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3DUSS Triton

CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
edited March 2011 in Work in Progress #1
guess what it is... here's a clue, it's not scifi...

well done to number_six who scores an A* in nuclear submarine recognition.
87892.jpg
Post edited by Coolhand on
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  • JennyJenny2 Posts: 0Member
    Looks like the bow of a diesel-electric boat?
  • Road WarriorRoad Warrior206 Posts: 813Member
    That's what it looks like to me as well. And you WERE saying we didn't have enough submarines.........;)
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    It is most definately powered by the Atom, not Cretaceous timber, and neither of you get points for working out its a sub.:D

    pls be more specific.;)
  • JennyJenny2 Posts: 0Member
    With that bow, if it's atomic-powered, it's almost certainly fictional. Real-world nuclear boats going all the way back to Nautilus, both ours and the Russians, are / were more cylindrical, to achieve greater crush depths.
  • PagrinPagrin171 Posts: 0Member
    Arrr well beyond being the prow of a sub, I have no idea what model.....err umm Red October, Titan, erm um (shrugs shoulders.)
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    It is most definately also not fictional.

    Remember that while a cylindrical shape is better at distributing pressure loads, you can encase your cylindrical 'hull' in pretty much any free flooding shape you want and it won't affect its crush depth, the Russians for example are famous for their double hull vessels.

    pls try harder:)
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    here is another pic with a view of the sail.
    87617.jpg
  • number_sixnumber_six0 Posts: 0Member
    Looks like USS Triton to me.
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    Now there's someone who knows their nuclear submarines... Yes, the gigantic and very expensive Triton, double nuclear reactors and the first submarine to cross the globe submerged.

    Kind of a strange design, i'm not surprised it would throw people off... its ship-like outer hull was apparently optimised for surface operations, a style that was quickly discarded for the more rounded shapes we see today
  • number_sixnumber_six0 Posts: 0Member
    Looking good so far. :thumb:
  • Road WarriorRoad Warrior206 Posts: 813Member
    Trition, eh? Hmmm. Is this for a personal project Steve or other?
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    other, heh;)

    dont have much time for personal work these days folks but i may post more 'other' work here along with my personal projects.
  • Road WarriorRoad Warrior206 Posts: 813Member
    Then go forth. Underway on "Cool" power...
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    hah, well with twin reactors on board it was definately 'hot' in real life. But then I am quite fond of all things nuclear... maybe not so much the bombs but who's to say where we would be without them...

    (btw, irl, thorium reactors ftw - maybe not a great choice for powering a sub, and you're not going to use them to make bombs either. but as cheap energy from fossils becomes increasingly difficult, expensive and immoral to obtain, it could keep all of us ticking over comfortably until we get fusion plants.)

    I think the raised lines on the hull are weld lines, so i've added a slightly blobby effect to the lines to try and simulate that.
    87630.jpg
  • Knowles2Knowles2171 Posts: 0Member
    Nice sub. Never would have guest it was the USS Triton through.

    Thorium is indeed the answer to making nuclear power viable, an it is much more useful than uranium or Plutonium plants, as it produces less wast, an more energy, an there several millions tons of known thorium deposits, enough to keep us going for a very long time. While we are running out of know deposits of Uranium and plutonium.
    The only reason we did not build them in the 1970s is because they were useless for making bombs. But Chinese an Indian have got plans to build commercial thorium reactors in the near future.
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    hehe why do i get the feeling you wanted to say more about this tech than comment on my model... but thankyou for both comments anyway.

    http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/

    ^here is a nice introductory article for others. Even today we're still persuing the types of reactors that are good for making good old pu, because as you say, its nice and easy to make bombs with, and of course extremely valuable.

    Funny stuff, Plutonium, I remember watching a lecture with a physicist who claimed he held a sub-critical mass of plutonium in his bare hands in some undisclosed country, warm to the touch he said, but it won't kill you until you compress it with explosives or do something silly with it. They showed it to him just to prove they had it... I find it remarkable that you can have a substance thats so deadly but it could sit on a shelf somewhere, unshielded, and you'd never know without some sort of detector.

    Clearly the only reasons why we haven't yet invested deeply in this stuff are incredibly complex and sinister, or perhaps just plain and simple sinister.

    Hopefully our leaders will get their heads out of their collective asses and do something useful for a change soon - with this technology even the absurd hydrogen fuel market becomes plausible for those without access to high levels of sunlight. desalination plants are feasible and so on. It really could be the golden age of atomic power, rather than atomic terror, that the world looked forward to in the era that this submarine was laid down.
  • PagrinPagrin171 Posts: 0Member
    Sorry to distract from the sub - which is coming along really well.
    I saw in a doco some time ago (So forgive me if I'm wrong or out of date.) that the Chinese were planning on building some 300 reactors across their country, but they were planning on making carbon reactors.
    The basic fuel is solid balls of compressed carbon. The practical upshot of which is in the event of a complete breakdown there is no radio active material so the whole reactor just stops.
  • japmejapme12 Posts: 0Member
    first to circumnavigate the globe, while submerged, cruising under the polar icecap to do so...
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    Pagrin wrote: »
    Sorry to distract from the sub - which is coming along really well.
    I saw in a doco some time ago (So forgive me if I'm wrong or out of date.) that the Chinese were planning on building some 300 reactors across their country, but they were planning on making carbon reactors.
    The basic fuel is solid balls of compressed carbon. The practical upshot of which is in the event of a complete breakdown there is no radio active material so the whole reactor just stops.

