US has improved its sensory
| technology, and while its known that the US is capable of
| listening to the sea, they may have some new edge they want to
| keep obscured from the likes of russia.
|
| I'm just some guy, but it struck me as a possible way for the
| US to flex on the russians, especially right now when Putin is
| threatening to use nukes, and the US, by the book wouldnt want
| to because the US may not know where all of russias nuclear
| subs are supposed to be. It was a great opportunity for the US
| military apparatus to turn on a sort of fog of war machine...
| for all we know intelligence may have told the likes of James
| Cameron and Rob Ballard to say they got early news from their
| navy friends.
| tw04 wrote:
| >While the workings of the SOSUS and IUSS systems may be
| declassified, the deployments and capabilities (mostly range
| and computation related) of such systems most likely are not.
| And there is always the possibility that there is yet another
| system the author simply isn't aware of.
|
| But they confirmed it 4 days later - which would be admitting
| to its capabilities. The entire talk track of: "they kept it
| secret because of conspiracy theory X" makes no sense when they
| didn't actually keep it secret, they simply didn't make it
| public until AFTER the team was there to search - for the
| fairly obvious reasons the author stated. Mainly it creates
| unnecessary publicity that is hurtful to the relatives of the
| folks that are at the bottom of the ocean, and political
| pressure to "not spend money on the search" which was already
| coming from some circles even without the Navy's information.
| grog454 wrote:
| And those are all valid reasons to delay release. My point is
| that they are not mutually exclusive with declassification,
| or verification that the information is OK to release
| publicly from a security standpoint. I'm not sure why secrecy
| automatically means "conspiracy theory".
| tw04 wrote:
| >I'm not sure why secrecy automatically means "conspiracy
| theory".
|
| It doesn't automatically, but literally everyone claiming
| the Navy was "hiding something" was going down the
| conspiracy theory route. I'm not talking about
| generalities, I'm talking about the specific situation in
| question which is the Titan sub.
|
| >the information is OK to release publicly from a security
| standpoint.
|
| What information are you referring to? It's already public
| that the navy has the system in question. It's already
| public that it is analyzing data realtime. Nothing about
| the system would have been compromised by publicly
| announcing they had detected an anomaly the day of the
| event vs 4 days later. The logical conclusion is that all
| of the aforementioned reasons are why they waited 4 days.
| You don't need clearance to get to the conclusion.
| XorNot wrote:
| Releasing the information 4 days later implies it took 4
| days to properly process and categorize. It probably
| _did_ take some time to properly process and categorize
| it, because anomalous sounds happen underwater all the
| time, and unless it 's a subsea nuclear detonation or a
| Russian propeller screw then it's going to go into the
| "figure it out later" bucket.
|
| So what we _know_ is it took no more then 4 days to
| categorize it. We _don 't_ know whether or not the system
| flagged it immediately, or flagged it as part of
| background process, or how long that took.
|
| Joe Internet-Commentator looks at that and says "oh it
| was totally instant, probably".
|
| Bill Submarine-Commander for a Hostile Power on the other
| hand is very interested in exactly _how_ quick any
| particular detection was, to what resolution, and what
| implied noise-cutoffs of the network. What sort of sonic
| events are handled in real time vs. handled in later
| analysis. Because for Bill the question is "how long
| before I'm detected and surface ships start dropping
| buoys, depth charges and torpedos to _kill me_ ".
| hgomersall wrote:
| This seems most plausible. The whole thing has an air of
| being carefully stage managed. Lots of showing off of
| general capability without much detail. Lots of
| international cooperation noise. Etc etc. It feels like
| the audience was not the general public, but I'm sure a
| bit of general distraction from other stuff happening
| didn't hurt.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| >Joe Internet-Commentator looks at that and says "oh it
| was totally instant, probably".
|
| Kind of, yeah. There is a good timeline on when the ship
| was in water, when an event would have occurred, plus a
| very narrow geographical search area. That is
| significantly more information than is ever available
| when chasing ghost submarines.
|
| It is difficult for me to imagine some bored analyst did
| not pop open a graph of activity within a 30 minute
| window of suspected loss of contact time for the area. If
| detectable, a ship implosion is likely a pretty aberrant
| signal in the data.
