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Photos from inside a Typhoon class submarine
- tpmx 6y agoThat phone in https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/igor113/15886453/8307124/8307124_original.jpg https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/igor113/15886453/8307124/830... looks identical to an Ericsson Dialog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_Dialog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_Dialog (1964) Was there a soviet-era clone of this phone? Or maybe Ericsson (Sweden) actually exported this to the Soviet Union during the 70s? That metallic red facia/dial cover thing looks decidedly non-scandinavian-market. After tearing one down as a kid in the 80s I can attest to its mechanical robustness; I can certainly see why the soviet military would pick this model for their new submarine class in 1976.
- bserge 6y agoCould be, I'm pretty sure we had the exact same phone in the 90's. The USSR was pretty good at copying western tech and calling it their own. And they'd mass produce the shit out of everything, for the military, for civilians, everyone would get the same thing.
- tpmx 6y agoIn retrospect it's kinda sad/funny that our "mortal enemy" at the time were using a clone of our landline phones. This was the same era when Sweden spent an insane amount of the national economy (like 5%) to develop and build a very large number of Draken and Viggen aircraft in order to defend Sweden in case the Soviets decided to invade. Do you recognize this ring sound? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If7x1qj-cYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If7x1qj-cYE
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- miahi 6y agoIt seems to be the real thing, not a knockoff. It has the L.M. Ericsson logo on the dial, like this one[1]. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ericsson_Dialog_in_red.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ericsson...
- Libre___ 6y agoThis pic looks like the real deal although I've seen Soviet Dialog clones traveling in eastern Europe. It does seem to be an export variant however, as the Swedish pulse dial system had the number 0 first: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Dialog_1966_grau.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Dialog_1... As an anecdote this is why the emergency number in Sweden used to be 90 000, in the dark or in a smoke-filled room you'd be able to feel your way to the last number(9), and then pull four short times from 0 to the finger stop to get emergency service.
- tpmx 6y agoWhat separates the clones from the real deal? The curl of the cable?
- Libre___ 6y agoIt might have been a Diavox(https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/history/products/the-telephones/diavox-1978 https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/history/products/the-te...) clone actually, but it was mainly the Cyrillic markings on the back of it...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rvba 6y agoKGB and GRU were tasked to spy on whatever possible - a lot of things made in USSR was based on blueprints delivered by their agents.
- xtiansimon 6y agoOne ping only
- overcast 6y agoThis year is just rude.
- happyweasel 6y agoRIP Sean Connery.. Hunt for Red October was a decent movie...
- rootbear 6y agoOh, no! I hadn't seen the news! Still one of my favorite Bonds.
- combatentropy 6y agoFor me, it was an extraordinarily well-made movie, one of my favorites. I was a film major, though, so I am concentrating on the camerawork and editing. The director, John McTiernan, was not famous enough --- right up there with Spielberg in his ability to compose scenes, https://vimeo.com/76739972 https://vimeo.com/76739972
- bigmattystyles 6y agoDecent? It was nothing but extraordinary. My favorite part is how Connery didn't even bother trying to do a Russian accent.
- 6y ago
- pavel_lishin 6y agoI never considered the fact that submarines can have windows. edit: also, they've got an arcade machine about submarine combat! Wonder whose idea that was.
- brandmeyer 6y ago> I never considered the fact that submarines can have windows. That space would be free-flooding when submerged. I'll bet that it makes coming into and out-of port much easier environmentally on the topside crew. Soviet submarine bases were much farther to the north than Americans'.
- tome 6y agoWhat does "free-flooding" mean?
- bserge 6y agoIt fills with water when submerged.
- brandmeyer 6y agoOutside the main pressure hull. Its filled with water (flooding) that isn't directly pumped in, but freely flows in and escapes via strategically-placed louvers.
- MiguelVieira 6y agoI can hear Basil Poledouris’s Hymn to Red October just looking at the photos.
- flimflamm 6y agoThey have a lathe in the submarine. Nice!
- wazoox 6y agoAnd a jacuzzi!
- twic 6y agoI believe that is the plunge pool for the sauna: https://englishrussia.com/2014/10/26/sauna-in-the-submarine/ https://englishrussia.com/2014/10/26/sauna-in-the-submarine/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrULRXlAlMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrULRXlAlMU
- goatinaboat 6y agoOn a ship you can’t carry every spare part you might need. So you carry raw materials and have a machine shop on board to fabricate anything you need. Modern navies are very interested in 3D printing for the same reasons.
