Why don't they make the coning tower an escape capsule?

Because by the time you realize something catastrophic is happening, you're already dead.
And with the size of a submarine, and how much effort it is to move down narrow corridors one at a time- are you going to wait for 30 minutes for the crew to make their way to a single escape pod?

This is definitely true. The likelihood of a submarine disaster bad enough to prevent a successful emergency blow while not simultaneously blocking most crew from accessing an escape pod is relatively low.

Because it's already full of shit. It's not like it's just a big empty space, that's where the radar masts and periscopes and antennas and shit are.

genius

Not really. They've had them for most of the history of the Soviet submarine fleet, and they've not been particularly effective, mainly due to the reasons already listed in the thread.

STALKER but underwater
>muffled "blyat" can just barely made out through the green fog of the sea as the light fades around you

They should make a game like that where you're trapped under the sea, traveling in a decades old suit through the blackness from one rusty sea lab to the next, avoiding the trench men

There's at least one similar horror game that's sorta like that but set in a near-future methane-mining facility on the seafloor, called Narcosis. There's also Bioshock of course. They made a first person story game out of the Kursk disaster recently, too. It looks like they pretty accurately modeled the interior to a painstaking level of detail.

>escape pods
youtube.com/watch?v=EfkNvOOiZ_8

Escaping from a sinking submarine is as much an issue of pressure as air. When a sub sinks it's internal bulkheads are crushed by the pressure. Often, this process takes only a few minutes before there's nowhere left on the ship to run.

That's not enough time to evacuate the crew to an escape pod and there's a good chance the Conning Tower would be caught in the collapse.

Depends on the depth. A situation like the Kursk would've been the ideal use case for an escape pod, but in was inaccessible/destroyed almost immediately once the forward area of the sub blew up. A case like the Thresher is the only other time I could imagine something like that being useful, where the valves on the air bottles were frozen shut and the thing began to sink uncontrollably.

On top of all the other reasons mentioned, the sail isn't a pressure vessel. It's part of the outer hull that isn't accessible while underwater.

Making it more complex than would require making the submarine significantly larger- think Typhoon sized.

Attached: 1920px-Typhoon_class_Schema.svg.png (1920x1057, 524K)

Well, most Russian subs are already double-hulled, so an extra escape pod attached to the interior of the sail isn't a huge leap in manufacturing complexity.

what an absolute unit
>ribs on the outside
interesting

Russian subs generally follow the 2-hull principle of design, with an interior pressure vessel surrounded by an exterior, streamlined skin. US subs are all single hulls, with the pressure vessel being the exterior layer.

Because when you really need it you'll probably be dead or you won't be able to reach it.

wrong.jpg

Why does everything made in Russia look so miserable in a strangely cool way?

Kudos, you just described the Tu-95

look up the USS Tang

Lol, thank you

>too much pressure to release an escape pod of any sorts
>not enough time to reach the escape pod
>not enough room on a jammed packed submarine to fit any meaningful escape pod
>too much pressure would probably crush an escape pod considering the pressure and depth you're probably at

1- it's not the pressure, it's the bouyancy of the pod that's the issue. Deeper you go, the more dense you become so you have to compensate. Usually done with internal compensating tanks.
Main blows/main ballast is usually ineffective below a certain depth owing to Hull compression and increase in density.
2. Depends, it you're stranded on the continental shelf then you could have days on the bottom.
3. The Russian designs allow room for up to 80 personnel in a 3 tier system within the pod. Most US and UK boats have many more personnel owing to less automaton.
4. If the pod is crushed before the Hull, what use would it be? The pod would be designed to be the strongest part of the entire boat and would more than likely have it's own crush depth 1.5x the main hull's crush depth.

I mean, it's true. I think the Borei and the Yasen class have a single-layer hull, but most Soviet subs were built with a pressure vessel surrounded by an outer hull.

no I was just saying ribs on the outside is an interesting design decision based on my limited knowledge of this type of pressure vessel
>US subs are all single hulls
partially single-hulled, and by the end of the cold war all were double-hulled iirc

There's a pretty significant amount of free-flood zones "inside" US subs. The entire nose cone is basically open to the ocean depths.

Try subnautica, its pretty gud