| XorNot wrote:
| Sure, but literally everything they're looking at is
| classified capability or may include classified
| capability. They _don 't_ have permission to just post a
| hot-take on Twitter, and definitely don't have permission
| to unilaterally release supporting data.
|
| All of that has to run through the chain of command and
| declassification process.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Adding another thing of interest for Bill the Hostile
| Power Submarine Commander - do the Navy sonar analysts
| stick to protocol, or are they neglectful of their duty
| to the point of posting hot takes on Twitter "just
| because" it's a civilian matter that's trending on social
| media?
|
| On that note, I wonder if they have the "loose tweets
| sink fleets" poster put up somewhere. Apparently, Royal
| Navy did this officially[0] (I may be wrong, but I
| thought this was an Internet meme _before_ the official
| poster).
|
| --
|
| [0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/royal-navy-updates-
| loose-lip...
| glompers wrote:
| But why precisely does the sloppy sub operator or the
| mass media audience deserve the information their tax
| dollars are paying an analyst staff to harvest? Your idea
| still seems to me like potential question-begging; the
| fact that the habit would be of interest to people and
| save lives at some point is not surprising, but
| lifesaving is not the nature of the pointed interest of
| most OceanGater polemics in the first place...
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I never said it had to be shared. Just that I think it
| incredibly likely that if a Naval sensor did detect the
| event, it would have been identified in short order.
| Potentially not definitively as an implosion, but that
| the Navy could have rapidly pinpointed the event in the
| data.
|
| I am not qualified to state what was the appropriate
| timeline to give a public response nor it if should have
| been made.
| glompers wrote:
| That's fair. I apologize for my tone.
| grog454 wrote:
| > Nothing about the system would have been compromised by
| publicly announcing they had detected an anomaly the day
| of the event vs 4 days later.
|
| Have you worked on classified detection systems? Actions
| and conclusions don't always appear to follow logic when
| your priors are wrong.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Well, the clearest source is that no one _claims_ the
| information was withheld, as far as I can tell that idea was
| just synthesized by podcasters and internet commenters. The
| Navy states, the WSJ reports (probably based on the Navy
| statement), and the Coast Guard mention that Navy intelligence
| reported the possible implosion almost immediately after it was
| discovered. The only thing that didn 't happen until four days
| later was the release of that information to the public.
|
| Many aspects of IUSS are still classified, and for example we
| can assume that the actual data will never be released because
| of sensitivity of the collection system. But the news that the
| Navy detected the implosion is nothing new, it would probably
| be more surprising if the Navy didn't (I don't know that the
| sound levels associated with a vessel of this type imploding
| are well known, maybe it could be explained away as the
| implosion having somehow produced almost no acoustic
| signature). We know that in the '60s the Navy detected
| submarine implosions (admittedly of larger submarines) further
| afield, and we also know that IUSS has seen major upgrades
| including new sensor arrays since then.
| maxbond wrote:
| > As far as I can tell that idea was just synthesized by
| podcasters and internet commenters.
|
| I don't use Twitter so can't confirm, but what I've heard in
| the news is that the OceanGate lawyer tweeted some vague,
| borderline conspiratorial stuff about not getting proper
| cooperation from the Coast Guard. I think the commentary
| people you refer to then boosted and expounded upon that
| idea.
|
| ETA: Partial confirmation here
| https://nypost.com/2023/06/20/oceangate-adviser-rips-us-
| gove...
|
| The statements quoted here don't match the description "vague
| and borderline conspiratorial," but they could be
| misinterpreted that way, and maybe there were others.
| daddylonglegs wrote:
| Active sonar has been back in use for searching for submarines
| for a few decades now, the article is out of date. Low frequency
| active sonar towed sonars are fitted to modern submarine hunting
| ships; the low frequency is necessary to get a long range as
| higher frequencies are heavily attenuated. If you've seen news
| stories about the danger to marine mammals from military sonar it
| was these systems that were involved, as they put large amounts
| of energy into the frequency bands that propagate well - these
| bands being the most useful for whales to communicate with as
| well.
