The quietest subs are diesel-electric, which are still being made. Probably the quietest such subs are German. As one submarine-officer friend of mine said, they are simply a hole in the water and no noisier.

The Russians always had good subs. They never gave up their Cold War dreams, just the way they controlled the Russian people. Now its organized crime in charge instead of socialist dictators but its the same guys for the most part and their foreign policy never changed.

Our RINO friends helped Obama pass a nuclear arms control treaty that required the US to dismantle many of our nukes while giving Russia permission to INCREASE and modernize their nukes.

Treason in a suit.

My uncle and his son, my cousin, were on subs in WWII and in the 70's. Both told me subs are driven by electric motors. The current ones use nuclear power to run the generators that charge the battery's that run the electric motors and the older ones uses diesel fueled engines to run the generators. Which is quieter? I've heard diesel generators, they are not very quiet. What is it about nuclear generators that makes them louder?

Ghostsniper, you've been misinformed.

ghost - Without research to refresh my recollection, I believe diesel-electrics can only run the diesel engines on the surface, and the fuel supply is a bulky liquid. Submerged, diesel-electrics only have the electric motors running. Nuclear powered don't have to surface to charge/re-charge batteries, and the fuel supply lasts a lot longer, which I understand are their chief advantages over diesel-electrics. Also, I believe nuclear powered subs have steam engines driving the generators, the steam being produced by the nuclear fuel. In that sense, they are kind of a throwback.

I'm the son of a career U.S. Navy submariner, and am rather close to the subject.

Nuclear subs use their nuke pile to superheat desalinated seawater, flashing it into "live steam", which is then run through steam-turbines, then reduction gears to turn the propeller shaft.

The noise inherent in a nuke sub is in the various pumps to manage the water circuits, the turbine itself and the reduction gears.

A diesel-electric sub runs on it's diesels on the surface, with a significant portion of their output directed to generators, which recharge their huge banks of batteries. The diesels do NOT directly turn the shaft, but rather, those generators, and ONLY those generators. The shaft is turned by an electric motor.

When submerged, that electric motor is running off of the charge stored in those batteries.

State of the art diesel-electrics are now hybrids, with various peroxide (and other oxidants) allowing for submerged operation of the diesels, affording much greater submerged range and endurance. They're not so quiet in that mode, but it's there if they need it.

On battery alone though, they're actually quieter than the ambient background sounds of the ocean itself.

Modern ASW (anti-submarine warfare) technology is often attuned to that very phenomenon; finding that unnaturally quiet spot, moving slowly through the water.

Satellites can also track the wake of a submerged sub from space. Can't identify the sub, or pin it's location exactly, (the wake may take some tens of minutes to rise to the surface), but at least they can know what neighborhood it's recently visited.

It truly is a never ending game of cat and mouse. Sadly, our ASW asset base has been diminishing at a frightfully rapid pace. And THAT, friends, is the worry.

Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX

VIRUS ALERT! Don't click on the link to the "New Cruiser". It goes to a US-Russia site, and it's absolutely chok-fulla-malware.

Gerard, you might want to put a warning on that one, or just strip out the link?

It's bad juju.

Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX

Thanks, Jim. Fixed.

Something to think about, when you consider how drastically Obama is gutting our military.

On top of the huge spending reductions, Obama is trying to demoralize the military by denying them cost of living raises — while food stamp recipients are getting a 30% raise.

Obama is continuing his treachery. We are being sold out by a true Manchurian Candidate. Nothing else explains what he is doing.

Remember the Kursk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_explosion