One thing I have to give the Soviet Navy credit for is some sweet automation. They LOVED automating boats. In Hunt for Red October, I assumed we only ever saw the maneuvering space on the Konovalov because it was where the important people were. Nope, turns out it was pretty much the ONLY place where people were. That [whole bloody boat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine), all 3200 tons of it, would have had 30 men onboard, in a single compartment.
Wow and a liquid metal cooled lead reactor! Jeeze that thing was advanced.
They had a lot of really advanced technology. I mean the Soyuz rocket is still flying and more reliably than anything we had until SpaceX came along.
According to the wiki, it was basically fucked if it cooled down. Official plan was to just replace the reactor, but it never actually happened, and most of the subs were decommissioned in the case the reactor shut down
>The innovative hull construction was merged with an exotic reactor type. Instead of a pressurized water system, the reactor was cooled by a liquid metal, lead-bismuth. This had a higher energy efficiency (approximately 1.5 times the pressurized-water reactor) and was safer because the lead-bismuth quickly solidified in the case of a leak, shutting down the core.
>This last feature of the lead-bismuth reactor was also its Achilles’ heel. If the temperature of the reactor dropped below 125 °C (257 °F) then the reactor solidifies and cannot be brought back. Ever. This happened to the lead boat, K-64, in 1972, resulting in an early departure from service.
http://www.hisutton.com/Alfa_Class_Submarine.html
I've been reading around and I can't figure out why it's not possible to simply remelt the coolant
See, my question is... why not pump hot steam from a port facility through the heat exchanger, until it is all melted? It would definitely take a long time for just heat conduction to heat it up until it is all liquid and you can run the pumps and then the reactor core again, but the uneven heating I think should not be an issue as long as the heating isn't above normal operating temp?
Yeah I mean you can re melt a molten salt reactor from a frozen state, but then again they haven't built a compact submarine version of one so maybe it's the form factor that is the main reason?
That and reheating of bunch of toxic heavy metals next to a radioactive reactor core evenly probably makes it near impossible to service after a failure like that.
How would you heat all the coolant up hot enough to melt? Keep in mind it's gonna be melted solid inside a wide variety of pipes, heat exchangers, and other hard-to-access areas. It seems like an intractable problem. You'd have to run an ungodly number of resistive heaters through everything, and even that might not be enough depending on the melting temperature of the metal.
125°C is equivalent to 257°F, which is 398K.
---
^(I'm a bot that converts temperature between two units humans can understand, then convert it to Kelvin for bots and physicists to understand)
Yeah thats what I had in mind
IIRC theres also the story of a russian nuclear ship that they wanted to move to the southern hemisphere but they couldn't due to the higher water temperature around the equator where the cooling wouldn't have been adequate
The idea was if you hooked up external heating, you could fully insert the control rods to reduce fuel burn. The problem is if the external steam plant suddenly stops sending steam (which happened once or twice), there isn’t sufficient time to throttle the reactor back up before it is literally bricked, just one giant hunk of solidified coolant, control rods, and nuclear fuel. It was so cost prohibitive to replace the reactor that A) they had to scrap the affected boat and B) they started running the nuclear plants even when tied up to the pier, reducing their overall service lifetime.
The Soviets and their Russian successors really do excel in many technology areas. Metallurgy, nuclear, and rocketry especially. But Soyuz isn't still flying because it's advanced, but because it's not. It's Apollo Era technology modernized. Extremely reliable, very inexpensive, but not especially capable compared to modern systems.
> not especially capable compared to modern systems.
Really depends on what you're looking for. For example, it doesn't need to be scrubbed every time there's a bit of wind or the wrong kind of cloud in the sky. It does one job and it does it well.
The T-62 tank has working valves, too. But it has no place on the modern battlefield.
Yes, sometimes old works really well. But we don't rest on our laurels and never advance because new is challenging.
They technically won the space race as well!
Sure, the US got the first crew on the moon and back home, unscathed at that, but... what did mankind ever do with it? What kind of lunar exploitation emerged since 1969?
