[TheStranger]

Great to see such a well maintained piece of history !! The pics are excellent and catches the details very well.

Foxbat, many thanks for the link on the Indian Sub.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

The Dutch navy was one of the navies that from pretty early on invested in a submarine service. It was the Dutch who introduced the three cylinder submarine as opposed to the common, to date, one cylinder submarine.

It’s the old “Tonijn" (Tuna)

Thank you Jeroen.

The Dutch were and still are leaders in submarine innovation and design. The 3 cylinder (ie pressure) hull was introduced in the 1950s so that each pressure hull could be made smaller and stronger and hence give the submarine a greater diving depth. The three were arranged forward, aft and topside with a streamlined (non-pressure) hull covering the three pressure hulls. The forward hull contained the forward torpedoes, sonar & reserve torpedoes. The aft one contained the engines & aft torpedoes. The top one contained the control room (or bridge). Today this is not needed as steel alloys and welding methods allow a single large pressure hull to be made strong enough for the desired depth. For a submarine depth and silence are its cloak of invisibility. Submarines are the original stealth service.

In the 1970s the Dutch were the second after the Swedes to introduce the X tail fins that enabled a submarine to sit at the bottom of a shallow sea and thus wait for its quarry in total silence. The X shape shown in the photo below has only now been adopted by other navies. It requires a very complex computer managed control as opposed to the more usual vertical & horizontal cross shape for the tail controls.

Originally Posted by alpha1

Though, you know, it misses one very key thing: what about the toilet?
I always get extremely paranoid about cramped places like a sub, more so because of the even more cramped toilets!!!

Well well. Good question. Yes they do have toilets which also contain valves and pumps to pull the 'job' out and down even when dived deep. You have to operate the valves in the right sequence to get the 'stuff' out. These days you have waste tanks like in an airliner. But in the earlier days if you didn't follow the sequence correctly the 'stuff' would burst out upwards and leave a bit of a splatter.

X arrangement of aft tail controls of a Dutch Walrus class submarine. Note how each tail surface has two parts (see one at bottom left) - one fixed part for stability and an outer moving part for maneuvering. Note the streamlined teardrop shaped hull which enables modern submarines to cruise at a fraction of the power for a given speed as compared to earlier cigar shaped hulls (of the Tonijn for example). In this photo the submarine has been lifted out of the water with the aid of ballast barges for hull maintenance.