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- Thread starter Jeff Head
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Well, conventional submarines are at their best when they move very slowly.
Sure, double hull has it's own benefit too, which is probably why many designs are more blended like Soryu and Dreadnought. The strengthening rings are still on the inside of the pressure hull, but the submarine is double hull on all or part of the submarine. Whatever the replacement for Yuan is, it needs to have wider pressurized hull.
The Soryu didn't change to Lithium Ion. They made a new class based on the Soryu called the Taige class that uses Lithium Ion.
If the LiFePo was available since 2014, this means the "039B" may themselves already incorporate such, and refits to earlier submarines might also be in order.
Since then renamed as the Taige class.
The Yuans had a build spurt until 2017, and since then only two more hulls were added, prior to the advent of the '039C'. Yet the yards are full with older Yuans that had the older sail type, suggesting the ships went back for maintenance, repair and refit. Since then images of the older sail type Yuans have virtually disappeared, which suggest to me that these Yuans have been refitted with the curvier sails. This could have been an opportunity to refit the subs with LiFePo.
This could be one of the designs shown in the images below, which were taken at a naval expo in Malaysia in 2019. These same models had been shown , and they are confirmed to feature single hull.
It kind of looks like the smallest one. Was there an export order for these to an undisclosed customer in the Middle East (not Iran but one of the richer small Arab states).
The biggest one of the trio, probably the most usable one for the PLAN and the one that interests me the most, is still smaller than the Yuan there. But it likely points to where the next PLAN SSK design would be, except that I suppose the sail will be like the 039C/A26 style intended to reduce radar reflection, instead of the 039B style sail above, and along with more angled surfaces on the shoulder sections for lower radar reflection.
At around 60 meters, the biggest of the three would compare to the length of the Walrus class (67 meters), the Type 214 (65 meters) and is longer than the Type 212 (56 meters). The beam is 5.8 meters with a depth of 6.8 meters, vs. Walrus (8.4, 6.6), vs. Type 214 (6.3, 6), and Type 212 (6.8, 6.4).