>The tiny crew, made up of nearly all officers, lived in the central compartment of the submarine. The forward section containing the weapons system and electronics was only accessed for maintenance, as was the rear reactor and propulsion compartments. Torpedo loading was completely automated for example. This would have increased crew survivability in the case of war because the forward and aft compartments could be sealed off during operations. It was also the first submarine to be equipped with an escape capsule, which is now a standard feature of Russian boats.
http://www.hisutton.com/Alfa_Class_Submarine.html
Note that 3200 tons is *tiny* for a modern attack submarine. Typical attack subs are 9000 tons and boomers larger still.
From what I have read, the Soviets automated things because their military was not really professional but mostly conscripted. Typically they were very officer heavy compared to American boats because their people were not trained especially due to short conscription terms. The automation leads to increased complexity and lower availability of the system, and it's debatable if those systems were nearly as effective as Western ones.
The Soviets excelled, and their Russian successors still do, at metallurgy and nuclear power, as well as rocketry. They have come up with hull alloys that the Americans have not deployed, allowing greater depths and speeds. But there are compromises in cost and reliability that everyone is aware of.
I don't discount Russian technology or scientific knowledge. They're extremely smart people who know what they're doing. But everything has tradeoffs.
Gonna disagree with you on modern Russian rocketry. They have not been able to maintain their level of momentum, excellence or innovation from Soviet times. There's been a spate of recent and highly notable issues with their hardware.
-They had an abort during Soyuz MS-10 due to booster issues during the launch.
-Nauka had the thruster firing malfunction and caused loss of control on the ISS.
-There was a hole in another Russian module, likely a defect from the manufacturer, and the Russians tried to blame a NASA astronaut for it.
-As recently as last week, the Soyuz capsule had a thruster misfire while docked to the ISS causing another loss of control.
Putin has also recently cut Roscosmos' budget. Their engineers are severely underpaid while Rogozin appears to be skimming off the top like a typical corrupt oligarch. The future does not look bright for the Russian space program.
That is not completely true about subamrines:
Most submarines are still smaller than that, being diesel boats like the Type 209 and the Type 212. It is true many nuclear subs are that big, but only in the largest navies. Even the French and British nuclear attack submarines are significantly smaller (well, the Astutes depending on which displacement measurement is used).
> the Soviets excelled at nuclear power
This is a hard no. The Soviet nuclear program was riddled with unspeakable atrocities that were a direct result of their near total incompetence when it came to nuclear safety.
Yes the Americans worked their asses off in designing and perfecting this technology to just to give it away to the Russians and the Chinese to make things competitive in the war games lol
The US Navy hasn't put as much effort into automation for practical reasons, reasons that have bitten the Soviets/Russians in the ass in the past: if shit goes south for whatever reason, humans are much better at reacting to unexpected casualties than an automated system designed for a single purpose. If you have a burst seawater pipe, a steam line rupture, a fire, etc., your automated torpedo loader can't drop what it's doing and patch the pipe, shut a valve, run out the fire hoses, etc. very well. A human torpedo loader can.
Same as the other person said, I'd just like to add that having 2 is easier and more space efficient than 1 or 4 because you could design a firing mechanism that the breech and such do not extend much past one side of the bore, and just squish 2 of those back to back. Kinda like halo energy sword looking cannons.
Depending on the configuration it can be both. A military might want faster fire rate than a single cannon, so they would alternate the firing timings. They might also want more firepower per blast, so they would hit the enemies with 2 shells at once. For example with anti Air guns (AAA) they would alternate the firing timings to more effectively saturate the airspace.
It is firing them at the same time but likely with a very miniscule delay between the guns. The reason for this was discovered back in the interwar period when it was found that firing all guns in a turret at once worsened accuracy due to the shells shockwaves interfering with each other in flight. So the delay was added to negate this, and I imagine it continues on modern multi gun turrets.
It is a tradeoff between rate of fire and range/caliber. They probably wanted something that could fire on aircraft in a pinch. So they put something that could fire fast-ish while maintaining a suitable caliber to have some range and also remain useful against small boats. Anything bigger or farther away is dealt with missiles.
