The RIDICULOUS Steam Submarine: The K-Class Failure

Submarines are strange because, unlike other naval vessels, they are actually designed to sink and then rise again. As it happens, occasionally that second part of the equation is a little difficult to achieve. In the pantheon of naval designs, there have been some magnificent seaworthy warships, but a brilliant design does not come from nowhere. Designers often learn from their mistakes and misjudgments along the way. We've already briefly looked at some poor warship designs on this channel, but some designs are just as poor. Executed, they deserve their own spotlight. The British

submarine

Kass was intended to fill a gap in the Royal Navy's Fleet quickly enough to keep up with the massive battleships in the Fleet's engagements.

The result was a strange design that, despite being one of the largest

submarine

s built for the era, was also one of the tightest and most critically dangerous for its crew amid trials and disasters, lost ships and escapes by the hairs, the concept was eventually scrapped, but not before dozens of Royal Navy crewmen had lost their lives, ladies and gentlemen, I'm your friend. Mike Brady of Ocean liner designs this is the story of the strange and exceptionally dangerous British

steam

-powered submarine, the Dreadful K class ship. Our story begins just before the outbreak of the first world war in the early 1910s, when in the british admiralty some interesting things were happening look back then there was a massive technological surge with new designs and technologies being introduced all the time it was difficult for conventional regulation and guidance to keep up for centuries the most advanced warships in the sea had been propelled by sails and supported by line oaks of battleships such as HMS.

Victory, but the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of iron and then steel, ships powered by

steam

engines changed everything, then came torpedo boats as steam engine technology improved, expansion engines more Slow and clumsy were largely supplanted by immensely powerful steam turbines that could propel ships to unthinkable speeds. In just a few decades British warships had changed from cumbersome half-sailboats to full-fledged steel battleships such as HMS Dreadnut. , with monstrous cannons and capable of reaching maximum speeds. Now that wasn't all, the submarine had been a product of Science Fiction not long before, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was a fully realized military technological battery and then diesel engine technology got better and better, which It meant that submarines could advance on the surface with their diesel engines advancing as they went. underneath they could use their electric motors which were quieter and, crucially, would not create any dangerous fumes.

Now, in this era of technological Leap Frog, the stage was set for a showdown of epic, international proportions because, of course, Britain wasn't just the only one. nation that is doing it America France Italy and especially Germany began to pump funds into their navies also in the battle for international glory and for Britain Germany was the biggest concern the closest thing in more recent years would probably be the US space race. The US and the USSR had a long-lasting race and bitter rivalry like that, Britain's military planners began to anticipate a confrontation with Germany, one or more massive battles at sea, the only problem was that this new style of warships had never been tested before in battle, there was a completely different game, so the hypothetical Supreme reigned. and this is the kind of fluid, fast-paced environment that encouraged some of the most creative in the British Admiralty to propose designs that at least on paper looked interesting, and in 1913 a new class of submarine was envisioned whose purpose and function was completely original. , but it would prove disastrous because submarines were such a new piece of technology that no one really knew what they might ultimately be used for when war broke out.

They had some serious drawbacks that limited, at least in the eyes of the planner, their usefulness and, truth be told, before the First World War they were seen more as a curiosity, even toy surface warships had ruled the waves for centuries and the defenders of submarine warfare who were true visionaries of their time were mocked by colleagues and senior officers who saw them. Like brainiacs playing with their toy ships for a surface, warships like battleships were actually very fast, much faster than submarines. Submarines used their diesel engines, but in the pre-war world the diesel engine itself was in its infancy, the first diesel engines were quite underpowered, the reason diesels had to be used in the first place.

First of all, since diesels burn their own fuel, which is injected directly into the engine and they do not need huge boilers like Steam. This means that the inside of the submarine is already tight due to the necessary pressure. The carrier shape of the hole is not occupied by a huge steam power plant, especially those boilers that would not really fit. Secondly, coal and steam are dirty and in confined spaces like a submarine, extremely dangerous on large ships of the time like the Titanic. Fans were placed along the upper decks to get as much fresh air as possible below, without it the boiler rooms would become uninhabitable and the stokers and engineers would suffocate in 70° air and drown in cold dust.

