MolaKule
Staff member
Some Interesting fact about Red October.
Quote:
The so-called “caterpillar drive” worked with no moving
parts, allowing a nuclear missile-armed Soviet submarine to
approach the U.S. coast undetected. As the submarine captain
(played by Connery) said, “Once the world trembled at the
sound of our rockets … now they will tremble again—at the
sound of our silence."
MHD propulsion is not fictional: real-life prototypes include
the EMS-1, a 3.0-m submarine that achieved speeds of
0.4 m/s during tests in California in 1966,2 and the ST-500,
a 3.6-m boat that reached 0.6 m/s in Japan in 1979.3 The
world’s first and so far only full-sized MHD-propelled craft,
Yamato-1, carried 10 people at speeds of up to 15 km/h during
successful sea trials in Kobe, Japan, in 1992.
In Clancy’s novel, Red October’s propulsion system was not
magnetohydrodynamic but based on a more conventional
(but also unusually quiet) “pump-jet” system employed in the
massive Typhoon-class Soviet submarines of the 1980s. Nevertheless,
there was intense real-world suspicion during this
period that the Soviets were developing MHD-driven attack
submarines. As late as 1990, military analysts were convinced
that strange “pods” mounted on the tails of new Soviet Victor
III-class submarines were MHD thrusters [“Evidence grows
the ‘pod’ is a superconductive drive,” Navy News and Undersea
Technol. 7 (11), 1–2 (March 19, 1990)]. Attempts to photograph
these pods caused a collision with a U.S. Navy ship, the U.S.S.
Drum, in 1981 [W. C. Reed, Red November: Inside the Secret
U.S.-Soviet Submarine War (William Morrow, 2010)].
Excerpts from:
The Hunt for Red October II:
A magnetohydrodynamic boat demonstration for
introductory physics
THE PHYSICS TEACHER, Vol. 55, PP. 460-466, November 2017
Quote:
The so-called “caterpillar drive” worked with no moving
parts, allowing a nuclear missile-armed Soviet submarine to
approach the U.S. coast undetected. As the submarine captain
(played by Connery) said, “Once the world trembled at the
sound of our rockets … now they will tremble again—at the
sound of our silence."
MHD propulsion is not fictional: real-life prototypes include
the EMS-1, a 3.0-m submarine that achieved speeds of
0.4 m/s during tests in California in 1966,2 and the ST-500,
a 3.6-m boat that reached 0.6 m/s in Japan in 1979.3 The
world’s first and so far only full-sized MHD-propelled craft,
Yamato-1, carried 10 people at speeds of up to 15 km/h during
successful sea trials in Kobe, Japan, in 1992.
In Clancy’s novel, Red October’s propulsion system was not
magnetohydrodynamic but based on a more conventional
(but also unusually quiet) “pump-jet” system employed in the
massive Typhoon-class Soviet submarines of the 1980s. Nevertheless,
there was intense real-world suspicion during this
period that the Soviets were developing MHD-driven attack
submarines. As late as 1990, military analysts were convinced
that strange “pods” mounted on the tails of new Soviet Victor
III-class submarines were MHD thrusters [“Evidence grows
the ‘pod’ is a superconductive drive,” Navy News and Undersea
Technol. 7 (11), 1–2 (March 19, 1990)]. Attempts to photograph
these pods caused a collision with a U.S. Navy ship, the U.S.S.
Drum, in 1981 [W. C. Reed, Red November: Inside the Secret
U.S.-Soviet Submarine War (William Morrow, 2010)].
Excerpts from:
The Hunt for Red October II:
A magnetohydrodynamic boat demonstration for
introductory physics
THE PHYSICS TEACHER, Vol. 55, PP. 460-466, November 2017
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