USS Nautilus submarine: Why are parts still classified?

[Roger Feeley]

Probably the best high-security story I've heard came from my brother who wrote consumer loans in Omaha. He knew this guy who did regular maintenance on Xerox machines including one at SAC headquarters beneath downtown Omaha. Of course he had to have clearance. On each visit, they would inspect him and his tools and take him on an elevator ride down to the secure part of the facility. Then they would go down this long dark hallway. At the end of the hallway, under a single bare bulb was the machine. The repairman commented once that maybe the machine would be of more use if the light was better. The reply was that, "You don't understand, we build this hallway just for you when you visit. In two hours, this hallway won't be here and the light will be better."

[Ole Anderson]

Roger Feeley,
If you've not seen it, I strongly recommend finding the English dubbed DVD of Das Boot, concerning a WWII U-Boat crew. That's by far the best submarine movie I know.

Alan

What? Not Operation Petticoat with Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, you know, the one with the pink submarine???

[Roger Feeley]

Oh boy, here we go. I guess I’m one of the three people in the world that loved “Down Periscope”. Seriously “The Enemy Below” is excellent.

[Mike Cutler]

Ole
My first boat was the USS John Marshall, SSBN 611, out of Guam.
Apparently a few years prior to me coming on board, two of the guys on board " got married". After that they would refer to the boat as the "Jane"Marshall. With the Blue Crew, the Gold Crew, and the "Pink" Crew. ( FBM submarines have two crews, blue and gold,normally.
The actual truth of this sea story, I can't verify. I wasn't there then. It does make for a good tale though.

[lowell holmes]

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/s...bf&action=view

See these pictures.

[Andrew Pitonyak]

I have not had any exposure to classified material in this space, so....

I believe that some of the techniques are still in use today. I could speculate which techniques are likely to be in use; but I won't.

[Bill Dufour]

For all I know the diameter of the torpedo tubes is a secret and they still use the same size. If you know the maximum diameter you can make some good guesses about speed and distance.

[Alan Caro]

Fellow Creekateers.

RE: Das Boot: I was interested to learn only a couple of days ago that there has a been a Das Boot Television series since 2018:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/a...ot-review.html

I haven't had TV for more than twenty years so I missed that one. The NYT review (there's a trailer in the article too) is generally positive, though it reads as though it's not as taught and unsentimental as the Petersen movie. That's TV and they have to spin out all the subplots to keep the series going.

It's been interesting to read of our friends that have been around submarines. My brush with subs: I've been on- or rather -in- a submarine only once, when I was nine years old. This was 1964 and the occasion was accompanying my father when he went shopping for a used submarine in New Orleans for the Continental Oil Company. Beau Clemens Discount Used Submarines E-Z financing was it? As I remember it was not expensive - $10,000 or so but the buyer has to figure in the cost of an oil change. I didn't know the reason for this, but must've been the early days of Gulf oil exploration, a few years after the Suez crisis when the ME was de-stabilizing, and new and nearer sources were desirable. For whatever reason- probably the cost of an oil change, the purchase was not made. A couple of years later when Gaddafi nationalized US oil assets in Libya, my father was laid off and he went to work for a private MI consulting firm. Years later he went to work for Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company that builds nuclear subs. That WWII Diesel was cramped, dark, and stinky, but it was a kid's heaven. I loved cars, planes, and machines of all kinds but had never been really inside a machine like that- really right in the machinery and every piece is visible. I was hooked and always watched submarine-related movies afterwards. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Ice Station Zebra, Grey Lady Down, Run Silent, Run Deep, The Enemy Below, Crimson Tide, K19-the Widow Maker was particularly powerful (did anyone else watch the recent series Chernobyl?), The Hunt for Red October, and Das Boot at the top of the list.

I watched The Hunt for Red October again last evening. While it was better than I remembered, there is still something too easy and sanitary about it; everything works out like clockwork and I found the numerous scratch and dent free close torpedo escapes (remember the effect in Das Boot of a depth charge explosion), Ramius' (Connery) letter declaring his defection in advance so as to give the Soviets a head start on hunting him down, the idea that Russia would not know where it's newest, highest tech multi-billions flagship was located at every second, the genial banter at the sonar station where one half of the team doesn't recognize a whale call or know what to do to track a signal, Ramius is one of the heroes, but he completely casually murders someone, and the silly choice of making the interior of the US sub white, and the Soviet sub interior a sort of elegant red and black. <It reminded me of high-end Los Angeles audio stores. There was just a bit too much convenient implausibility, but it was still fun.

My other slight association with subs is that for fun I worked a bit on a concept for a high speed (supercavitation), deep dive research sub and at that time had an architectural client who, a few years later, designed and built a sub and took it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Alan

[andrew whicker]

I work for an industrial compressor company. We made compressors for some nuclear plants in the 50's and I am NOT supposed to look at the drawings. They are classified. Only hard copies.

I'm supposed to have clearance to view the drawings for a compressor that... is very similar to every other compressor we build.