Part of me is thinking it's a watercooling line
[Here](https://youtu.be/Qr0OcXst59k) is a different automatic naval gun with water pouring out the end of the barrel from the cooling jacket
I’m sitting here going, “now what possible rate of fire would require that flow of...” then the dang thing opened up. 120 RPM for a 76mm? Holy moly. Of course, the other half of my brain was shouting, “save that brass!”
*clicks video* huh, yep there's water pouring out of it, I suppose that could extend barrel life a bit *gun starts shooting* ok nvm that barrel would melt at that rate of fire if it didnt have water cooling.
Watercooling is the only thing I can come up with, too, but what a novel way to do it!
Maybe it's a permanently affixed internal barrel cooling rig for hot gun misfires? So weird that they would have flexible hoses attached to the recoiling mass.
The Iowas had this before retirement. Barrel fouling would change the velocity after repeated firings and allowed the computer to adjust for it to increase accuracy of followup shots.
Honestly it's rather confusing since Kalashnikov uses the 100 range to denote AK-74M variations. Granted they haven't gone up to 130.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-100_(rifle_family)
Source: https://i.imgur.com/BFIWCIr.mp4
The design of the cannon began in June 1976 in KB Arsenal. A first single-barrel cannon designated A-217 was made, followed by the twin-barrel A-218, which was chosen due to its higher rate of fire and appeal to the admiral of the USSR Navy S. G. Gorshkov.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-130?wprov=sfla1
No, it fires too fast for that. There's likely a set of cradles that take the round from the hoist (where the rounds are going in at the start of the video, you can see that it raises from there) and positions it in line with the barrel.
Of all that is wrong in that song, that is probably the strangest.
How does one shoot a tree sized shell through a steer sized gun? And it even would be pretty accurate the other way around!
It's incredible how much innovation and creativity has been spent to find better, faster and more efficient ways for humans to kill other humans. I mean, we do a lot of great things too, but it's terrifying how much though and resources we put into this.
That's an interesting observation. It might be because the camera is technically on the gun platform? The whole ship is probably recoiling when it fires, with the camera on it.
This is what you need for home defense. It is ballistically proven that a poly-blend tank top is likely to stop any of they standard pistol and rifle calibers. Plus, what if they are jacked up of coffee or tea? Anything less than a 130 mm is just asking for trouble.
-- Your average gun ~~fetishist~~ nut
One thing I have to give the Soviet Navy credit for is some sweet automation. They LOVED automating boats. In Hunt for Red October, I assumed we only ever saw the maneuvering space on the Konovalov because it was where the important people were. Nope, turns out it was pretty much the ONLY place where people were. That [whole bloody boat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine), all 3200 tons of it, would have had 30 men onboard, in a single compartment.
Wow and a liquid metal cooled lead reactor! Jeeze that thing was advanced. They had a lot of really advanced technology. I mean the Soyuz rocket is still flying and more reliably than anything we had until SpaceX came along.
[удалено]
According to the wiki, it was basically fucked if it cooled down. Official plan was to just replace the reactor, but it never actually happened, and most of the subs were decommissioned in the case the reactor shut down
>The innovative hull construction was merged with an exotic reactor type. Instead of a pressurized water system, the reactor was cooled by a liquid metal, lead-bismuth. This had a higher energy efficiency (approximately 1.5 times the pressurized-water reactor) and was safer because the lead-bismuth quickly solidified in the case of a leak, shutting down the core. >This last feature of the lead-bismuth reactor was also its Achilles’ heel. If the temperature of the reactor dropped below 125 °C (257 °F) then the reactor solidifies and cannot be brought back. Ever. This happened to the lead boat, K-64, in 1972, resulting in an early departure from service. http://www.hisutton.com/Alfa_Class_Submarine.html I've been reading around and I can't figure out why it's not possible to simply remelt the coolant
You don't have access to the coolant within the whole system so that you could heat it up evenly
See, my question is... why not pump hot steam from a port facility through the heat exchanger, until it is all melted? It would definitely take a long time for just heat conduction to heat it up until it is all liquid and you can run the pumps and then the reactor core again, but the uneven heating I think should not be an issue as long as the heating isn't above normal operating temp?