    Well they aren't balls of solid carbon, but this is a popular misconception, what documentary was this?

    Carbon is not a nuclear fuel but carbon is sometimes used as a moderator to slow neutrons - highly radioactive carbon in the form of graphite spewed from the chernobyl disaster.. So it has its place in a reactor, or out of it littering the countryside, but you need something else to actually power everything.

    What a pebble bed reactor does, which is what i assume you're talking about, is take a peice of nuclear fuel, and coat it with carbon, encase it in its own moderator... so there is fuel in there, but in a neat self contained package. You can use any fuel in there, including thorium... and unlike something like Chernobyls RBMK reactor, as the pebble bed becomes hotter and hotter, the reaction reduces. in chernobyl as the reactor became hotter and hotter due to disabled cooling systems the reaction became more and more intense. modern conventional reactor designs, of whatever type, and older western designs are designed differently so this is, err, significantly less likely to happen. but what you do get after a while are corrosion problems on your primary loop, and then you get leakage of nasties, which is bad.
  • citizencitizen171 Posts: 0Member
    Pagrin wrote: »
    The basic fuel is solid balls of compressed carbon. The practical upshot of which is in the event of a complete breakdown there is no radio active material so the whole reactor just stops.
    Sounds like a pebble bed reactor, but the carbon isn't the fuel, the fuel would need to be a radioactive substance, Uranium for instance, but it's encased in carbon as a neutron moderator. The design means that a meltdown would be self limiting.
    ---
    Edit: I see Coolhand got there first.
    ---
    For some reason I thought it was the Nautilus that was the first around the world submerged, I don't know why. The USS Triton is one of those designs that are in the transitional period between the old and the new. There's a brilliant example, that completely escapes me off hand, of an iron warship that despite being steam powered still had the tumblehome appearance of wooden ships of the line. As a side note the next generation DDG-1000 also has a tumblehome cross section...

    Ah, it was the French pre-dreadnought Jaureguiberry.
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    Nautilus was the first to cross under the Arctic ice, iirc.

    Tritons primary task originally was to keep up with a surface fleet, which a conventional sub cannot do. on the surface it will keep up with a carrier group and deploy a radar, essentially a picket ship which can submerge, hence the ship like shape which i suppose made it more seaworthy. Once there was no need at all for a sub to operate on the surface we see the rounded contemporary shape emerge... So i'm not sure if its simply the era and traditional thinking but more the role it was designed to fulfill that lead to its shape, same with old diesels, designed to spend much time as possible on or near to the surface so again they had a ship like shape. Basically i dont think in this case the subs looked like this because engineers didn't know better, its form following function.
  • citizencitizen171 Posts: 0Member
    So it wasn't so much as a transitional period in design, as a transitional period in role?
  • Road WarriorRoad Warrior206 Posts: 813Member
    All this talk of atomics is interesting but I want to see more Triton. :)
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    citizen wrote: »
    So it wasn't so much as a transitional period in design, as a transitional period in role?

    Essentially yes, its capability in its role was quickly surpassed by aircraft which could look much further over the horizon, and were significantly cheaper. Still, it's nice that the sub can keep up though, so it never diminished her great speed. I'm not sure other, even nuclear subs of that era could keep up with a carrier group at full steam, hence the twin reactors on Triton.
    All this talk of atomics is interesting but I want to see more Triton. :)

    here are a couple more pics;)
    87643.jpg87644.jpg
  • Road WarriorRoad Warrior206 Posts: 813Member
    Looking good......you will have her complete in no time.
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    I have already completed one version of it infact:) this one is the same with more detail, you can see the seam where it meets the old.
  • Dr-TimelordDr-Timelord0 Posts: 0Member
    Was she quite small for a nuclear sub ?
  • CoolhandCoolhand283 Mountain LairPosts: 1,294Member
    no she was the largest of her era, no doubt due to the speed requirements and twin reactors, a big boat even for today. I think the Oscar II is currently the worlds largest sub (the ill fated Kursk is an example of that class.) and that's only about 20 metres longer, though with a much bigger displacement.
  • Dr-TimelordDr-Timelord0 Posts: 0Member
    From reading her bio on wikipedia, it shows how quickly something can be outdated, a 10year life span is pretty short for a Nuclear Sub,
  • number_sixnumber_six0 Posts: 0Member
    I have a soft spot for the boats of the "silent service' though I was never
    tempted to join.... Prefer the surface, fresh air and soap. :lol:
    Seriously I was never in good enough health to join any of the services.
    Yet again Coolhand, looking good!:thumb:
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