DEEP HULL WEB SITE

Military submarines rarely descend to more than 600 metres depth wheras the abyssal plain is about 6000 m deep, leaving a substantial design opportunity.

Funding authorities have stubbornly insisted that there is no technical way forward, and that there is no need to increase the operational depth.

I worked from 1989 to 2005 on propulsion systems for various types of submarine and I certainly don't accept the second assertion.

(See my personal site and turn up the link to AIP)

In the matter of making a deep going hull, I had an inkling of how one might set about making a more depth resistant hull and I asked a colleague in the Cosworth Engineering Group company where I was then working to see if he could make an initial stab at the calculations. We worked for some time at this, he trying to make the stress equations solid and I doing the arithmetic.

What we concluded was that you could make a hull which would go deeper than 600 metres and that you could also, in practice, assemble it. It wouldn't go to 6000 metres, but it ought to go a lot below the 600 m standard.

We then started thinking about development and immediately ran into a brick wall. There was no customer.

No grown up experienced man is ever going to go to the British Ministry of Defence with some idea for new equipment. The MoD will say successively that it isn't needed, they already tried the idea, there is no money for such work, or that their scientists think the idea is unworkable. They have an unending list of reasons not to do anything.

In the case of military equipment, you really are stymied. You can't go to a foreign power, because you are handing them information that should be classified. The only real way forward is to get a large company interested, someone big enough to squeeze the MoD's balls. It might also be possible to go to the Defence Department of an ally country and ask them to get a waiver from the MoD to allow them, the ally, to do the development.

Time went by. My colleague died. I could not see a way forward that would not involve me in risk. So I destroyed all the original calculations, and the computers and disks upon which the calculations were embodied, and declared the matter dead.

It makes me hopping mad

Latest revision 14 February 2011                                                            This site is owned by Tushino Ltd