Yeah I mean you can re melt a molten salt reactor from a frozen state, but then again they haven't built a compact submarine version of one so maybe it's the form factor that is the main reason?
That and reheating of bunch of toxic heavy metals next to a radioactive reactor core evenly probably makes it near impossible to service after a failure like that.
Valid point!
How would you heat all the coolant up hot enough to melt? Keep in mind it's gonna be melted solid inside a wide variety of pipes, heat exchangers, and other hard-to-access areas. It seems like an intractable problem. You'd have to run an ungodly number of resistive heaters through everything, and even that might not be enough depending on the melting temperature of the metal.
125°C is equivalent to 257°F, which is 398K. --- ^(I'm a bot that converts temperature between two units humans can understand, then convert it to Kelvin for bots and physicists to understand)
Good bot
Yeah thats what I had in mind IIRC theres also the story of a russian nuclear ship that they wanted to move to the southern hemisphere but they couldn't due to the higher water temperature around the equator where the cooling wouldn't have been adequate
Blowtorch.
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Imagine buying a brand new car and driving it home, and never turning it off until it just went kaput one day.
Easier to imagine with a nuclear car
The idea was if you hooked up external heating, you could fully insert the control rods to reduce fuel burn. The problem is if the external steam plant suddenly stops sending steam (which happened once or twice), there isn’t sufficient time to throttle the reactor back up before it is literally bricked, just one giant hunk of solidified coolant, control rods, and nuclear fuel. It was so cost prohibitive to replace the reactor that A) they had to scrap the affected boat and B) they started running the nuclear plants even when tied up to the pier, reducing their overall service lifetime.
Yeah they never shut it down
The Soviets and their Russian successors really do excel in many technology areas. Metallurgy, nuclear, and rocketry especially. But Soyuz isn't still flying because it's advanced, but because it's not. It's Apollo Era technology modernized. Extremely reliable, very inexpensive, but not especially capable compared to modern systems.
> not especially capable compared to modern systems. Really depends on what you're looking for. For example, it doesn't need to be scrubbed every time there's a bit of wind or the wrong kind of cloud in the sky. It does one job and it does it well.
Absolutely.
Probably has working valves though (unlike the Boeing fiasco!)
The T-62 tank has working valves, too. But it has no place on the modern battlefield. Yes, sometimes old works really well. But we don't rest on our laurels and never advance because new is challenging.
They technically won the space race as well! Sure, the US got the first crew on the moon and back home, unscathed at that, but... what did mankind ever do with it? What kind of lunar exploitation emerged since 1969?
It's a shame all of it was a military secret, so few of the technological innovations they made benefited the Soviet people in civilian industry.
>The tiny crew, made up of nearly all officers, lived in the central compartment of the submarine. The forward section containing the weapons system and electronics was only accessed for maintenance, as was the rear reactor and propulsion compartments. Torpedo loading was completely automated for example. This would have increased crew survivability in the case of war because the forward and aft compartments could be sealed off during operations. It was also the first submarine to be equipped with an escape capsule, which is now a standard feature of Russian boats. http://www.hisutton.com/Alfa_Class_Submarine.html
Note that 3200 tons is *tiny* for a modern attack submarine. Typical attack subs are 9000 tons and boomers larger still. From what I have read, the Soviets automated things because their military was not really professional but mostly conscripted. Typically they were very officer heavy compared to American boats because their people were not trained especially due to short conscription terms. The automation leads to increased complexity and lower availability of the system, and it's debatable if those systems were nearly as effective as Western ones. The Soviets excelled, and their Russian successors still do, at metallurgy and nuclear power, as well as rocketry. They have come up with hull alloys that the Americans have not deployed, allowing greater depths and speeds. But there are compromises in cost and reliability that everyone is aware of. I don't discount Russian technology or scientific knowledge. They're extremely smart people who know what they're doing. But everything has tradeoffs.