|
| eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar_2087
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| batch12 wrote:
| > This website is begrudgingly generated by the use of software.
| Letters to the editor are welcome via facsimile
|
| What does this mean? Is it a reference I'm missing, a vague
| disclaimer for generated text, or am I reading too much into the
| footer?
| shoo wrote:
| facsimile refers to communication by fax machine, an ancient
| method of written communication over telephone lines that was
| popular pre-email, and is still popular in remaining pre-email
| societies such as federal government departments and japan.
|
| > begrudgingly generated by the use of software
|
| read the top of https://computer.rip/
| batch12 wrote:
| I know what a fax is, but I was missing the header context.
| Thank you.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I think it just means the author does not like software too
| much and can be reached via fax.
| tls wrote:
| [dead]
| imwillofficial wrote:
| As a submariner, I can say this is a fantastic write up.
|
| Was a fun read and I learned a bit too.
| escape_goat wrote:
| I think the question on everyone's mind is probably how to
| produce a signal from inside the hull of a single-hulled cargo
| vessel in the North Atlantic that will allow one to relay
| messages in morse code to the US Navy.
| efitz wrote:
| _> It is unwise, in the course of a search and rescue operation,
| to report that you think the vessel was irrecoverably lost._
|
| I made this point several times on social media during the Titan
| incident but it fell on deaf ears; it seemed crazy to me that
| people were accusing the US Navy of some nefarious cover-up
| regarding possible acoustic detection of implosion.
|
| Anyone who's ever worked with any type of signal analysis would
| be aware of the huge uncertainty involved; the idea that we could
| positively identify the specific destruction of the Titan
| remotely was ludicrous on its face.
|
| That aside, even if the Navy was 100% certain, would you want the
| search for your loved ones called off because someone heard a
| noise? Of course not. You search for people missing at sea until
| you find them or until the point where any reasonable hope of
| finding them is gone. That applies to billionaires as well as
| anyone else.
| autokad wrote:
| I'd rather the Navy be pretty sure they were dead and tell me,
| instead of keeping it to themselves just because they might be
| wrong. No one was saying don't look, people were annoyed they
| pretended they knew nothing when they where 99% sure the sub
| imploded.
| Emily56 wrote:
| [dead]
| rpaddock wrote:
| In World-War-One J.H. Rogers demonstrated and patented a method
| for communication with submarines via special antennas. Anyone
| have anymore information on these types of systems?:
|
| "James H. ROGERS Underground & Underwater Radio ( Static-free
| Reception & Transmission Underwater & Underground )"
| http://rexresearch.com/rogers/1rogers.htm
| darkclouds wrote:
| >Much more appealing is passive sonar, which works by listening
| for the sounds naturally created by underwater vehicles.
|
| Experts in marine biology. Reminds me of the night vision camera
| the british military were showing off on BBC Countryfile program.
| Who would have thought the military are experts in biology, but
| probably explains why the brits took off sunglasses in Iraq when
| talking to people, but the US didnt. You should see the british
| scarecrows as well!
|
| > Instead, the battle of submarine silence has mostly revolved
| around obscure technical problems of fluid dynamics, since one of
| the loudest noises made by submarines is the cavitation around
| the screw.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_propeller Difference in
| cavitation. https://youtu.be/k0yzBTTqfzs?t=436
|
| Dont know if these toroidal propellers scale up to submarine
| sizes, they keep them hidden under an large oily rag along with
| the front of the subs.
|
| > did the Navy withhold information on the detection from
| searchers out of concern for secrecy
|
| Location of sensors maybe, after all something like the titanic
| will attract treasure hunters, why wouldnt interested govt's
| deploy remote sensors to detect who is in the area? Submarines
| make it easy for crew to be kept in the dark on missions as not
| many can use the periscope or other sensors.
|
| I read somewhere once that a sensor, sonar or hydrophone, in UK
| waters could detect the sounds come from a New York harbour,
| which gives an insight into the distance sounds can travel
| underwater, but considering all the noises that can be detected,
| having sound processing abilities, a little bit better than
| something like Dolby Noise Reduction, is the key part of the
| underwater arms race.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/15/listen-t...
|
| https://news.sky.com/story/titanic-sub-search-what-are-the-s...
