The RIDICULOUS Steam Submarine: The K-Class Failure

submarines are strange in that unlike other Naval vessels they're actually designed to sink and then rise again it just so happens that occasionally that second part of the equation is a little bit difficult to pull off in the pantheon of Naval designs there have been some magnificent seaworthy warships but brilliant design doesn't just come from nowhere often designers learn from their mistakes and their misjudgments from along long the way now we've already looked at some poor warship designs in brief on this channel before but some designs are so poorly executed they deserve their own Spotlight the British Kass submarine was intended to fill a gap in the Royal Navy's Fleet fast enough to keep up with the massive battleships in Fleet engagements it resulted in a bizarre design that despite being one of the largest submarines built for the age was also one of the most cramped and critically the most dangerous to its crew amid trials and disasters lost boats and narrow escapes the concept was finally scrapped but not before dozens of Royal Navy crewmen had lost their lives ladies and gentlemen I'm your friend Mike Brady from ocean liner designs this is the story of Britain's bizarre and exceptionally dangerous steampowered submarine the Dreadful K class [Music] boat Our Story begins just before the outbreak of the first world war in the early 1910s where in Britain's admiralty some interesting things were happening see back then there had been a massive technological surge with new designs and Technologies being introduced all the time it was difficult for regulation and conventional guidance to keep up for centuries the most advanced warships at Sea had been sail powerered and oakh holded line of battle ships like HMS Victory but the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of iron and then steel hold ships powered by steam engines changed everything then came torpedo boats as steam engine technology improved the slower clunkier expansion engines being largely supplanted by immensely powerful steam turbines which could drive ships up to previously unthought of speeds within just a short few decades Britain's warships had changed from Awkward half sailing ships to fully-fledged Steel held battleships like HMS dreadnut Fielding monstrous guns and capable of cracking top speeds now that wasn't all the submarine had been a figment of Science Fiction not long before but by the late 19th and early 20th century it was a fully realized bit of military Tech battery and then diesel engine technology improved more and more it meant that Subs could go along on the surface with their diesel engines thumping ahead while below they could use their electric motors which were quieter and crucially wouldn't create any kind of dangerous fumes now this age of technological Leap Frog the stage was set for a showdown of international and Epic Proportions because of course Britain wasn't just the only nation doing it America France Italy and especially Germany began to pump funds into their navies as well in the battle for international glory and for Britain Germany was the biggest concern the closest thing in more recent years would be probably the USA and ussr's Space Race a lasting and bitter rivalry like that Britain's military planners began to envisage a showdown with Germany one or more massive battles at Sea the only problem was these new style of Warships had never really been proved before in battle there was a whole different game so the hypothetical reigned Supreme and this is the kind of fluid fast-tracked environment that encouraged a few of the more creative ones among the British admiralty to propose designs that on paper at least sounded interesting and in 1913 thought was put towards a new class of Submarine whose purpose and function was entirely original but which would prove disastrous because submarines were such a new piece of technology nobody really knew what purpose they could ultimately serve in the outbreak of War they had some serious drawbacks which Limited at least in planner's eyes their usefulness and truth be told they were seen more before the first world war as a bit of a curiosity even a toy surface warships had ruled the waves for centuries and the advocates for submarine warfare who were real Visionaries of their time were scoffed at by colleagues and and higher ups who saw them as boffins playing with their toy boats for one surface warships like battleships were really really fast much faster than submarines Subs used their diesel engines but in the pre-war world the diesel engine itself was in its infancy early diesel engines were quite underpowered the reason that diesels actually had to be used in the first place were twofold first diesels burn their own fuel oil which is injected right into the engine and doesn't need massive boilers like Steam do this means the inside of the submarine already cramped because of the necessary pressure bearing form of the hole isn't taken up by a massive steam power plant especially those boilers they just wouldn't really fit secondly coal and steam are dirty and in confined spaces like a submarine extremely hazardous in Big Ships of the age like Titanic massive ventilators were placed all along the upper decks to get as much fresh air below as possible without it the boiler rooms would become uninhabitable and the stokers and Engineers would suffocate in 70° air and choke in cold dust how would that Arrangement work in a submarine which is a confined space where holes for ventilation cannot really exist without seriously hampering the sub's ability to dive this is by the way what we in the industry call foreshadowing the short of it is that submarines were slow on the surface able to achieve just about 15 knots at most now that isn't that sluggish given that at the time most big Merchant ships chugged along at about 12 knots it meant that well-positioned submarines could engage enemy shipping by cutting them off on the surface before diving to attack below the surface the submarines electric motors pushed the Subs along at speeds that were much slower about 9 knots not fast enough to catch up to any real enemy ship unless they were crippled in the water already now for many navy planners that only reinforced the idea in their minds that the submarine was little more than a toy that would be useless in engaging the Kaiser's battleships and battle Cruisers which by the way could steam at least 10 knots faster than a British sub on the surface and that was that but then there came some alarming news from Europe in 1913 someone somewhere had leaked intelligence that said Germany Was preparing a new class of submarines that would overcome all of these issues that the new German boats would be able to keep up to the PACE and steam over 20 knots they could maintain Pace with battleships and destroyers now this changed the game because it meant that the new German submarines