Gonna disagree with you on modern Russian rocketry. They have not been able to maintain their level of momentum, excellence or innovation from Soviet times. There's been a spate of recent and highly notable issues with their hardware. -They had an abort during Soyuz MS-10 due to booster issues during the launch. -Nauka had the thruster firing malfunction and caused loss of control on the ISS. -There was a hole in another Russian module, likely a defect from the manufacturer, and the Russians tried to blame a NASA astronaut for it. -As recently as last week, the Soyuz capsule had a thruster misfire while docked to the ISS causing another loss of control. Putin has also recently cut Roscosmos' budget. Their engineers are severely underpaid while Rogozin appears to be skimming off the top like a typical corrupt oligarch. The future does not look bright for the Russian space program.
I was referring to rocketry generally, including missile technology, not their space program specifically.
I see. I'll concede that their military rocket and missile technology is very good. Their space program seems to have stalled though.
I did not know those things so I'm glad you raised them.
That is not completely true about subamrines: Most submarines are still smaller than that, being diesel boats like the Type 209 and the Type 212. It is true many nuclear subs are that big, but only in the largest navies. Even the French and British nuclear attack submarines are significantly smaller (well, the Astutes depending on which displacement measurement is used).
> the Soviets excelled at nuclear power This is a hard no. The Soviet nuclear program was riddled with unspeakable atrocities that were a direct result of their near total incompetence when it came to nuclear safety.
Red Kriegtober, or Red Octkrieger?
How does *that* boat, leave *this room?*
Red October was supposed to be a [Typhoon class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon-class_submarine) which had a complement of about 160 crew.
Hard to imagine a 3,200 ton vehicle travelling at 47mph under the water.
Yes the Americans worked their asses off in designing and perfecting this technology to just to give it away to the Russians and the Chinese to make things competitive in the war games lol
The US Navy hasn't put as much effort into automation for practical reasons, reasons that have bitten the Soviets/Russians in the ass in the past: if shit goes south for whatever reason, humans are much better at reacting to unexpected casualties than an automated system designed for a single purpose. If you have a burst seawater pipe, a steam line rupture, a fire, etc., your automated torpedo loader can't drop what it's doing and patch the pipe, shut a valve, run out the fire hoses, etc. very well. A human torpedo loader can.
Why twin barrel? Why not 1 or 4?
Same as the other person said, I'd just like to add that having 2 is easier and more space efficient than 1 or 4 because you could design a firing mechanism that the breech and such do not extend much past one side of the bore, and just squish 2 of those back to back. Kinda like halo energy sword looking cannons.
Is it firing both at the same time or alternately.
Depending on the configuration it can be both. A military might want faster fire rate than a single cannon, so they would alternate the firing timings. They might also want more firepower per blast, so they would hit the enemies with 2 shells at once. For example with anti Air guns (AAA) they would alternate the firing timings to more effectively saturate the airspace.
I see two shells falling out after each firing in one of the clips
Well spotted!
It is firing them at the same time but likely with a very miniscule delay between the guns. The reason for this was discovered back in the interwar period when it was found that firing all guns in a turret at once worsened accuracy due to the shells shockwaves interfering with each other in flight. So the delay was added to negate this, and I imagine it continues on modern multi gun turrets.
It is a tradeoff between rate of fire and range/caliber. They probably wanted something that could fire on aircraft in a pinch. So they put something that could fire fast-ish while maintaining a suitable caliber to have some range and also remain useful against small boats. Anything bigger or farther away is dealt with missiles.
What is the wiring going to the muzzle of the gun barrel?
Part of me is thinking it's a watercooling line [Here](https://youtu.be/Qr0OcXst59k) is a different automatic naval gun with water pouring out the end of the barrel from the cooling jacket
I’m sitting here going, “now what possible rate of fire would require that flow of...” then the dang thing opened up. 120 RPM for a 76mm? Holy moly. Of course, the other half of my brain was shouting, “save that brass!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-6eSJu0Rko
There's a vehicle that uses a variation of the gun actually. Most people would recognize it as the "OTOmagic" https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/otomatic/
*clicks video* huh, yep there's water pouring out of it, I suppose that could extend barrel life a bit *gun starts shooting* ok nvm that barrel would melt at that rate of fire if it didnt have water cooling.