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| > I read somewhere once that a sensor, sonar or hydrophone, in
| UK waters could detect the sounds come from a New York harbour,
| which gives an insight into the distance sounds can travel
| underwater, but considering all the noises that can be
| detected, having sound processing abilities, a little bit
| better than something like Dolby Noise Reduction, is the key
| part of the underwater arms race.
|
| I didn't really get into this in the article but there's a
| phenomenon called SOFAR (I think this does stand for something
| but the acronym is sort of a joke). It's basically a specific
| static water pressure (and thus depth) in which sound "ducts"
| sort of like how HF radio can duct in the ionosphere. As I
| understand it, it's not at all unreasonable for a sound in the
| SOFAR channel to go clear around the world. I know there are
| cases where hydrophones have recorded a particularly loud sound
| multiple times because of it coming "the long way around" as
| well as echo effects. Some of these sounds have been things
| like "perhaps the loudest sound ever produced" and are
| attributed to seismic phenomenon, but there are a lot of
| strange things going on in the ocean and hydrophones continue
| to provide plenty of questions for marine researchers to
| answer. And, of course, at least some of the IUSS sensors are
| very intentionally placed within the SOFAR channel to
| capitalize on this effect.
| darkclouds wrote:
| It is interesting a bit like catching the sound of a distant
| rave on the wind.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOFAR_channel
| indymike wrote:
| > I read somewhere once that a sensor, sonar or hydrophone, in
| UK waters could detect the sounds come from a New York harbour,
| which gives an insight into the distance sounds can travel
| underwater, but considering all the noises that can be
| detected, having sound processing abilities, a little bit
| better than something like Dolby Noise Reduction, is the key
| part of the underwater arms race.
|
| In a typical attack sumbarine, a substantial amount of the
| ship's volume is dedicated to acoustic sensors:
| https://media.defenceindustrydaily.com/images/SHIP_SSN_Virgi...
|
| This arms race is very old, and the state of the art even 20
| years ago is pretty impressive.
| darkclouds wrote:
| 403 forbidden link with your link but the wayback machine
| lets me see it.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230123071023/https://media.def.
| ..
|
| Detecting (background) radiation is the new state of the art
| and improvements in tech seen in peoples mobile phones.
|
| https://icecube.wisc.edu/news/press-
| releases/2017/11/first-l...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwKKOPd-5cU
|
| https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-
| activity/news/2...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| what's the difference with british scarecrows? eyes or
| something?
| darkclouds wrote:
| 5 eyes perhaps.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| They take their sunglasses off when talking to people. It's
| more polite.
| tomcam wrote:
| Yeah, that comment fascinated me too. I can only say that the
| character of British scarecrows is... very different from
| those in the US, although I can't articulate one reason
| exactly why:
| https://www.google.com/search?&q=british+scarecrow&
| ct19 wrote:
| There's a declassified short film about SOSUS from the 60s. It's
| a fun watch
|
| https://youtu.be/qsADWTHlmKI
| a_bonobo wrote:
| There's an interesting link between K-129 and the current 'boom'
| around deep sea mining:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
|
| The cover-story to build the Glomar Explorer to recover K-129 was
| that Howard Hughes thought that it was economically feasible to
| mine manganese nodules from the deep sea. A lot of engineering
| research started that year (1974) that now, 2023, bears fruit in
| several large companies trying to mine the ocean floor with
| approvals to start probably happening this year:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02290-5
|
| Without the cover-story and Howard Hughes I wonder how many
| researchers would have ever looked at deep sea mining.
| diracs_stache wrote:
| The Norman Polmar book on the topic is fairly interesting.
| Also, I've really turned into my dad reading Cold War non-
| fiction in bed.
| manzanarama wrote:
| This writing is so clear and good. I can't tell you how many NYT
| articles I read where the paragraphs feel out of order, chopped
| up and there is no consistent flow. This reads very enjoyably.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| That kind of modern journalism is absurd. Originally the rule
| in journalism was, the first paragraph must contain who, when,
| what, where, then subsequent paragraphs fill in the details in
| either chronological or logical order.
