Russia's 'Shkval' Supercavitating Torpedoes

[dukkha]

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union placed a heavy reliance on its submarine fleet to negate America’s advantage in naval forces. The U.S. Navy was not only tasked to help protect the flow of reinforcements into Europe in the event of World War III, it also threatened the Soviet Union directly and would have hunted down and sunk her ballistic missile submarines. The USSR at first used sheer numbers of diesel electric submarines, then more advanced nuclear attack submarines, to whittle down the odds.

One of the most innovative underwater weapons developed by the Soviet Union was the VA-111 Shkval (“Squall”) supercavitating torpedo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval

Highly classified, Shkval was virtually unknown before the end of the Cold War and only became common knowledge in the mid-1990s.
Powered by a rocket engine, it was capable of astonishing speeds of up to 200 knots an hour. But in a world where physics ensured most ships and underwater weapons topped out at 50 knots, how did Russian engineers accomplish such a breakthrough in speed?
Traveling through water creates major drag problems. The solution: get the water out of the path of the torpedo. But how, exactly does one get water of the path of an object in the middle of an ocean?


Shkval solves this problem by
diverting hot rocket exhaust out of its nose, which turns the water in front of it into steam. As the torpedo moves forward, it continues vaporizing the water in front of it, creating a thin bubble of gas. Traveling through gas the torpedo encounters much less drag, allowing it to move at speeds of up 200 knots. This process is known as supercavitation.

[dukkha]

Shkval was originally designed in the 1960s as a means of quickly attacking NATO nuclear missile submarines, delivering a nuclear warhead at previously unheard-of speeds. The torpedo is of standard 533-millimeter torpedo diameter and carries a 460 pound warhead. It has a maximum range of 7,500 yards. Shkval began mass production in 1978 and entered service with the Soviet Navy that year.

Like any weapon, there are drawbacks. For one, the gas bubble and the rocket engine are very noisy. Any submarine that launches a supercavitating torpedo will instantly give away its approximate position. That having been said, such a fast-moving weapon could conceivably destroy the enemy before it has time to act on the information, as the enemy suddenly has a both an enemy submarine and a 200 knot torpedo to contend with.

Another drawback to a supercavitating torpedo is the inability to use traditional guidance systems. The gas bubble and rocket engine produce enough noise to deafen the torpedo’s built-in active and passive sonar guidance systems. Early versions of the Shkval were apparently unguided, trading guidance for speed. A newer version of the torpedo employs a compromise method, using supercavitation to sprint to the target area, then slowing down to search for its target.

Is there a future for the supercavitating torpedo? The U.S. has been working on such a weapon since 1997, apparently without a deployable weapon. Indeed, the U.S. Navy is currently in the process of upgrading the venerable Mark 48 submarine torpedo for service into the foreseeable future. Then again, the Navy’s requirements were far greater than Shkval’s capabilities, including turning, identifying, and homing in on targets.

In the meantime Russian submarines are the only subs in the world equipped with supercavitating torpedoes, modernized versions of Shval armed with a conventional warhead. Russian industry also offers an export version, Shkval E, for sales abroad. Iran claims to have a supercavitating torpedo of its own it calls Hoot, and which is assumed to be a reverse-engineered Shkval.

In 2004, German defense contractor Diehl-BGT announced the Barracuda, a technology demonstrator torpedo meant to travel up to 194 knots. Barracuda was meant to be launched from submarines and surface vessels, and test models could travel straight and curved paths. However, the program apparently never translated into a marketable weapon.

A noisy—but effective—weapon, Shkval smashes the paradigm of undersea warfare. A 200 knot torpedo is a very attractive capability, and as naval competition heats up in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, we may see even more navies adopting supercavitating designs and adjusting their undersea tactics accordingly. Undersea warfare is about to get a whole lot louder—and deadlier.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/bu...ing-them-80241

[Adolf_Twitler]

When Subs break down and fall lifelessly to the Ocean floor, there is not too much time to rescue the lives of the ones on board.

The Russians have lost several submarines of late, and while the UK and the US have always volunteered to help save the lives of those on board, the Russians have been too proud and stubborn to allow us to help rescue them. And in every case, the submarine crews have died perhaps unnecessarily!

Russia still has a lot to learn about how to safely submarine and be responsible submariners.

[dukkha]

The Losharik fire is Russia’s worst submarine disaster since 2008, when a fire-suppression system malfunctioned on the Russian navy attack submarine Nerpa, asphyxiating 20 people as the vessel underwent trials in the Sea of Japan.

Eight years earlier in 2000, the missile submarine Kursk suffered an explosion and sank in the Barents Sea, killing 118 people. The Kursk’s sinking and Putin’s slowness to respond were major scandals in Russia.

Nerpa and Kursk were fleet submarines with front-line military missions. Losharik by contrast is a deep-diving research vessel that belongs to the Kremlin’s Directorate of Deepwater Research.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/loshar...it-caught-fire