- bserge 6y agoThat's very interesting, I guess you need to be able to manufacture parts while at sea.
- jonahss 6y agoZeppelins like the Graff and Hindenburg had machine shops onboard as well! Their engines were very unreliable, they could do overhauls mid-flight. Airplanes around that time were just as unreliable, but flew shorter hops. Had to overhaul or swap their engines quite regularly between flights.
- wcarey 6y agoEven the much smaller submarines in the second world war where space was at extreme premium carried a fairly complete machine shop.
- petertodd 6y agoIt's actually really common for ships to have small machine shops to be able to fix things while at sea. Here is a particularly nice example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Machinists/comments/dht45m/i_work_on_a_ship_and_this_is_our_machineshop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Machinists/comments/dht45m/i_work_o... A lathe and some tools isn't that expensive. As a rough guess, that one is probably something like $20k worth of tools. Maybe double that including the cost of the floor space? Changing course and getting deliveries at sea is really expensive, so easy to imagine it'd pay for itself if you need it just once. https://federatedtool.com/king-kc-1440ml-2-14-x-40-gearhead-metal-lathe-with-2-spindle-bore/ https://federatedtool.com/king-kc-1440ml-2-14-x-40-gearhead-... <- $7k for a quite capable lathe and some tooling.
- IgorPartola 6y agoI love that at the end they have the instructions for how to properly pressurize the toilet so it would flush. And warnings to make sure you flush it properly or you’ll be severely punished because people live near the head in that sector.
- crocal 6y agoThe toilet is a very critical device in a sub. It is said that a german sub /sank/ because of that.
- dmd 6y agoA thing that really strikes me as extraordinary is how there used to be two almost entirely independent technological supply chains. Americans and soviets both built extremely advanced equipment, with radar and sonar and computers and all that and literally from "digging ore out of the mountain" to making a computer there was almost no overlap in supply chain.
- CountSessine 6y agoSometimes those supply chains overlapped or fed into each other, at least covertly https://www.mining.com/bbc-future-sr-71-blackbird-the-cold-wars-ultimate-spy-plane-11725/ https://www.mining.com/bbc-future-sr-71-blackbird-the-cold-w...
- petermcneeley 6y agoI find this also quite fascinating as well considering that this was a non market economy. While not a complete refutation, I think the technological success of the USSR pokes holes in the economic calculation arguments of Von Mises (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Calculation_in_the_Socialist_Commonwealth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Calculation_in_the_So...).
- dmd 6y agoThere is a fascinating alternate-history book about this: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042 https://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/155597...
- ARandomerDude 6y agoI'm surprised it's so dirty and rusty. American crews clean their ships, then they clean them again if they run out of clean things to clean. I'm sure budget plays a large role but I couldn't stop looking at the rust, chipped paint, and dirt.
- giarc 6y agoThis one doesn't look operational, however I could be wrong.
- alkonaut 6y agoThese are abandoned for many years I assume?
- simonh 6y agoThese photos are from 11 years ago, and in the comments from 2009 they're saying how they'd already been neglected for a long time so they may have been rusting for a decade or more even then. I wonder what they look like now.
- gscott 6y agoIn the comments he says it was scrapped...
- marcinzm 6y agoBased on Wikipedia, I'm guessing this was TK-17 and 20 as TK-12/13 were probably scrapped before these picture were taken. TK-17 and TK-20 where officially decommissioned in 2004/2006. They were probably effectively decommissioned years before that but it'd make bad PR to say so. The pictures are from 2009 so that's many years sitting neglected with probably just enough people to keep the reactor alive and theft at bay.
- andromeduck 6y agoNo, the post was published in 2009 but the photos themselves were taken in 2004.
- mrtksn 6y agoIs everything still that exposed on modern submarines? Everything looks engineered, it’s nice in its own way but as a final product I would imagine that something designed to be more upbeat and tidy can be beneficial for the psychology of the crew.
- pantalaimon 6y agoI guess it's intentionally so. If there is a problem with tech, you want to be able to fix it quick as the life of the crew depends on it.
- mLuby 6y agoSame with the ISS. It looks relatively unkempt.
- mrtksn 6y agoThat's what I was thinking but on the other hand you have the clean design of SpaceX Dragon interior.
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoCrew Dragon is pretty much supposed to be autonomous since you don't really DO anything inside it. The ISS houses things that require active use
- brandmeyer 6y agoWhen thinking about the "Cold War" the emphasis in the submarine community was on "War", not "Cold". US and Soviet submariners played an intense game of cat-and-mouse for decades. The ICBMs on Typhoon and Trident were there to enforce the "mutually assured" part of mutually assured destruction. Typhoon's mission was to carry ~200 nuclear bombs with a guaranteed strike-second capability. In that environment, wouldn't you rather have our crews sharp and focused?