|
| Now the first paragraph must contain an emotional human-
| interest style "hook" to rope in the reader, then bury the lede
| in some random spot in the remainder of the text, in an attempt
| to keep the reader searching for it, like a slot machine.
|
| As soon as I realize that's how something is written, I take
| that as signal it lacks the quality to stand alone and I
| discard it and move on.
| hengheng wrote:
| Condensing inflated long-form articles back to their useful
| size would be a worthwhile AI application, just like
| searchable podcast transcriptions.
| p1mrx wrote:
| https://www.boringreport.org/app does that, at least until
| the IP lawyers figure out what to do with it.
| hammock wrote:
| NPR features are the same now, only on the radio
| khy wrote:
| "John Smith is buttering his toast with a spoon, much to the
| bemusement of our waitress Jane at the All Day Diner on the
| outskirts of Duluth Minnesota..."
| ProAm wrote:
| How many news or journalism sites are you currently
| subscribed to?
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| None, why? Are paywalled articles written in the
| traditional way since they already have a revenue source
| and don't need to addict people?
| ProAm wrote:
| So you dont pay for any of it and then complain this is
| what they have to do to get views and clicks. Chicken
| meet egg, egg meet chicken, pot meet kettle.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _this is what they have to do_
|
| They could always close the shop too.
|
| "We need to keep the revenue coming in these changing
| times" is _not_ a justification for descending deeper and
| deeper into immoral and anti-social behavior.
|
| Not to mention, the way market economy works means that
| even if we'd all start paying for shitty pseudo-
| journalism today, the influx of money will _not_ make
| them climb back out of the ethical /quality hole - it'll
| only validate getting worse as a growth model.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| If I start paying for it today, they wont magically start
| writing proper articles again.
|
| The news media has gotten themselves stuck in a bad Nash
| equilibrium. Guilting indiviudals into paying wont change
| that. Systemic change is required.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| This whole thread we're in was started by someone
| observing how well-written and clear the original article
| is, so I don't think the only way to get clicks is to
| write in the way I'm complaining about.
| AdamN wrote:
| I pay about $2k/yr for news sites and the variability is
| high even for paid sites. Check out the WSJ Editorial
| pages if you want to observe diminished writing ability.
| chongli wrote:
| Yeah. I can usually tell within the first couple of words if
| the article is worth reading or not. Anything that seems to
| start with a complete non-sequitur or some variant of "once
| upon a time" is an immediate back-button bounce for me!
| simplicio wrote:
| How can you start with a non-sequitur?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Non-sequitur to the headline?
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Now the first paragraph must contain an emotional human-
| interest style "hook" to rope in the reader
|
| So news sites have become a recipe site? Except, you've
| limited to a single paragraph vs 7/8 of the page
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| It's more that they're using Skinner Box variable rate
| reinforcement bs to rope readers in and keep them reading,
| which explains why the text feels so randomized and out-of-
| any-logical-order.
|
| https://www.nirandfar.com/want-to-hook-your-users-drive-
| them...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| writers rarely have complete control over what editors do to
| their pieces before the nyt publishes them, and in this case
| there are no middlemen muddling things up
| the-printer wrote:
| The fact that he publishes informative pieces at such a steady
| rate is remarkable as well. And the fact that he resisted to
| use the phrase "deep dive" in this particular one is indicative
| of a high level of discipline with his prose.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| I wonder what supercavitation sounds like
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I looked it up and if the video is accurate, it sounds like
| static. About what I expected a large stream bubbles to sound
| like. (Imagine a shaken soda bottle can overflowing.)
| bvan wrote:
| I've sent my comments to the author by Fax.
| tommiegannert wrote:
| Reminded me of this story:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba%E2%80%93Kongsberg_scan...
|
| Toshiba wasn't allowed to export a 9-axis (C)NC-machine to the
| Soviet union, because it could (and would) be used to create
| ultra-silent submarine props, in the 80s.
|
| Asianometry video about it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaRyqAVIkwI
| 542458 wrote:
| It's kinda wild that the two executives committed fraud to
| export weapons technology to a major military adversary in
| contradiction of international agreement... and ended up with
| 10 and 12 month sentences. That seems really light to me!
