Hello community, I just joined as I'm hoping someone here can help me with some info.
When I was a kid I was living in Singapore as my dad was RNZAF based at Sembawang. I was lucky enough get a walk-through of a RAN Submarine at base there and only have one photo of the experience. Photo is dated 28th Nov 1979. Question for the group, does anyone know which one this was?
I'm hoping the shield on the front gives it away? Looking it up, this was one of 6 Oberon class subs in RAN service at the time: Onslow, Orion, Otama, Otway, Ovens, or Oxley, so assuming it was one of them?
As DDG38 said that's not an Australian Oberon class heraldry. I just tried to search to see if there was any RN Oberon shield that make look like that and I can't find really anything like that one.
I would guess that it is probably Ovens. Oxley I think was in refit still during 1979.
The RAN site actually has a lot of history of the submarines, and during the 70's many were going through refits. If you go through carefully maybe they might have the exercise or deployment listed for one of the subs.
Royal Australian Navy
www.navy.gov.au
Ovens and Oxley I think were most commonly deployed to SEA/Singapore. My old man was on Onslow and complained he never went to Singapore as a submariner, he went to the UK, Hawaii, and for some reason to Mexico. It may not be a ships shield but a ship award.
thought the Hunters were meant to have more space for future growth and fit-out than the Hobarts? If the Hobarts are smaller (7000 t full load vs 8800 t full load) than Hunters, yet have more VLS, where does the extra space go in the Hunter design? Is there enough margin for future changes in Hunter, given that reportedly the spare hull margin in Hunter was also limited?
People seem to think the Hobarts and the Hunters will have wildly different dimensions. Hobart is 147.2 m in length and Hunter is 149.9.. Even parked next to each other you would be hard pressed to see the 2.7m difference. Hobart is slightly narrower and has a bit different hull form. But its not wildly different, about a 1-2 meters (18.6 vs 20.8) .
If you make the passages 250mm wider across the ship it can easily eat into that extra margin. Throw in things like a ladies toilet, modern firefighting and damage control, more room for power, networking, better aircon/mech services.
Which is why I think people shouldn't get overly excited about displacement and fixate on sizes. Select the capabilities you want, then build the ship around that. Artificial size limits are just odd. 5,000-7,000t might be a range on a military ship depending on load, commercial ships can vary 100,000t depending on load, same ship.
Australia should be building massive ships. Its not like we have small harbors, or we are running out of iron or that the iron is expensive for Australia.
Hobarts are more focused ships. They have two Gas turbines. They have more VLS, command and control spaces, etc. Putting a big flex space in the middle of the ship chews up space/weight etc. IMO that is precious space, not sure we need our surface combatants to move shipping containers around.
I find it interesting that the Canadians spec 210 sailors, despite their ship going with less weapons and more automated weapons (like CAMM and the OTO 5" which is basically completely automated for the first 52 rounds, but takes up more hull space)
