What ever happened to Cargo Submarines?

In the summer of 1958, President Eisenhower ordered the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, to undertake a very special top-secret mission: a voyage beneath the northern ice sheet called Operation Sunshine, to demonstrate that

submarines

really could go anywhere and be a credible nuclear threat. but such Transit opened a whole new and unexpected can of worms, so why don't we have many

cargo

submarines

joining me under the sea as we explore the n

ever

-coming era of foreign

cargo

submarines? Assets beneath the surface of the sea were not new. In fact, it was almost 45 years earlier, in World War I, when cargo submarine concepts floated and sank.

Germany at that time needed certain raw materials to win the war and the best place to obtain them would be the neutral United States, but there was only one problem: the annoying British blockade, so they would use two submarines with the torpedoes removed and the cargo in It was their place to go to the United States and simply buy the raw materials they needed to win the war effort, but there were two problems: the first was that the trip would have to be profitable. Germany would have to source supplies from Congo to go to the United States and sell there some things that were unlikely to interest the then neutral Americans and then of course in 1917 Germany sank a ship hiring many Americans and thus joined England . and France, meaning they were no longer open to trade with Germany, but in the next war the dynamic would change completely.

The US Navy was the first to strategically implement such an idea using submarines to transport ammunition and supplies to the island corridor in Melina Bay. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines in early 1942, they evacuated wounded nurses and gold as the area was conquered and then these submarines had to be stripped of torpedoes and ammunition to transport as much as possible due to the success of this strategic retreat. , President Franco D. Roosevelt ordered the Navy to develop cargo carrying submarines, they built three of the Barracuda class that were n

ever

used, they did not perform as well as expected and the boats were seen as superior, but in reality they would be the Axis powers that the cargo submarines would use, mostly to supply the vast Nazi submarine fleet, became special cargo submarines that could refuel these attack ships called Type 14.

They could carry 500 tons of fuel. and other materials and be able to supply up to 12 U-Boats. ships for four to eight weeks each, the plan worked successfully until it didn't, the Allies easily decoded the 12u ship group in one location and all the resupply submarines were destroyed, the Germans would have another chance to design the cargo type 20. submarine this U-Boat was to have a surface displacement of 2,700 tons and could carry 800 tons of cargo in orbit 50 tons outside the Prussian hull in special bags would not have torpedoes but would have anti-aircraft guns for self-defense during replenishment, as in World War I, their first job was to bring supplies from Germany's ally in the east, but it was a bad ending as the materials were sent to build more attack submarines.

The Japanese in the Pacific also use cargo submarines for their many Island Bases as a form of resupply under the Allied blockade and even used some to transport launchable aircraft and you will be pleased to know that I have made a full video on submarine carriers that you can watch right now here on the channel. During World War II, the power of submarines was absolute and terrifying. The Lend-Lease program that rescued Britain and Russia from the clutches of the Nazis depended on American-made weapons and goods transported by the merchant fleet—a fleet of ships, that is, that was constantly being harassed by German submarines. under the freezing Atlantic, so why not just turn the tables on the Nazis and transport the goods in submarines instead of ships?

And that's exactly

what

some Britons thought: it became clear that Britain's only advantage of being an island surrounded by C was also a major flaw. Goods had to be shipped or transported by seaplanes, which made them vulnerable to being surrounded and isolated from North America and Europe and the solution seemed to be cargo submarines after the war. The man who at the time was behind the push for cargo submarines was none other than Barnes Wallace, the inventor of the vicarious swallow and the very famous dam burst bomb that I just featured here on the channel. He advocated nuclear-powered cargo submarines as a means of manufacturing.

Britain is immune to future embargoes and becoming a global trading power, but like their aspirations for a strong Britain, their voice fell on deaf ears as the empire was slowly dismantled from within - but you know who isn't? abandoned this idea? Our favorite Union, the Soviet Union, in the 1990s, the St. Petersburg Malachite Design Bureau proposed submarines capable of transporting oil or cargo containers in or through the Arctic regions. It was envisioned that these ships would submerge beneath the polar ice cap to travel directly between Europe and ports in Asia and possibly northern Canada, where designers noted that, given the same cargo capacity, the efficiency of a submarine container ship is considerably larger, for example, than that of an icebreaker transport ship of the normal type, a container submarine is competitive, the tanker and container ship variants would follow the same design as standard military nuclear submarines, with the variant's tank carrying almost 30,000 tons of oil to be loaded and unloaded from surface or underwater terminals, the container ship was to transport 912 standard cargo containers loaded in 30 hours through hatches assisted by an internal transportation system, however, these plans came to nothing due to the difficult financial straits that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

As a side note, the US also followed up with underwater tankers. General Dynamics in the 1980s approached several shipbuilders in West Germany to build two types of submarines. General Dynamics said it designed two versions of the tanker submarines: a 725 million nuclear-powered ship and a 700 million version powered by a methane meteorite. At the time it said wow, it didn't have any orders but had received enthusiastic responses to the plan. since we don't have them, you can imagine why years later the Reuben design office proposed a similar design with the submarine cargo ship as a civilian redesign of the famous Typhoon class submarine of the Cold War.

In 1997 an underwater cargo transportation system was suggested. and is considered a maritime component of the global intelligent transportation system, of course we know that today Russia needs everything it can get militarily and a plan to modernize old submarines for co-corporations never came to fruition, so the big question That's why we don't have cargo submarines today? Why does the concept always fail now? I know many of you already wrote the answer in the first 30 seconds of watching this video and I bet some of you even clicked before watching this part, so If you notice

what

I'm saying now, then comment on Yellow Submarine below .

Here's the fact that submarines don't really make much commercial sense outside of military or illicit operations. The fact is that transporting goods on a large surface ship is ridiculously cheap. Ship technology, if you can call it that, is incredibly mature and has been around for tens of thousands of years and with the announcement of containerization it has only reached crazier levels of globalization. Submarines, on the other hand, are expensive to build and maintain. They are so efficient because they have to move more water per unit load than a ship, let me explain, in order to dive and surface, large portions of a submarine's space are dedicated to ballast tanks that are filled and emptied of water. that they filled to sink. and then expelled to rise like your lungs in a swimming pool, I mean, with air, not with water, do not ingest water and drown, please, and that space on board is full of water and not full of paid cargo, so that there is no freight company. would invest the upper doors in a cargo submarine that has much less space than a normal ship, in addition the technology is much more expensive and commercial operations of nuclear technology have until now been very limited outside of joint military operations, so Without the nuclear power generated by a military submarine makes sense, submarines would be less efficient than ships that carry less cargo and would be more expensive.

It's cheaper to load up a giant storm-insured surface chip and just take the troughs and ultimately all that sub-surface ice we throw up. At the beginning of the video, well, global warming is taking care of that so you don't need to worry unless of course you live next to the coast, but who's to say that a new Ice Age won't bring back this idea? watch this space thanks for watching