| romwell wrote:
| The country that issued the sentence is the same country that
| profited off of the exports and whose government is heavily
| involved in business deals[1]... so yeah.
|
| Also, the punishment would be not to the executives, but to
| the company involved (Toshiba) and imposed externally.
| However:
|
| >In response to the affair, Toshiba carried out lobbying
| activities in Congress between 1987 and 1989 to ease the
| sanctions. The amount of money invested by Toshiba, the
| number of lobbyists, and the scale of its activities were
| said to be the largest ever.
|
| So, business as usual.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-
| business_relations_...
| Eisenstein wrote:
| You know, lobbying wouldn't be so bad if our government
| officials just ignored them when they were advocating
| against the public interest.
| flacebo wrote:
| When the company I work for was buying a brand new swiss
| grinding machine (which enables the manufacturing of some
| extremely precise parts), I had to fill and sign a very strange
| statement about:
|
| - the exact kind of goods that we will use the machine for
|
| - certify that we will not use it in any nuclear explosive
| activity, or unsafeguarded nuclear fuel-cycle activity, or the
| use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons
|
| - that we won't transfer the manufactured goods or the machine
| outside of specific countries without the consent of some kind
| of swiss economic affairs office.
|
| I got the same kind of vibes.
| tommiegannert wrote:
| Now I'm very curious what makes a precision grinding machine
| particularly useful for nuclear applications.
| bcbrown wrote:
| When you're using shaped charges to turn a large metal
| sphere into a small metal sphere, just about everything
| needs a high degree of precision.
| Outright0133 wrote:
| Total layman guess: shaped nuclear charges?
|
| No idea if that's even possible.
| scotty79 wrote:
| And despite all those ears they let newsagencies milk the
| suspense about the fate of Titan submersible for days.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| Well, that's sort of the point of the article -- they knew
| they'd heard something, they didn't know for _sure_ what that
| noise meant, though. So they (probably, we infer from how
| quickly the wreckage was found) directed the rescue team to the
| right place to see what happened, rather than speculating.
|
| It would have been a lot worse if they'd announced that they
| heard noises that were consistent with an implosion but it
| turned out that _wasn 't_ what had happened.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Ever since that MH370 plane disappeared, I've been wondering.
| Would it going into the water make a splash that is audibly
| significant (compared to other surface noise i.e. waves) and
| would there be hydrophones in that area of the ocean, and would
| enough signal processing perhaps be able to locate the splash?
| And has all this perhaps already been done, but the people who
| have, can't talk about it?
| sabizmil wrote:
| There was a bit in the Lemmino video about exactly this. In it
| he states that there were 4 hydrophonic stations that heard
| "something" and follows up with the recordings for you to hear.
|
| https://youtu.be/kd2KEHvK-q8?t=435
| lesuorac wrote:
| It took them many days to find the Titan despite exact
| knowledge of where the Titanic is.
|
| MH370 could be in a significantly wider area of the ocean so
| it's going to be much harder to find it. Although prices of it
| have already been found [1] and used to determine a crash
| location (35.6degS 92.8degE).
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#M...
| thomashabets2 wrote:
| Per the article it took them 5h to find it, after they got a
| vessel to the site. Not days.
|
| They seem to have gone right to it just about immediately.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Sticking with the article, it took them <4h to find it
| after the >1h to dive to the Titanic.
|
| How much credit do you want to give the USN? As far as I'm
| concerned, the Titan was found at a expectable rate with a
| blind search given its proximity to the Titanic. The Titan
| was found 1600ft from the Titanic so a 1600^2 area (at 100
| sq/ft s; The Odysseus has a 4k camera after all) would take
| 7 hours so finding it within 4 hours seems entirely
| plausible even if you just did a blind search starting from
| the Titanic. But also if you knew the exact location it
| wouldn't take you 4 hours to find it.
|
| But my original point is really we already have estimates
| of MH370's location even without using secretive methods.
| It's just going to be a lot harder because knowing where on
| the surface it crashed doesn't tell you where it'll be
| below the surface.