How would that arrangement work on a submarine that is a confined space where no ventilation holes can really exist without seriously impeding the submarine's ability to submerge. By the way, what we in the industry call omen, in short, is that submarines were slow on the surface and could reach about 15 knots. at most now that's not so slow given that at the time most large merchant ships were moving at about 12 knots, that meant that well-positioned submarines could attack enemy ships by isolating them on the surface before diving to attack below the surface. The submarines' electric motors pushed the subs at speeds that were much slower, about 9 knots, not fast enough to overtake any real enemy ships unless they were already stalled in the water, for many navy planners. , which only reinforced the idea in their minds that the submarine was little more than a toy that would be useless against the Kaiser's battleships and battlecruisers which, by the way, could sail at least 10 knots faster than a British submarine on the surface and that was it, but then some alarming news came from Europe.

In 1913 someone somewhere had leaked information saying that Germany was preparing a new class of submarines that would overcome all these problems, that the new German boats would be able to keep up with the PACE and sail at more than 20 knots, they would be able to maintain the pace with battleships and destroyers now, this changed the game because it meant that the new German submarines, if introduced, could sail alongside larger fleets of battleships and cruisers keeping pace until the enemy fleet was detected and then they could dive and hunt freely from beneath the surface in the Vanguard. of action and the sinking of Capital warships left and right cutting off the Retreat and the roots of Escape was a terrifying thought, it is a shame for the British admiralty that these reports were now incorrect, even if the German ships in Didn't really exist, it really seemed like a possibility.

At the time German submarines were well developed because, unlike the British Admiralty, German naval planners took them a little more seriously and the diesel engine had been refined by German manufacturers to a standard. higher than Britain's, the response was rapid and frantic, even Britain needed its own. fast submarines, the challenge had been raised and a design specification was put forward at the time, the most advanced British submarine was the E class boat, it was approximately 180 ft or 55 m long and around 660 gross t displacement in the surface, cylindrical pressure The hole fit 30 crew members in cramped but relatively cozy conditions.

They were powered by two 800-horsepower Vicor diesel engines on the water and those boats could submerge and then switch to a pair of electric motors that produced between 600 and 840 horsepower. The ebots had a top speed of 15 knots on the surface and around 9 or 10 knots below. Now obviously this kind of speed simply wouldn't compete with those fast German ships. It had been reported that speeds above 24 knots would be necessary to increase speed. Squeezed out of these submarines, if Britain ever wanted to keep up, the ships would have to be large to begin with, larger ships would move faster through the water, but they would have to be large to provide a stable platform for the submarines. immense engines that would be needed.

To reach those

ridiculous

speeds, it would need at least twice the length of the E-Class and more than twice the displacement, about 1,500 tons, but the details started to get murky because obviously the speed would have to come from the engines, but what engines? Diesels were thought to be too primitive to achieve the required power, but steam engines provided a new set of issues that were already evident to many in the admiralty; In fact, the future First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Jackie Fiser, apparently famously remarked that the most fatal mistake imaginable would be to put steam engines in submarines, but then development of the design was halted because the opportunity arose to test the idea. .

A different proposal had been made for a submarine capable of international and long-range service capable of reaching speeds of around 20 knots on the surface, so for this design two prototypes would be built to test the two different options: the HMS Nautilus with the most powerful diesel engines in a confrontation against HMS Swordfish and her steam turbine engines. The future of the proposed high-speed submarines would depend on this test and The only reason steam turbines had become a viable option at the time was because by 1913 they could burn fuel oil instead of coal, which greatly reduced the amount of dust and misery the crew would have to endure.

INF ferace England had basically had a monopoly on building submarines and their diesel engines for the Royal Navy. They would build the diesel-powered Nautilus, but in a stroke of healthy competition encouraged by the head of the submarine service, Commodore Roger Keys, the second HMS steam turbine-powered design. The swordfish would be built in Scotland, both would have to be quite large, over 200 feet, around 1 to 1400 tons. Now that work had begun in 1912 and proponents of the Fleet's fast submarine design would be watching closely as there were doubts that diesel engines could do the job and we already know there were reservations about the use of steam engines, In the end the test was never carried out as planned because the war abruptly interrupted the process in 1914 while Nautilus was sitting in Warf fitting out and Swordfish was still under construction on the slipway, what happened next surprised many of the detractors of the Admiralty submarines.

