XPost: soc.history.war.misc, rec.aviation.military, or.politics   
   XPost: seattle.politics   
   From: a425couple@hotmail.com   
      
   My computer had a absolute total failure.   
   I'm getting it back, kind of.   
   Right after I was under anesthesia for 3-4 hours.   
   If someone says "His head's not right!"   
       I can not argue right now.   
   Still making progress, but here goes:   
      
   Like Two Ships Not-Quite-Passing In the Night   
      
   The Atlantic Ocean is big — very big. It has an area of more than 40   
   million square miles (100 million square kilometers), which is more than   
   twice the land area of Asia. And, given that it’s ocean, very few people   
   live there. Sure, there are a lot of ships cruising throughout the seas,   
   and there are people on board those ships, but even if we were to treat   
   those people as permanent residents of the Atlantic (which I originally   
   typoed as “reseadent,” which kind of works!) you’d need more than 50   
   million of them to have a population density equal to Alaska, which is   
   easily the least-dense state of the 50 American states.   
      
   All of that is to say that you’re cruising around the Atlantic, chances   
   are, you’re not going to run into anything. That’s particularly true if   
   you’re not in a port, where there are lots of ships moving in a small   
   area, or if it’s during peacetime, when ramming into another ship may be   
   intentional. And it’s supremely true if you’re in a submarine — not only   
   are there far fewer subs than there are ships on the water’s surface,   
   but you also add a y-axis to the equation.   
      
   So it must have been really strange when, on the evening of February 3rd   
   to 4th, 2009, the HMS Vanguard — a British submarine — crashed into   
   something.   
      
   Oh, and potentially very dangerous, too, because the Vanguard was a   
   nuclear sub carrying a payload of atomic weapons.   
      
   Submarines are typically designed to be hard to detect. They travel   
   underwater (obviously) and are, therefore, already difficult at best to   
   detect from the surface or the sky. The easiest way to find a submarine   
   is using sonar (which, originally, was an acronym meaning “Sound   
   Navigation and Ranging”) — basically, you use listening devices to   
   “look” for any sounds that don’t match the normal noises you’d expect   
   to   
   find in the ocean. As submarines have motors and people — things you   
   typically don’t find in the depths of the ocean — if you know what   
   you’re listening for, you can often detect an oncoming sub.   
      
   But over the decades, submariners have become better and better at   
   hiding from enemy sonar. The National Museum of the U.S. Navy’s website   
   explains:   
      
   To increase stealth, submariners take advantage of how sound waves act   
   in ocean water. The speed of sound in seawater is greatly determined by   
   temperature, pressure, and salinity. These three factors vary in   
   different locations and bend the sound waves accordingly. Because SONAR   
   depends on receiving sounds signals, the way sound waves bend determines   
   what can be picked up by SONAR. Submariners can find places between the   
   bending sound waves of active enemy SONAR called shadow zones. There,   
   subs can hide and watch the enemy without being detected.   
      
   And on that day, the Vanguard was likely taking efforts to hide itself —   
   the British military, understandably, has been mum on the details.   
   Unfortunately for them, so was the Le Triomphant, a French nuclear   
   submarine. Le Triomphant happened to be in the same area, "conducting   
   routine national patrols in the Atlantic Ocean” according to the British   
   Ministry of Defense (via the Guardian), and because the two submarines   
   were doing their best to hide, they didn’t detect one another. And,   
   despite the vastness of the ocean, they collided.   
      
   The collision happened at a very low speed and no one aboard was   
   injured, and thankfully for the rest of us, none of the nuclear stuff on   
   either ship went boom. The damage to the French ship was so minimal that   
   they claimed to have not realized they hit another ship; per the   
   Guardian, “On 6 February, France's defense ministry had said that the   
   boat "collided with an immersed object (probably a container)" when   
   coming back from patrolling and that its sonar dome was damaged.” (It   
   wasn’t a container, unless you’re being very, very literal.) The French   
   ship needed repairs to its active sonar dome while the British ship   
   suffered damage to the casing that held its missiles on its right side,   
   which is to say, the damage was pretty minor. That said, the repair   
   bills, according to the Telegraph, were “expected to cost up to £50   
   million in repairs,” or about $65 million for the two combined. (That’s   
   a lot, but the sub cost more than £3 billion to build, so it’s not   
   outlandish.)   
      
   There were some calls after the event for the UK and France to better   
   coordinate their efforts to patrol under the Atlantic, but neither   
   nation acknowledged if any efforts were being made to do so. The good   
   news is that such an event is unlikely to happen again, if for no other   
   reason than it was incredibly unlikely to have happened in the first place.   
   	   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)