"Worst Submarines of All Time" Topic

"What a drag. Top Gun was about the best of the best flitting around the skies, kept aloft by a lonely impulse of delight. This list of History's Worst 5 Submarines catalogues the worst of the worst lumbering around in the briny deep. Such a vessel is a millstone dragging down the fortunes of its navy, its parent military, or the society that puts it to sea.

Call it Bottom Gun.

Now, it's possible to rank hardware, including submersibles and their armament, purely by technical characteristics. The crummiest piece of kit -- condemned by shoddy design, faulty construction work, or premature obsolescence -- is the bottom-feeder on such a list. In the case of submarines, then, tallying up speed, submerged endurance, acoustic properties, and kindred statistics offers a reputable way to proceed. But it tells only part of the story…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Another dreadful piece of dross

Worst 5 submarines, then lists 3 submarines from 2 different countries as number 5. Well, that makes 7. Then, for number 1, lists an entire fleet of excellent submarines as the worst because they weren't used correctly. Hello, title worst submarines, not worst use of submarines.

Another dreadful piece of dross just about sums it up.

The Wasp was sunk and the Yorktown was finished off by Japanese submarines. The Saratoga was out of action for months shortly after Pearl Harbor due to being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The Japanese used their submarines as fleet support for their surface fleet and did not use them against merchant ships.

Since the US did dedicate air and sea resources to protect merchant shipping I don't think using the Japanese subs against merchant ships would have bought them that much.

As long as the RN's WW1 'K' boats are there (they are), that is all I care about…

Wouldn't the worst be the ones that went under and didn't come back up during peacetime?

Wouldn't the worst be the ones that went under and didn't come back up during peacetime?

Sounds like the RN`s `M` class submersible monitors, another `seems like a good idea at the time` idea from WWI.

I was under the impression that a ex Soviet admiral admitted that they torpedoed the Scorpion?

One of the worst of the articles on that site that Armand inexplicably keeps linking to.
It cannot stay on topic to save its life, and the author thinks he can get away with it by attributing ideas to Clausewitz and Mahan.

Nothing but B. S. written to fill a deadline.

"The National Interest" is basically a political site.
The historical articles are there to fill space.

Wouldn't the worst be the ones that went under and didn't come back up during peacetime?

Which still gives us Thresher, Scorpion, and Kursk on the list.

Thresher, while tragic, has probably saved a whole lot of lives after the SubSafe program kicked off.

Scorpion had not been refitted with SubSafe components when she went down, which is why I suspect that it was a relatively simple-but-urgent issue. I suspect that the Stern Planes had a hydraulic seal blow out, forcing the planes to full dive. The last-ditch response if nothing else has worked is to emergency blow, and if Scorpion's EMBT blow valves froze up (as had been demonstrated as part of the Thresher investigation), that would have killed her. Even on a Trident sub (slower and much bigger than the Scorpion), we only had 8 seconds to work through all the immediate actions, and blowing the tanks usually happened shortly after that.

Kursk was the explosion of a high-test-peroxide torpedo. While I question the sanity of the Russians for using HTP, but it's not like OTTO II fuel is much safer. Silver-Zinc batteries may have killed the Scorpion with a torpedo emergency, since they can get really hot like modern lithium batteries.

Now, the Xia and Han class definitely belong on that list.

So does the K-class. "Too many holes in the hull" is NOT something you want people to say about your sub!!!

I disagree about K-219. While a horrible accident caused by utterly incompetent leaders, there was nothing innately wrong with the class itself.

And the IJN submarine fleet were pretty good boats, considering that the US intentionally scuttled all I-400 class ships we'd captured rather than letting the Soviets have them. Again, nothing innately wrong with the sub designs, everything wrong with their leadership.

I'm not sure I could actually put more than 3 subs on the "worst ever" list: Han, Xia, and K-class. Well, maybe the UK's X-class, nicknamed the "Exploder-class" because they used high-test peroxide.

So the loss of Kursk wasn't due to a rocket torp going off in the forward compartment?

I don't remember where I heard that…

Hmmm, Russian, Chinese, and North Korean come to mind, plus that horrible little one I took a ride at in Disneyland, that didn't even really submerge, in order to see plastic fish in the water.

The Kursk wasn't damaged enough for it to be a Shkval rocket-torp. A "hot run" on a SUBROC (American rocket-propelled weapon) means that the rocket motor has burned a hole through the breech door, the bulkheads between the torpedo room and the pressure hull in about 30 seconds.

High-test peroxide can easily cause a fire hot enough to cook off a torpedo warhead.

Another useless and idiotic list. Why, oh why, you insist on inflicting these things on the forum is beyond me…

The ww1 british k boats take the cake.

I'd put the Turtle on there, and the Hunley. A weapon system that couldn't penetrate the enemy hull and a submarine that killed not one, not two but three crews…

What is beyond me is why you thread by thread knock it off with them negative waves!. (smile)

Move on Coastal2! (smile).
Life is short.

Amicalement
Armand

The British K Class definitely have the prise. At one point a batch of them tried to make a sortie with Beatty's battlecruisers and the result was two K's sunk and three crippled without ever getting out of the harbor.

The Turtle was rubbish because it's not even close to a Seawolf class attack sub in terms of capability.

Who in their right mind would pick a Turtle over a Seawolf, I ask!