| thomashabets2 wrote:
| Checking near the Titanic seems like the obvious choice.
| Whether or not USN microphones helped much, I of course
| don't know.
|
| But my point is that it was not the case that even with
| USN help it took them days to find it, implying USN could
| not locate it in less. It's simply not information one
| way or the other, on its own. This data is consistent
| with both them instantly knowing exactly when and where,
| and taking days.
|
| I'd believe it can take hours to check a small area,
| taking care to not drift into anything, and aiming
| powerful narrow spotlights. Oh, and avoiding getting
| currents to smack you into something of a historic
| landmark.
|
| Especially since the implosion had the power of some
| hundreds of kg of TNT, and parts can move around in the
| streams too, over the past days.
| runjake wrote:
| Yes, acoustics was explored[1] extensively.
|
| 1. https://www.google.com/search?q=MH370%20acoustic
| stuff800 wrote:
| > Instead, the battle of submarine silence has mostly revolved
| around obscure technical problems of fluid dynamics, since one of
| the loudest noises made by submarines is the cavitation around
| the screw.
|
| Cavitation is loud, but usually only happens if they're running
| full out. What they're really listening for now are reactor plant
| noises.
|
| > I don't know if this is true today, but at least years ago the
| low-noise design of the screw on modern US submarines was
| classified, and so the screw was covered by a sheath whenever a
| submarine was out of the water.
|
| Many US fast attack (Virginia, Seawolf) and the upcoming Columbia
| SSBN use some sort of external pump jet. I'm not sure if they
| cover those up out of water like they did with more 'traditional'
| screws.
| nickelpro wrote:
| Huh, I wouldn't classify any of those propulsion trains as
| pump-jets (and I never heard them called that aboard said
| vessels ;-P), but wikipedia seems to agree with you.
|
| They're ducted propulsors, a direct evolution of the classic
| submarine prop that integrates a pressure-increasing shroud and
| stator vane assembly. A "pump jet" classically involves some
| sort of centrifugal pump element or at least a vectoring
| mechanism.
|
| You typically wouldn't call a ducted fan (ex, on the X-22 [1])
| a jet, but I guess in the water we do.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_X-22
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Wow that is one cool aircraft. Never heard of it.
| namibj wrote:
| I counter (ultra) high bypass turbofan.
| Doxin wrote:
| > What they're really listening for now are reactor plant
| noises.
|
| Which is why old timey diesel electric submarines still
| sometimes have the edge over modern subs. No plant noises at
| all if they are running silent.
|
| This leads to some hilarity in joint naval exercises every now
| and then. e.g. when HNLMS Walrus managed to "sink" among others
| the USS Theodore Roosevelt before getting away, to great
| consternation of the Americans.
| hgomersall wrote:
| It's actually a good thing that allies are technically
| comparable. And this is surely the whole point of such
| exercises.
| defrost wrote:
| C'mon though, which US joint exercise partner _hasn 't_
| 'sunk' a USS craft at one time or another yet?
|
| Not to mention the actual real sinkings that are a standard
| feature of pretty much every RIMPAC nav-mil-cosplay LARP
| event:
|
| * https://gcaptain.com/australian-sub-sinks-us-navy-ship-
| pract...
|
| * https://www.businessinsider.com/us-australia-japan-
| practice-...
|
| * https://news.usni.org/2020/08/31/video-
| rimpac-2020-exercise-...
|
| The thing about ships from the Netherlands though, they
| pretty much sink themselves locally:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipwrecks_of_Western_Australi.
| ..
| wossab wrote:
| It wasn't just a sunk craft. They sunk a carrier. That's
| painful. Your wikipedia entry is kind of weird, since it's
| about Australia and there are no Dutch ships in the list
| for the last century or so.
| defrost wrote:
| Australia has 'sunk' USS carriers in war games also -
| there are entire books written about how carriers are
| hard to defend in modern warfare - they're painful to
| lose but (shhh, don't tell anyone) relativey easy targets
| in all manner of ways.
|
| The wikipedia entry is about 1400+ ships that were mostly
| Dutch - from the days of the Dutch East Indies and Spice
| trades.