Suddenly, new German ships began to do devastating work on the British ships. The submarine SM9 dealt a major blow in September 1914 when she caught three old British cruisers sailing unprotected while on patrol, sank one after another and killed around 1,500 men. The SM35 alone would synchronize 220 Allied merchant ships during the war for a total tonnage of more than half a million tons and now, suddenly, the submarine didn't seem like much. It was no longer a toy and the Admiralty took its own submarines very seriously. In fact, the German OTS were quite fast on the surface with their powerful advanced diesel engines capable of reaching close to 17 knots.

They were also larger than their British rivals and an improved, faster design was needed. Old pre-war plans for fast submarine designs were quickly dusted off and, unable to adequately pit HMS Nautilus and HMS Swordfish against each other as they were still under construction, Vickas provided a design for a ship they expected to achieve those desired fast speeds Vickers simply designed a submarine larger than thethat they used before and installed their largest possible diesel engines, huge 12-cylinder units capable of generating 1,200 horsepower each, now the new class of submarine would have no less than three of these each driving. its own propeller, the resulting ship was called the jclass submarine and although it was a good ship it did not meet the speed requirement, they were still impressively fast on the surface but they maxed out at about 19 knots faster than the German submarines but nowhere near as fast as the other battleships or surface units for the British, it should have been the sign that the technology was not there yet, but instead the admiralty began to look at other options and push their fast battleships with the swift steam. powered turbines and if they could be fitted to a submarine eyes pointed towards HMS Swordfish which in April 1916 had been renamed HMS S1 the ship had a pair of geared steam turbines fed with steam from oil burning boilers the submarine was large but The enormous weight of the machinery made it slow to turn and dangerously unstable.

She could only reach 18 knots on the surface, but still, what if the turbines were even more powerful? What if the boat was bigger? She surely she would work well. The admiralty must have thought in their wartime desperation that it was a worthy effort, the k class submarine was born, a class that would soon be known as the Calamity class and, for good reason, the main problem with the K class ships was the choice of propulsion. Steam turbines are very large and very heavy, they need boilers to accompany them. which are also very large and very heavy, the vapors from burning oil must be properly vented through funnels, the boilers themselves raised temperatures in the surrounding area to alarming degrees.

Now all of these presented design challenges that the admiralty had to overcome. They started out making the K class a monster of a submarine, the old E class boats were about 180 feet or 55 m long but the Kass boats would be a whopping 339 feet or 3 m long now, looking at the plans it's clear why an enormous amount of the submarine's interior would need to be occupied by the massive propulsion, boilers, turbines and auxiliary machinery; In fact, about half of the submarine's enormous length is taken up by machinery alone, giving K-class crews the unique advantage. and unfortunate distinction of serving on both the largest and narrowest ships in the fleet, the idea was now for the K class to use their turbines to cruise at 25 knots on the surface, but then dive below and switch to their engines electric when As was usual to charge the batteries and provide a backup power plant, a diesel generator was installed just in case, which took up even more space and added more weight.

Now driving at 25 knots sounds great, but in the event of a forced submergence, the crew of a steam-powered submarine is presented with a unique situation to vent all the gases and fumes from the boilers. It was necessary to install funnels, which meant, in short, also the holes. Too many holes. Submarines depend on their watertight design and the elimination of natural weaknesses. points in its holes to resist the crushing pressures of depth adding more holes in the hull of a submarine is almost the worst thing designers could do, it simply added more possible points of

failure

, the cruiser would need to be impeccably well drilled and trained to close all the ventilation hatches and channels into the water to really submerge the boat.

Now in practice this turned out to be quite an elaborate procedure and added just more steps for submarine crews to track under pressure. This too, by the way, is a good omen that the first K class ships were completed in May 196 and the good news was that the always reliable and powerful steam turbines could do their thing and the ships could move forward at about 24 knots on the surface, unfortunately that's where the good news ended for these white elephants of the sea. The enormous length and volume of the boat made them extremely difficult to control since the swordfish had been in testing, but the controllability problems were almost nothing compared to the problems with the diving process.

The idea was like this. This, if run on the surface at high speed with steam power, then the boiler furnaces would first have to be shut down and safely extinguished because if they remained burning below the surface it could prove lethal to the crew thanks to the buildup. of gases and smoke. lower the smoke stacks into the shafts in the deck and secure them in place while the holes left behind to vent the smoke would be closed with hatchers, the other holes being necessary to feed the boilers with air from above and sea water From below it was called all the main injectors would have to be closed and secured as well, only then could the submarine attempt to submerge, but here too there was a problem: the full hull meant that the K-class submarine could have a maximum safe diving depth of about 200 feet or 61 M.

