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Comment by whistlesnort | Hacker News Reader

As a young pup back in the 80s I worked at a research lab that was obsessed with the Typhoon submarine. My first assignment was to test torpedos that could hit the same spot on a submarine. Why? Because the double-hulls of the Typhoon were made of titanium. A Mark 46 could hit it and I doubt the crew would even notice (exaggeration, of course, but you get my point).

My second assignment was to write programs that processed data from a towed sonar array. We were looking for ways to find Typhoon submarines hiding in underwater canyons.

It is funny to me now to see a Typhoon mothballed with tourists crawling all over it. We were honestly scared of this thing.

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Our strategy was to engage from the rear and use MK48 to pop the shaft seals. In retrospect, the time to penetrate the bastions meant that the show was over by the time we could engage. The MK50 was meant to defeat the Soviet hulls, again, by the time surface/helo assets were in the bastions the world had ended days ago.

Typhoons are not made of titanium.

Mark 46 has 50kg of explosives. Not as much as heavy torpedo, but still no submarine in the world will likely be able to continue a mission with damage from it, invariably of whether it had double hull or not. Though, a typhoon would've more likely it simply outran, and outdived it.

The inner hull supposedly is made of titanium, the outer of steel.

"The Soviet Navy would have to “treat and/or derust each Typhoon’s massive steel outer hull and Titanium inner hulls. Russia may have lost the highly expensive industrial capability to work Titanium for submarines.”" - https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-russia-packing-it...

Eh... the Soviets weren't giving us tours back in the 80s. Alls we had to go on was the field data and the intelligence. Of course, I was the assistant to the coffee maker in those days. Nobody shared poop with me because my clearance wasn't high enough. When I asked the engineers why they were working on software for a dual strike they said the Typhoon was tough to kill.

The lab was always working on ways to counter a threat. I was just a junior engineer on one team. The Navy has a lot of money.

Yeah, and I’m actually saying you were right, they were made of titanium. I imagine that maybe we knew that a lot of titanium was going into making it, but maybe not specifically which parts.

Whilst the Akula-class attack subs (not to be confused with NATO-name Akula, the Typhoon SSBN - what this article is about) explicitly moved back to using steel after the Sierra-class used titanium due to cost, I used to work at BAE Systems on Submarine systems / weapons ~17 years ago, and I'd also heard rumours there that the inner hull was Titanium.

Whilst it's not likely that the mission could continue with damage from a Mark 46 (44 KG explosive, btw), it's very likely that the titanium would at least give the submarine a much greater chance of survival than otherwise, as evidenced by the USS Baton Rouge collision in February 1992 with a Sierra-class sub, which suffered much less damage than the American one.

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