Spent 7 years on submarines AMA
- Thread starter teamquestnorth
- Start date
1. How often have you ever pinged off a great sperm whale?
2. Is "greasing the ol' torpedo" really a saying now a days?
3. How's the food down there in a submerged naval vessel?
3. What kind of contraband have you seen onboard?
4. Does the US navy provide Wi-Fi somehow in the deep?
5. Not a question. Das Boot in Geman is the greatest sub movie in existence.
Also this is a terrific thread as per norm Mr.
@teamquestnorth . Aye-aye motherfucker!
2. Is "greasing the ol' torpedo" really a saying now a days?
3. How's the food down there in a submerged naval vessel?
3. What kind of contraband have you seen onboard?
4. Does the US navy provide Wi-Fi somehow in the deep?
5. Not a question. Das Boot in Geman is the greatest sub movie in existence.
Also this is a terrific thread as per norm Mr.
@teamquestnorth . Aye-aye motherfucker!
Did you have to do the escape training? Where you rise up in the water and not blow out or whatever it was? I bet that sucked
This kinda shit
Gay as fuck, shouldn't they be getting shot out of the torpedo holes?
I dunno that's why I asked
I'd like to image
@teamquestnorth escaping via these
And then snapping people's necks while drinking a martini and shooting lasers out of his watch.
I'm sure he got into plenty of holes down thereI'd like to image
And then snapping people's necks while drinking a martini and shooting lasers out of his watch.
Errr giggity?
I didn't hear about the instance that you're talking about but I've heard of others.
With satellites now, its pretty easy to know where a carrier is.
Much more difficult to actually sink one however. They almost always travel in battle groups and are surrounded by destroyers which employ towed arrays as well as their hull mounted sonars. There's also usually at LEAST one submarine but often 2 that operate in these battle groups as well.
Getting into an advantageous firing position and also within range can be tricky without being detected.
A lot of times you have aircraft dropping sonar buoys randomly around the area as well.
I think the last time a carrier was sunk by a submarine was the British during the Falklands war and iirc that carrier was unescorted.
I bashed the top of my head on an air vent while we were on the surface once. I had to get 8 stitches and they sowed me up on the officers dining table in the wardroom.
I joined the Navy because they offered the biggest signing bonus
There isn't really an accurate movie about modern day subs . Das Boot does portray accurately what life is like on a WW2 diesel boat though. Very cramped and grimy.
Red October or Crimson Tide or movies like that weren't even filmed on a real submarine.
However one of the season finales of "24" was filmed on my first submarine USS TOPEKA.
Red October if I had to say probably had a somewhat accurate theme of what life was like during the cold war.
If you recall the black guy "jonesy" he was a sonar tech and that was my job. Although he was the only sonar guy that ever seemed to be on watch. There was usually 15-16 of us onboard and had at least 5 people on watch at any time.
The food is actually pretty good and is almost always freshly made. I'll give a few examples.
For breakfast, you walk up to a window and order an omelette or eggs any way u want them, then there would be hash browns, bacon, sausage etc..sometimes cereal too.
We would usually run out of fresh milk after about 2 weeks though and had to use powdered milk after that.
Lunch would be a salad bar, and a varied menu throughout the week like BBQ chicken, deli sandwiches and the like. Every Friday would be slider day(burgers)
Dinner would also vary but always included a salad bar too. Saturday night would be wings and pizza. Sunday would be surf and turf. All you can eat prime rib and lobster.
You could probably be out for over a month and a half before you had to break out the canned stuff
Idk how many hours. Probably in the many thousands.
A major health concern that a lot of people would probably think is bad would be radiation from the reactor. The truth is though that you would pick up more radiation flying cross country once than you would being underway for 6 months on a submarine.
We all wore TLD's to measure the amount of radiation that we were getting and its closely monitored.
The real dangers are emergencies like fire, flooding, hydraulic rupture, hot run of a torpedo etc..
Those are all very dangerous and can doom a submarine in seconds. We would constantly train to combat things like these.
We did. They were called "steel beach picnics". Usually the would bring up some burgers or what not and we would eat them topside.
Usually we had swim calls at the same time and u could dive off the side and swim.
Of course most of the time these were in warm waters around Hawaii and there were sharks which I'm terrified of so I never went swimming.
They usually had a couple of guys on " shark watch" with an M16 and shotgun in case anyone got attacked.
We've never pinged off a great whale that I know of and if we did I don't think we could see a "return" as its not metallic or really solid and would probably absorb most of the sound or scatter it. Towards the end of my tour, we were actually supposed to verify that there were no whales around before we went active.1. How often have you ever pinged off a great sperm whale?
2. Is "greasing the ol' torpedo" really a saying now a days?
3. How's the food down there in a submerged naval vessel?
3. What kind of contraband have you seen onboard?
4. Does the US navy provide Wi-Fi somehow in the deep?
5. Not a question. Das Boot in Geman is the greatest sub movie in existence.
Also this is a terrific thread as per norm Mr.
There's no WiFi when you're submerged (or at least there wasn't) I'm sure there probably isn't still now a days though. We had "family grams" that we could send via email but only got to send and receive like once a week.
Contraband....I know of a few chiefs who got busted with alcohol on board. Never saw and drugs or anything like that.
This is useful info for us guys that store unattainable/useless knowledge. We as always are indebted to you
@teamquestnorth .
I had 5 seasons of NCIS fall in my lap in the form of dvd sets. Have you ever bumped into them? Was there one stationed so to stay on your boat while you were at sea?
I don't know if you can answer this one or not but I'll ask anyway. If you can't just say so I understand.
There has been much talk about some of the sonar we use on subs that cause injuries to whales/dolphins own sonar. Some of which is been thought to be a reason for allot of the mass beaching we see from time to time. Have you ever heard of this and is there any truth to it?
There has been much talk about some of the sonar we use on subs that cause injuries to whales/dolphins own sonar. Some of which is been thought to be a reason for allot of the mass beaching we see from time to time. Have you ever heard of this and is there any truth to it?
@teamquestnorth do you remember when that AWACS plane went down in China? I think around 2001. I cant explain to people how frightening it is to KNOW your being tracked by a submarine. You assholes terrorize the surface fleet.This is the incident im talking about
US Military: Spy Plane Crash in China
Really interesting.
Keep up the info.
wow that's really impressive. you are eating better under the surface that many places above it.
I have definitely heard about this. TBH I honestly don't know either way if there's any truth to it but it could definitely be possible.
Right before the end of my tour on my last sub they started making us sonarmen verify that there were no whales in the vicinity before we went to active sonar. Which basically means could we hear whale noises in our headsets at the time. Whales have a very distinguished sound in the water and every sonarmen has probably heard thousands. Its very common.
From my understanding, the decibal blast from the active sonar isn't what actually injures the whales but its disorienting and they end up beaching.
Again, that's what a lot of the environmentalists are saying and it definitely seems plausible and the sub fleet has for sure taken measures to reduce the impact that our sonar would have on whales.
The Navy is (or at least was) trying to fight back saying that the training we used active for (detecting battery/electric sub's) outweighed the potential risk to the whales
I've been out of the game for awhile so theres probably been more research done since to potentially verify whether the Sonar does indeed pose a lethal threat to whales.