Now this was similar to the older E class ships, but the K ships were over 200 feet long and it meant that the already difficult to control submarines could dive poorly trimmed with one end of the ship still on the surface in sight and the other end is approaching the maximum safe depth The crews were said to be joking sarcastically I say number one my purpose is to dive what is your purpose speaking of the crew it seems almost as if Had it been an afterthought when it came to designing the Kass ship how exactly 60 men were to live comfortably in cramped conditions with boilers running at hundreds of degrees behind them is unknown, of course the conditions were hellish, with almost unbearable temperatures and the humidity was absolutely off the charts, the enormous exterior size of the KBS was offset by the fact that around half her length was filled with machinery, the men sweated and suffered below as their boats lumbered forward and stumbled in the waves.

The tests began and the results, apart from the speed, were worrying. First, the elaborate dipping process was difficult to do quickly. To this day there is discussion about the fastest kbo dive speed with times ranging from 5 to approximately 30 minutes. Now, the original design specification called for a dive time of less than 5 minutes. In practice, a safe dive took between 20 and 25 minutes to complete, but a forced dive could be affected by ignoring or at least rushing certain safety protocols in about 4 minutes or so, but in a submarine full of hatches. , vents and hot boilers burning, is something the crew probably wouldn't want to test on the surface.

The submarines were capable of reaching their design speed but it was almost impossible to turn effectively, they were said to have the speed of a destroyer and the turning circle of a battlecruiser, but that was not all, the ships had a freeboard low, there simply wasn't enough. They were kept above the waterline, considering their enormous weight and volume, they would send enormous amounts of water over their branches as they sailed at high speed, but luckily the crew was given a completely enclosed bridge on the deck to now compensate for all these problems and

failure

s of The logic was to catch up with the K-class ship and the submersible.

The first Destroyer idea was the K13. She was undergoing her sea trials in January 1917, which culminated in a series of dives. The boilers were lowered, the vents closed and the funnels folded. She went down but did not go up. A ventilation hatch had not closed or latched and at depth the water roared in the turbine engine room. With 80 men on board, including her crew and members of the shipyard that had built it, the submarine sank and despite burst ballast tanks sank to the bottom. Messages were sent from above from below in cap shs and surprisingly the captain of K1 13 was able to escape.

He reached the surface and began coordinating a rescue mission, but inside the submarine the engineers had calculated that there had only been about 8 hours of air left and the saga of raising the boat Skipper had chewed up about seven an airline was connected from the ships. rescue pump above, but couldn't pump anything from below. The survivors tapped Morse code on the side of the shaft. in, give us air, give us air again and again and finally the blockage in the line was identified, it was successfully passed down and the secondary branches were refloated to the surface enough that holes could be made and the men could get out .

A little more than 30 had mostly died. trapped and drowned in the huge engine rooms AF reports showed that the main ventilation hatch in the engine room had not been closed and, in fact, gauges in the command room had shown it to be open, but when a fact is in the human element, it is clear that such a complicated immersion process since the kots had introduced many different points of failure the admiralty had other ideas the first six KBS were put in their own flotilla and were assigned the strange task of hunting to the smaller, more agile german uots now the kbo's problems are legendary and their tainted careers border on the monstrous, unfortunate and unfair.

K5 was conducting tests when she made a routine dive, but was never heard from again. K3 dived out of control well below the safe diving depth of 200 t, peaking at 266 feet, somehow avoiding catastrophic crushing failure, the ship managed to surface and actually survived the hmsk. The K12 carried out its sea trials in the same lock as the K13. She encountered a similar problem and ended up stranded on the bottom, but luckily her crew was rescued and then the same thing happened to K16 Moral. and the submarine flotilla collapsed during World War I, as if conditions weren't bad enough already.

