Submarine video I found on Youtube

 "A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Cool video I just found!  This was filmed the last year that I was in the submarine service, on a much newer submarine.  It more or less captures the experience of a patrol. 

 At about the 4:30 mark, you can see a sailor step up onto cans of food stacked out in the passageway.  The cans are covered with cardboard to reduce noise and to help keep the cans clean.  This ship was really on an extended patrol.  They were not just goofing around off the coast for a weekly op, with a film crew riding along for a few days to make a PR film. 

The part at 28:00 where they are in the wet trainer dealing with flooding is spot-on.  The trainer is incredibly cold, incredibly loud, very confusing, and unpleasant.  They have leaks hidden all over the place that they turn on one after another.  It's best to start with the lowest leaks, and the largest leaks, so that you don't have to make emergency repairs under water.  You usually are chest-deep before you are able to control the "flooding" enough that the drain pump can keep up with it.  You never get all the holes patched.

You may have noticed in the video that nearly everyone has the same type of eyeglasses.  There is a reason for that.  On a submarine, *everyone* has to be able to get a good seal on a rubber breathing mask, in event of a fire.  Those glasses are designed to fit inside the face mask of the breathing devices, and the ear pieces are flexible wire that the rubber face piece seal mostly seals up.

Back when this video was made, our peer-level hunter-killer boats were Soviet Victor III class boats, and other boats of interest were their ballistic missile subs, the Delta II and Delta III.

Below:  A Soviet-era Victor III attack submarine.  The pod on the rudder contains a deployable towed sonar array.

Below:  A Soviet-era Delta II Ballistic Missile submarine.  It carried 16 missiles, each with a payload of three 500 kiloton thermonuclear warheads.  So if deployed near the US west coast, this vessel could flatten all the major western cities and bases in a few minute's missile flight time.

Below:  A Soviet-era Delta III class submarine.  This carried 16 missiles as well, configured with seven warheads of 100 kiloton yield, so it could punch 116 targets.  Yields from both superpowers tended to decrease over the course of the cold war, as targeting improved.