I thought these were supposed to be simple, layman's answers? Lets not take the conversation too deep in the weeds.

I'm so sorry to correct you on a relatively minor point, but that's a Porsche 993. It's the last of the Air cooled breed, and arguably the best.

My heart is broken for the life of the lost gearhead, the hurt navigator, and the amazing car - now irreplaceable.

Cleaning was done in dry dock with a pressure washer. However, remember that US Navy submarines tend to operate mostly at 500ish feet. When you combine that kind of pressure with high speed little things like some fuzz on the hull tend to be pretty much unimportant.

IT'S MY IDEA! YOU CAN'T HAVE IT!

Raphael,

Totally whales humping - every time. I totally felt like a voyeur!

Honestly... it's classified. The Russian subs got pretty quiet and we could only pick them up on longrange sonar with narrowband on very low frequencies. (which means that you couldn't hear them at all.)

First off, it's not metal. It's a rubber anechoic coating. :)

We used to welcome anyone who came into the shack! One of our best operators was a deck division striker. He made second class and got out. It was sad.

Sonar was fun - it was roughly equivalent to looking out the window... or at least as close as you could come on a sub.

Ingo-Castilho,

They get that way quicker than you'd think...

Little known fact: the flying Big D was actually USS HOUSTON. (my old ship!)

Fly Houston, Fly! ;)

(BTW, it really was... Dallas was an East coast boat, Houston was the stunt double for Dallas in virtually every surface 688 shot. HOUSTON was given the honor of doing the "emergency surface" scene, however, in the night…

I don't mean to pull rank, but I'm going to. :)

I was a Sonar Technician Submarines First Class (STS1/SS) onboard USS HOUSTON.

You'd be amazed how little that matters. A more important factor is how clean the seawater heat exchangers are. Don't get me wrong, a clean hull helps a lot, but due to the odd ways that fluid dynamics work, you end up with a boundary layer along the hull and the geometric shape matters much more than the coating's…

Because Porsche?

On point 2, things fall off at high speed - the alfa was legitimately crazy fast. I can't prove it because of stuff being classified, but I'm pretty sure the Alfa was the fastest manned sub that's ever been.

The Alfa was indeed awesome.

Banned books are a useful place to look for books worth reading. It's great that people use attempted censorship to recommend great books! Thanks! Now I know of one more book worth reading. :)

Tyler,
I thought it was extremely funny. I wish I had a sign to hang on the old EP-3 pretty frequently. (lord knows it broke enough!)

That was a fantastic book. Red Storm Rising was painfully slow to get started, but was great the first shot was fired.

Surface warriors make me giggle... I used to be an enlisted submariner (USS Houston, SSN-713). Your cruise missiles are cute, but once we can hear you, you're boned. You're boned, and you won't even know it until your keel breaks in half.