|
| It's of interest as that coast was one of the main
| drivers to develop "GPS 0.1" aka clocks capable of
| reliable determination of Longitude and one of the
| (relative to monetary value at the time) largest
| technology prizes offered.
|
| They stopped stacking up on the West Australian coast
| once accurate navigation became commonplace but for a
| while there .. yep, Dutch ships sank themselves.
| wossab wrote:
| While your post is informative, it's kind of disingenuous
| to claim a link between two phenomena when there is none,
| seemingly because you needed to say something bad about
| Dutch ships in some way. It's a shame really, because it
| detracts from the quality of your other links.
| defrost wrote:
| > it's kind of disingenuous to claim a link between two
| phenomena
|
| Which two phenomena?
|
| Dutch ships heading to the Dutch East Indies sinking
| _and_ the need to accurately measure longitude?
|
| These are very much linked.
|
| > needed to say something bad about Dutch ships
|
| I felt no such need.
|
| It's a simple fact that a comment about Netherland naval
| ships faux sinking US carriers prompted a remark about
| the large numbers of Dutch ships famously sunk off our
| coast here in W.Australia.
|
| It has little to do with the quality of the ships and
| everything to do with the then inability to accurately
| reckon longitude.
|
| Of technical interest to anyone with an interest in the
| evolution of surveying, navigation, timekeeping, colonial
| expansion, shipwrecks, treasure, etc.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| What are you talking about, pump jets?
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > . What they're really listening for now are reactor plant
| noises.
|
| Yep; a fanatical obsession with reducing plant noise is why US
| subs were so quiet compared to everyone else. The author knows
| fuck-all about what he's talking about going on about
| cavitation.
|
| It's also why diesel hybrid subs from Sweden are nearly
| undetectable. There's virtually no plant noise - probably just
| a coolant pump or two - while running on battery. They are
| sometimes 'hired' by other navies for exercises because they're
| so incredibly quiet.
|
| He's spouting pure bullshit about the Navy retroactively going
| back over their 'tapes'. He first explains that for decades the
| Navy has run computerized classification systems, but then
| we're supposed to believe that a highly sensitive listening
| array did not detect the extremely energetic implosion that
| would sound like nothing else?
|
| Cameron said that buddies in the navy told him very quickly
| that they'd heard the implosion, but they were confirming what
| he already knew when he heard that telemetry was lost at the
| same time as comms; telemetry came from a completely separate
| external pressure vessel. It going silent means it was
| destroyed, and the only way that could have happened was the
| sub imploding.
|
| The bit about it being unrecognizable as an implosion because
| of its unique construction is complete supposition.
|
| This is what happens when you have an article about submarines
| written by a guy who _checks_ is a github engineer who likes 80
| 's and 90's phone technology.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Also, SOSUS being secret until 1991, as per article, and
| being famously and prominently featured in the book Hunt for
| Red October 1984...
| andrewflnr wrote:
| He said it was classified until 1991, but that it had been
| revealed accidentally multiple times before then. So that
| checks out.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Since you are appealing to qualifications, I am genuinely
| curious what your qualifications are. I have never heard of
| the author before but I have also never heard of you, so it
| would be interesting to get your technical background to
| compare.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> The bit about it being unrecognizable as an implosion
| because of its unique construction is complete supposition._
|
| the theory that it would have been correctly classified by
| the trained system seems an even less likely complete
| supposition - the only arguments I've seen in favor of it are
| argument ad incredulity fallacies
| mcpackieh wrote:
| They do seem to cover the intake and output:
| https://www.thedrive.com/content/2020/01/werw.jpg?quality=85
| polynomial wrote:
| reactor plant noises?
|
| Would like to hear more about this! Assuming the reaction
| itself is silent (?) what kinds of sounds is the reactor making
| and what are the challenges in quieting them?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| In order to generate electricity from heat, one generally
| must transform the heat into mechanical energy first. This is
| most often done creating steam and using it to spin a
| turbine. I assume that this is the process that is noisy.
| outworlder wrote:
| Plus all sorts of pumps and cooling loops.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| lol not today FBI! ;)
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