![]() ![]() Get The essential guide to World Submarines The natural successor isseen as the Pr.705 ALFA Class which retained a sail, albeit a small streamlined one. The project 673 design was too advanced for its time and the second generation of Soviet attack submarines were destined to be more modest, at least in design terms. The Project 673 submarine was designed as an interceptor boat, to be kept in port and sent out in the event of an intruding NATO submarine. This configuration reduced drag and made the boat more agile. Instead, a retractable tower acted as the bridge when the submarine was on the surface. The most obvious external feature was that the design lacked a sail. This was both an effective safety feature and an Achilles’ heal as the reactor could not be brought back into operation if this occurred. The nuclear reactor was to be a high-power lead-bismuth liquid-metal-cooled nuclear plant which had the feature of solidifying in case of a leak. It was to be built from titanium alloys which are both lighter and stronger than steel and do not corrode. Several innovative solutions were designed into the Project 673 boat. Rather than stealth, they focused their attention on speed. So in the early 1960s Russian engineers started to design the follow-on attack submarines which would close the gap or exceed the American boats. This article looks at a few ‘sailless’ submarine designs.Ĭompared to the US Navy’s small and agile Skipjack Class submarines, the Soviet’s first generation Project 627 NOVEMBER Class nuclear powered attack submarines were generally considered an inferior design. It is probably the first full-sized sailless submarine, but it the Chinese naval architects behind it are not the first to seriously consider this layout. It does technically have a sail, but it is barely a bump in the casing, possibly only covering a crew access and some mast heads. Javier Silvano Arzola, Naval Engineers Journal, July 1999Ĭhina has launched an unnamed ‘sailless’ submarine in Shanghai. ![]() "The fairwater sail or bridge fin is a totally undesirable appendage when viewed from any hydrodynamic or hydrostatic aspect or, indeed, from any other aspect including stealth." ![]()
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