Challenge: NATO Alfa Class Submarine Equivalent

Delta Force

Banned
Isn't another issue with the ALFA the titanium hull. If I recall, the SU had plenty of titanium so cost wasn't that big of an issue but it would have been an issue in terms of supply and cost for the US or other western countries. Correct me if I am wrong...

Titanium is produced in Canada, as well as other NATO and/or neutral states. However, titanium is notoriously difficult to work with. While it had been used or was starting to be used in aerospace in the 1970s, the CIA initially dismissed rumors of titanium hull submarines because it thought titanium was impossible to work with in a shipyard.
 

sharlin

Banned
Really for their time the Alfa Class was quite a technological wonder with its titanium hull and small reactor etc but as an actual weapon...bloody aweful.
 
The US was using titanium in aerospace applications from the 1950's but only started to use it on a large scale in the 60's and 70's.

American aircraft manufactures were intending to use it extensively in their SST programs. Boeing were intending to fabricate most of their design by welding titanium sub assemblies together, they actually learnt how to do this fairly successfully. The main issue with welding titanium is it becomes brittle if hydrogen is present, the main source of this is water vapour so a lot of care needs to be taken when welding. Building a Alfa hull must have been nightmarish with massive QC issues.
 
Not, however, in the quantities or at the price the Soviets/Russians produce it.

It's far more possible/cheaper/easier for a Soviet weapon to be built out of titanium than a Western one.

Right and I think that was part of the disconnect in the west - intelligence analysts assumed a titanium hulled submarine would cost them what it would cost us and so they had trouble believing it.
 
A straight-up copy (or independently identical machine) is maybe not so likely, but it does seem like the United States or Britain could have produced a conceptually similar cutting-edge wonder submarine or submarine class at some point. Indeed, as gatordad points out, the SSN-21/Seawolf-class in some respects is that class, with lots of technological innovations, but was too expensive for series production with the end of the Cold War (nevertheless, a lot of the developments made for them were incorporated into the Virginia-class boats).
 
Britain didn't bother trying to one-up the Soviets over this, they just built a torpedo in the hopes of levelling the playing field, the result being the Spearfish, a conventional type design, but capable of supposedly about 80 knots.
 
The Project 705 boats were in many ways classic Soviet designs. Pure suicide on a stick.

Very fast, heavily armed and LOUD, like put a glass up to the pressure hull and you can here one 10 miles away loud. You had to get within 6-8,000 yards to use the VA-111, had to drop speed to around 10 knots to have the flow noise come off the boat's sensors before acquiring the target, while the enemy SSN you were attacking had already gotten a firing solution and launched homing torpedoes (the super cavitating torpedo can not home, it is deaf as a post and relies on the launching vessel's initial firing solution to achieve a hit).

To top it off it was designed to use a NUCLEAR WARHEAD. Think about that, 6,000 yard range, nuclear warhead detonating underwater, and no time to move away. I'll wait...

The class was meant to protect Soviet SSBN in defended bastions at the cost of the Lyre EVERY TIME. Simple Kremlin math, expend 31 officers (no enlisted crew)/$100M boat and save a national asset.

The West doesn't think that way

Mk 45 ASTOR seems pretty similar to me - often referred to as a 2 kill weapon system - that being the target and the firing platform
 
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