- officemonkey 6y agoI'm surprised about the relative space. I once toured a Los Angeles-class sub (sorry, no photos) and I never felt I had enough headroom. Seeing all that open space in "workout area" and the "lounge area" and a lot of headroom was very strange.
- doikor 6y agoThe Russian nuclear submarines are just crazy big compared to the American ones (or anything made by anyone else for that matter) Typhoon class has a displacement of 48000 tons. Los Angeles class has displacement of 6927 tons. Typhoon class is a bit under 7 times bigger. Even the largest American sub (Ohio class) is still less then half the size of a Typhoon (the largest submarines ever built) at 18750 tons edit: As a side not Russians have mainly moved away from the old Typhoon and replaced it with Borei class which is half the size (24000 tons). Only 1 Typhoon class sub is still in active service.
- Hamuko 6y ago>Typhoon class has a displacement of 48000 tons. That's quite massive. The Japanese I-400-class submarines/submersible aircraft carriers, which I believe are still the largest diesel submarines built, were under 7000 tons.
- masklinn 6y ago> which I believe are still the largest diesel submarines built According to the internet you seem to be right, the Qing-class gets very close but not quite there: wiki lists 6628t, versus 6670t for the for the I-400.
- hu3 6y agoHere's a nice picture comparing their sizes: https://inteng-storage.s3.amazonaws.com/images/import/2017/04/WW2_submarines_comparison.jpg https://inteng-storage.s3.amazonaws.com/images/import/2017/0... Source: https://interestingengineering.com/uncovering-i-400-japanese-submarine-aircraft-carriers-ww2 https://interestingengineering.com/uncovering-i-400-japanese...
- sorokod 6y agoPhotos taken at 2004.
- bobnarizes 6y agoLooking at those pics made me think that it was like putting a camera inside of my body
- quelsolaar 6y agoWhat is striking to me is the enormous waste of resources and engineering talent that went in to destructive monstrosities on all sides. I remember having the same reaction visiting a UK air museum seeing the Vulcan up-close for the first time. Entire generations of the best an brightest roped in to build political brinkmanship tools, never to be used that are now rusting away. Meanwhile, Japan and Germany, the loosers of WW2 that was meant to be kept down, by not allowing them to participate in the arms race built up formidable industrial capacity, that came to dominate many sectors by the end of the cold war.
- carapace 6y agoAlice: Why do you have that cannon in your front yard? Bob: To keep the tigers away. Alice: But there are no tigers around here. Bob: See? It works. - - - - It's hard to credit now, but I recall the real existential dread of the bomb. Reagan talking about the "Evil Empire". As a kid I was scared of nuclear war. Today we still have the nukes but everybody's pretty relaxed about it. Hypersonic weapons are on the horizon (not literally, thank God) which are crazy destabilizing to the international détente. No one cares. "War is so last century."? "Space Force"!? We're not out of the woods yet. The hippies were right: peace and love are the answers.
- op03 6y agoMore like a Cost of dealing with people in the neighborhood who want your stuff and/or want you to bend and bow to them. Look at Taiwan today. What other option do they have other than burning billions to buy some deterrence? Same goes for Japan and Germany. They are highly dependent on outside help if the bullies in the neighborhood get a little more ambitious.
- looping__lui 6y agoEver heard of NATO?
- fastball 6y agoYes, that is GC's point. NATO wouldn't be much of a deterrent to others without the US pumping massive investment into it / its own war machine.
- cwbrandsma 6y agoThat is certainly enough to trigger my Submechanophobia. Time for a walk in the mountains.
- wintorez 6y agoClicked on the link looking for the swimming pool photo: https://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001e551p https://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001e551p It's fascinating that they thought about a swimming pool in a submarine, and also a galley and toilet in SU-34, another very fascinating Soviet design.
- pantulis 6y agoCame here to comment the same exact thing. A swimming pool inside a sub?!?!
- cbanek 6y agoI was also wondering about the swimming pool! Is it meant to be one of those stationary lap pools or more of a lounging pool? Looked pretty small (although everything is on a submarine).
- wintorez 6y agoSee for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrULRXlAlMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrULRXlAlMU
- Balgair 6y agoBirds!? Goldfish?! and a Sauna and rocking chairs? My Lord, these things were like the Galaxy-class Enterprise from Star Trek. They were almost cruise liners.