Word had spread that a new bulbous bow was to be fitted to the remaining K-class ships, signaling to the crews that the admiralty considered them incapable of conducting a proper search. Maintaining the problems of containing hot steam and boilers within the hull of a submarine was tragically demonstrated when K26 steam lines failed and scolded two stokers to death with superheated steam. The men who volunteered for submarine service and were assigned to the K-class boats began to refer to themselves as the Suicide Club, the ungainly Kass boats earning them a reputation for terrible and terrible handling while the crews of other ships watched them grope and, by the end of 1917, the flotilla was finally sailing alongside the big ships of the Fleet, as they had been designed to do when the cruiser HMS blond set a new course, caused chaos, the KBS also altered its courses, but its terrible maneuverability in confined spaces caused the Defender Bender and the K4 to crash directly into the K1 in January 1918, although the kbo suffered the most infamous incident that the entire great fleet was to suffer.

To carry out exercises off the Ory Islands, the KBS had divided into two flotillas, the 12th and, ominously, the 13th, and each departed led by a lead ship, for the 12th, the cruiser HMS Fearless and for the day 13, the Destroyer HMS Ethereal, passing the May corridor. at the mouth of the F, things began to go terribly wrong, the lights were detected by the 13th flotilla and the ships changed course to avoid them. There were probably fishing trollers or other small merchant vessels, but in typical kbo fashion, K1 14's rudder got stuck and drifted. At night and offline K22 behind her had lost sight of her companion Fua when, to her horror, they saw the submarine Dead Ahead through their branches now K22 cut straight into K14 and stood their ground in the massive battle.

The fleet cruisers passed quickly. and one gave K22 a good hit as it passed causing serious damage and more flooding now the submarines were floating motionless in the water unable to move and not sink thanks to their watertight doors the 13th latilla received the news of the collision and turned towards helping his comrades HMS Ethereal and the other fully illuminated Kats avoid a collision, turning and running back through the main fleet as they return to K22 and K14, but suddenly, out of the Mist appeared the 12th flotilla with HMS Fearless in the lead and the result.

It was catastrophic, Fearless smashed through K17 cutting it almost in half leaving it sinking while K6 crashed into K4, the two were trapped and started to sink now all the other ships twisted and turned trying to avoid each other. , creating a scene of absolute absoluteConfusion, dozens and dozens of men were left in the water and then the unthinkable happened: the fifth battle squadron, three dreadnots and their escort destroyers burst in at almost full speed, the men in the water were run over and killed by about twenty people of K4 did not survive. and 48 of the K17 also died in the end, around 105 men lost their lives, three KBS were badly damaged and two sank without ever encountering the enemy, but the tragedy came to be sardonically referred to as the Battle of the Isle of May, now it should.

They have been the end of the K class as a concept, but surprisingly they survived until long after the war ended in May 1918. The K15 received a huge sea through its funnels that shut down the boiler furnaces, leaving it powerless and with the engine room flooded. Her stern sank, but her bow was left buoyant enough to float above the waterline thanks to her quick crew, the ballast tank valves jammed and it took the ship eight agonizing hours to properly refloat. . Now this says nothing of the many many collisions and near misses throughout the ship's career, it seems that even despite the design problems and flaws, the ships were simply haunted by some sort of curse.

K7 had finally managed a clean shot at an enemy submarine on the surface, a series of torpedoes saw one hit. the German ship in the conning tower, but failed to detonate despite the many failures of the classes, it must be noted that the men who actually manned and operated them worked like lions to make the submarines work and deserved all the praise in the end , the concept of a fleet fast-acting submarine filling steam turbines was soundly and decisively refuted. Ironically, modern nuclear submarines today are equipped with reactors that are essentially a refinement of steam propulsion in some ways, but unlike those hungry boiler-powered Kass ships, they don't need large amounts of ventilation and wind action. extraction and certainly do not need funnels.

Between 1921 and 1926, the KBS was scrapped with a couple of incomplete holes that were used to create a new diesel-powered boat called the mclass in the 1920s. A fleet submarine capable of fast speeds was designed that could reach 22 knots thanks to advances in diesel engine propulsion. The story of the K-class submarine is like that of Icarus, the admiralty aspiring to new and exceptional technological heights, only to be reminded of the lethal consequences of overreaching. After all, it is still somehow difficult to look back at the planners and designers of too judiciously back then, considering that much of this technology was untested and in its infancy at the time, but even so Lord Jackie Fiser knew it back in 1913, when he said that the most fatal mistake imaginable would be to put steamer on a submarine and was tragically proven right.