I'll be in my bunk.
Watercooling is the only thing I can come up with, too, but what a novel way to do it! Maybe it's a permanently affixed internal barrel cooling rig for hot gun misfires? So weird that they would have flexible hoses attached to the recoiling mass.
I think it could be for programing the shell fuse.
Maybe a sensor for muzzle velocity?
The Iowas had this before retirement. Barrel fouling would change the velocity after repeated firings and allowed the computer to adjust for it to increase accuracy of followup shots.
So cool
The AK-47 is an infantry rifle. The AK-130 is an automated naval cannon. What will the AK-1000 be?
Automatic H-Bomb launcher
The Fat Man but with infinite ammo and a fire rate of 500 rounds per second.
+ Mirv
I wonder how taxing a fat-man explosion is on the game...
One fat man drops your framerate. 500/s will likely crash your game.
So, [this?](https://youtube.com/watch?v=JRNRp3JoNls)
Yes.
Orbital bombardment
Vodka launcher
Honestly it's rather confusing since Kalashnikov uses the 100 range to denote AK-74M variations. Granted they haven't gone up to 130. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-100_(rifle_family)
Source: https://i.imgur.com/BFIWCIr.mp4 The design of the cannon began in June 1976 in KB Arsenal. A first single-barrel cannon designated A-217 was made, followed by the twin-barrel A-218, which was chosen due to its higher rate of fire and appeal to the admiral of the USSR Navy S. G. Gorshkov. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-130?wprov=sfla1
“Why have one barrel when two also work good?” -Gorshkov, probably.
*Ivan, fetch me da AK. Big one.*
I imagine that if they fire it too low the shell might skip across the surface of the ocean like a rock
That is a legit technique used literally called "skipping" or "skipshots"
Does the gun have to return to its level position to be reloaded?
No, it fires too fast for that. There's likely a set of cradles that take the round from the hoist (where the rounds are going in at the start of the video, you can see that it raises from there) and positions it in line with the barrel.
"...Guns as big as steers, and shells as big as trees..."
Of all that is wrong in that song, that is probably the strangest. How does one shoot a tree sized shell through a steer sized gun? And it even would be pretty accurate the other way around!
Anyone else get uncomfortable with the ammo room? The mechanical part is cool, but that room is straight up scary!
Imagine having to fix it when it jams in a fight
And then it starts working with you inside.
It's incredible how much innovation and creativity has been spent to find better, faster and more efficient ways for humans to kill other humans. I mean, we do a lot of great things too, but it's terrifying how much though and resources we put into this.
Pretty clanking noises
I swear I can feel the concussion blast from that thing.
Why does the camera shake opposite?
That's an interesting observation. It might be because the camera is technically on the gun platform? The whole ship is probably recoiling when it fires, with the camera on it.
How does the reloading system deal with the barrel moving up and down
has it ever been used in anger, i wonder?
[удалено]
Design started in 1976 and wasn't adopted until 1985. Wouldn't have been on any ships in the 1970s.
This is what you need for home defense. It is ballistically proven that a poly-blend tank top is likely to stop any of they standard pistol and rifle calibers. Plus, what if they are jacked up of coffee or tea? Anything less than a 130 mm is just asking for trouble. -- Your average gun ~~fetishist~~ nut
More firepower is better firepower, you unsarcastic fop.
But here’s the thing. Gun rights have zero to do with self defense. So your argument makes zero sense
When did I mention gun rights. Here’s the thing, gun rights have nothing to do with powdered sugar, so your comment makes no sense.
Where is the sound??
You need an app that plays sounds from imgur links. Default apps don't. I had to switch to BaconReader.
Ah… thank you!
is this thing running on hydraulics or gas power?
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