- wintorez 6y agoIt's funny that we always associate soviet technology as crude and uncomfortable, but in some instances, they are actually more comfortable; (Not always, sometimes)
- p_l 6y agoTo make it funnier, the reasons for such amenities both on Galaxy-class from Star Trek and Typhoon are similar if not the same. Namely, keeping crew happy and capable when on looong cruise with no port calls and living in enclosed space.
- jpalomaki 6y agoSmarter Every Day Youtube channel has a series of videos filmed onboard Los Angeles class sub. This was pretty interesting and I really like this approach compared to typical TV documentaries. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XWoGULb2HQRvhzBclS1yimW https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XWoGULb2HQR...
- 404mm 6y agoOdd question, how much air were these things leaking? I know there were containers with pressurized air (not only to refill chambers after torpedo was launched or cleared..). But I wonder how air tight submarines actually are.
- Balgair 6y agoTorpedo launch systems shouldn't leak any air, at least. Here's a good explanation of a system used on US subs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYEyhB0AGlw&t=7m9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYEyhB0AGlw&t=7m9s
- tpmx 6y agoI suspect they have a bilge pump somewhere for the water that's eventually seaping in (causing all of that interior corrosion).
- mkuklik 6y agoThey are not that air-tight... see this cat on one of the pictures (https://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001g7xxp https://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001g7xxp). He was a part of a cat unit used to test submarines for air-tightness. Soviets would lock such unit up on a submarine for a week... if cats are dead, submarine is air-tight. One of the picture survived! Though I heard that cat survivability was close to 100%. Only reported cat fatalities were due to bad food.
- ac42 6y agoThey used cats specifically for their inbuilt probability amplification properties.
- chiph 6y agoNo air was lost - any pinholes that let air out would also have let water in, because when submerged the water was at a much higher pressure than the interior of the sub. Plus, think of the effect on crew morale!
- jaspergilley 6y agoNot nearly as nice as The Hunt For Red October makes it out to be
- bicx 6y agoI can smell the various engine oils and general mustiness just by looking at these photos. I love old machinery like this.
- mkuklik 6y agoHow much did these guys pay to get on this submarine? This reminds me of the movie: https://www.netflix.com/title/80202236?s=a&trkid=13747225&t=cp https://www.netflix.com/title/80202236?s=a&trkid=13747225&t=...
- trhway 6y agoNo need to pay if you know somebody. May be a bottle of good vodka/cognac to smooth introduction to the friend of the friend :). I grew up on a Navy base, and back in 90ies visiting my hometown we'd drink and enjoy sauna on a big active service Navy ship with my childhood friends who served there at the time (as officers of course). Of course if you're an "American spy" nobody would let you even come into the town, and an unknown person trying to pay money out of the cold to for example get some photos/etc. is a sure way to get branded as one :)
- rsync 6y agoThere are pictures of an exercise room with treadmills, etc., near the end ... and also a relatively large conference room. Those were not inside the submarine, right ?
- dataking 6y agoI wondered the same. I think they are. You can see how the pool is very cramped and follows the curvature of the submarine hull.
- jaynetics 6y agoI wondered as well, but it seems entirely plausible. This thing had about the same crew size as an Ohio class submarine but more than double the volume.
- PeterisP 6y agoThat's the rest room next to the sauna, and yes, it's inside the sub.
- p_l 6y agoThis class of submarines was designed to spend a long time underwater on patrols. The problems faced by the crew are comparable to problems facing long term space missions, except there was higher chance of returning to port. Because of that, Typhoons were designed with crew comfort in mind, with lots of amenities, ensuring crew performance after several months underwater.
- whistlesnort 6y agoAs a young pup back in the 80s I worked at a research lab that was obsessed with the Typhoon submarine. My first assignment was to test torpedos that could hit the same spot on a submarine. Why? Because the double-hulls of the Typhoon were made of titanium. A Mark 46 could hit it and I doubt the crew would even notice (exaggeration, of course, but you get my point). My second assignment was to write programs that processed data from a towed sonar array. We were looking for ways to find Typhoon submarines hiding in underwater canyons. It is funny to me now to see a Typhoon mothballed with tourists crawling all over it. We were honestly scared of this thing.
- baybal2 6y agoTyphoons are not made of titanium. Mark 46 has 50kg of explosives. Not as much as heavy torpedo, but still no submarine in the world will likely be able to continue a mission with damage from it, invariably of whether it had double hull or not. Though, a typhoon would've more likely it simply outran, and outdived it.
