There's nothing inherently wrong with being double-hulled. Just a different design philisophy and the Russians swear by it. Double hull makes anti-active sonar facetting easier as well.
New sailless SSN (provisional)
- Thread starter ACuriousPLAFan
- Start date
Double hull comes with some ugly acoustic issues like resonance between the hulls at speed. Russian swear by it due to needing large reserve buoyancy (and some rumored technical issues with single hull construction) and hence took some trade offs.
Anti-active sonar faceting is a pretty nebulous advantage given we have not seen any demonstrations of it and this sub does not appear to have any visible faceting. Active sonar is also of questionable use in actual combat right now, there's a reason USN has transitioned to a fully passive bow sonar and only keeping a small sail mounted active sonar.
Subs have their center of buoyancy above their center of gravity. Sail is a factor of instability. In side slip conditions -for example while sub is turning- it can generate enough lift force to roll the submarine. For this reason a truly maneuvrable sub would have to get rid of the sail. The Soviet Lira class (Alfa as it is named in the West) was very maneuverable and had a very streamlined sail too. Its sail was also towards the middle of the sub.
If the beam really is 12 meters, it is highly likely that this sub is of considerably higher displacement than the 09V and is essentially an elongated form of it. What the elongation would be for? We can only speculate at this point. The highest possibility would be an extended VLS farm.
Though if the submarine is double hulled, effective volume by still be considerably smaller than 09V which would limit the amount of VLS you could fit. Also, the flat portion of the hull on the back doesn't seem to be wide enough for rows with two large tubes like on the 09V and it doesn't seem to be long enough to fit more tubes than the 09V in a single file.