- ericd 6y agoThe inner hull supposedly is made of titanium, the outer of steel. "The Soviet Navy would have to “treat and/or derust each Typhoon’s massive steel outer hull and Titanium inner hulls. Russia may have lost the highly expensive industrial capability to work Titanium for submarines.”" - https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-russia-packing-its-old-typhoon-class-submarines-hundreds-cruise-missiles-102302 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-russia-packing-it...
- whistlesnort 6y agoEh... the Soviets weren't giving us tours back in the 80s. Alls we had to go on was the field data and the intelligence. Of course, I was the assistant to the coffee maker in those days. Nobody shared poop with me because my clearance wasn't high enough. When I asked the engineers why they were working on software for a dual strike they said the Typhoon was tough to kill. The lab was always working on ways to counter a threat. I was just a junior engineer on one team. The Navy has a lot of money.
- zahma 6y agoWell this is ironic. I was just watching The Hunt for Red October in honor of Sean Connery.
- harryruhr 6y agoYes, me too. It's my favourite movie with Connery.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nix23 6y agoWho find's the third Thypoon? https://www.google.ch/maps/@64.5739821,39.7815937,1702m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.ch/maps/@64.5739821,39.7815937,1702m/data... What an interesting picture overall it is ;)
- spaetzleesser 6y agoCompared to World War 2 or especially World War 1 diesel submarines this looks pretty comfy and not as claustrophobic. I guess it helps to have a nuclear reactor that gives you plenty off energy.
- bartread 6y agoSo, obviously, this looks hilariously dated in 2020. But even in 1990, when The Hunt for Red October was something of a phenomenon, if you were into computers this looked pretty dated. What I've subsequently come to realise, of course, through friends whose jobs involve maintenance of military equipments, is that most of it is pretty dated. I really start to wonder if, like Google with its servers back in the day, one couldn't build military systems that were capable and credible from off the shelf components, rather than paying billions to the military-industrial complex.
- jvanderbot 6y agoThey often do. But the long lifetime and extremely focused role of this equipment means it rarely changes. And I'm not sure the ballistic missile submarine computing market is ripe for disruption, or that less than a few billion is a reasonable cost target for a nuclear powered stealth multi megaton missile silo.
- p_l 6y agoSome of the cost is due to grift. But a lot of the cost is due to making sure that things work in harder conditions than office/home, that the parts can be repaired quickly, etc. It also usually has to work for longer than typical lifespan targeted by server vendors (3-5 years for normal server, 20-30 years for industrial/military hw) All of those requirements also mean that there's less made, so you have less exploitation of economies of scale - even if you use COTS chips, the market for, let's say, OpenVPX SBCs with specific connector configuration is pretty small. So even efforts to commoditise parts run into problems like that.
- 55555 6y agoLooking these really makes me feel uncomfortably claustrophobic. https://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001dq4y4 https://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001dq4y4
- dheera 6y agoI always find it fascinating all the random pipes going all over the place. So many potential single points of failure.
- rvba 6y agoThe state of this submarine kind of shows the Soviet approach to everything. They spend enormous amounts of money to build those submarines - and then did not even care to take care of rust inside, or to support them. Supposedly those submarines are not active any more (probably explains the photos), but the typical state of "not caring about things" is a very communist approach. Even in military. Compare this with the American approach of caring about quality. I mean, probably better for everyone if their ships go down as often as they go down, but just wanted to make an insight on mentality.
- calcifer 6y ago> The state of this submarine kind of shows the Soviet approach to everything. Yeah, no. These two Typhoons have been mothballed for a long time and are in the process of being disassambled. > probably better for everyone if their ships go down as often as they go down I'm confused, are you talking about American ships?
- m0zg 6y agoLOL at the exhortations to properly flush the toilet, not put toilet paper into the toilet, and close the door after using the toilet because "there are people living in the compartment". I can only imagine what things smelled like after 3+ months underwater.
- ngcc_hk 6y agoTyphoon class. Know that due to hunt for the red October. Rip Sean Connery.
- jaclaz 6y agoWorth a note is how in aeronautics the western countries and the USSR developed an artificial horizon with completely different display (direct vs. indirect): https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/51791/how-is-a-confusion-possible-between-western-and-russian-attitude-indicators https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/51791/how-is-a-... https://glance-efis.com/direct-and-indirect-attitude-indicator/ https://glance-efis.com/direct-and-indirect-attitude-indicat...