if introduced could sail alongside larger fleets of battleships and cruisers keeping up the pace until the enemy fleet was spotted and then they could dive and Hunt freely from below the surface at the Vanguard of the action and sink Capital warships left and right cutting off Retreat and roots of Escape it was a terrifying thought it's just a shame for the British admiralty that these reports were incorrect now even if the German boats didn't actually exist it really seemed a possibility at the time Germany sub Marines were welld developed because unlike the British admiralty German Naval planners took them a little more seriously and the diesel engine had been refined by German manufacturers to a higher standard than Britain's the response was Swift frantic even Britain needed its own fast submarines the challenge had been issued and a design specification was put forward at the time the most advanced British submarine was the E-class boat it was about 180 ft or 55 M long and of around 660 gross t displacement on the surface the cylindrical pressure hole could fit 30 crewman in cramped but relatively cozy conditions they were powered by two 800 horsepower Vicor diesel engines above the water and those boats could dive and then switch over to a pair of electric motors which are outputting around 600 to 840 horsepower it meant the ebots had a top speed of 15 knots at the surface and about 9 or 10 knots below now obviously this kind of speed just wouldn't contend with those fast German boats speeds in excess of 24 knots had been reported way more speed would need to be squeezed out of these submarines if Britain was ever going to keep up the boats would need to be big larger vessels move faster through the water for one thing but they would need to be big to provide a stable platform for the immense engines that would be needed to actually hit those ridiculous speeds there would need to be at least double the length of the E-class and more than double the displacement at about 1,500 tons but there details began to get murky because obviously the speed would need to come from the engines but which engines diesels were thought to be too primitive to be able to hit the required power but steam engines provided a whole fresh selection of issues already evident to many in the admiralty in fact future first Lord of the admiralty sir Jackie fiser apparently famously remarked that the most fatal error imaginable would be to put Steam Engines in submarines but then the Design's development was actually halted because an opportunity to test the idea came up a different proposal had been made for a submarine capable of international and long ranging service capable of speeds around 20 knots on the surface so for this design two prototypes would be built to test the two different options HMS Nautilus with the more powerful diesels in a showdown against HMS swordfish and her turbine steam engines the proposed high-speed submarines future would depend on this test and the only reason steam turbines had become a viable option in the first place by that point was because they could by 1913 burn fuel oil instead of coal which vastly reduced the amount of dust and misery that the crew would need to endure vicker's ship building at Barrow INF ferace England had basically held the Monopoly on building submarines and their diesels for the Royal Navy they would build the diesel powered Nautilus but in a stroke of healthy competition encouraged by the head of Submarine service Commodore Roger Keys the second design powered by steam turbines HMS swordfish would be built in Scotland they would both need to be quite big well over 200 ft around 1, to, 1400 tons now work had got underway in 1912 and the proponents of the fast Fleet submarine design would be watching closely already there were doubts that the diesel engines could do the job and we already know that there were reservations about using steam engines in the end the test would never be conducted as intended because the war rudely interrupted proceedings in 1914 as Nautilus was sitting at the fitting out Warf and swordfish was still under construction on the slipway now what happened next shocked a lot of the admiralty submarine naysayers suddenly German new boats began to do devastating work on British ships the submarine sm9 pulled off a major coup in September 1914 when she caught three old British Cruisers as they were sailing unprotected on patrol she sank one after another and killed around 1500 men sm35 alone would go on to sync 220 Allied merchant ship ships during the war for a total tonnage of over a half million tons now suddenly the submarine didn't seem like much of a toy anymore and the admiralty took their own Subs very seriously indeed German OTS were quite quick on the surface with their powerful Advanced diesel engines able to achieve close to 17 knots they were bigger too than their British Rivals and improved design was needed and fast quickly the old pre-war plans for the fast submarine designs were dusted off and without being able to properly run HMS Nautilus and HMS swordfish up against one another since they were still under construction vickas provided a design for a boat they hoped would be able to hit those long-desired fast speeds Vickers simply designed a bigger submarine than they' used before and fitted their biggest diesels possible massive 12 cylinder units capable of outputting 1200 horsepower each now the new class of sub would get no fewer than three of these each driving its own propeller the resulting boat was called the jclass submarine and although it was a fine boat it fell short of the speed requirement they were still impressively fast on the surface but they maxed out at about 19 knots faster than the German submarines but nowhere near as fast as the other battleships or Surface units for the British it should have been the writing on the wall the sign that technology just wasn't there yet but instead the admiralty began to seek out other options and there powering their fast battleships with the fast steam powered turbines and what if they could be fitted to a submarine eyes turned towards HMS swordfish which in April 1916 had been renamed HMS S1 the boat had a pair of geared steam turbines fed with steam from oil burning boilers the submarine was big but the massive heavy machinery made her sluggish to turn and dangerously unstable she could only hit 18 knots on the surface but still what if the turbines were yet more powerful what if the boat were larger surely that would work well the admiralty must have thought in their wartime desperation that it was a worthy Endeavor the k-class submarine was born a class soon to be known as the Calamity class and for good reason the primary issue with the K class boats was the choice of propulsion steam turbines are very big and very heavy they need accompanying boilers which themselves are also very big and very heavy the fumes from burning the oil need to be adequately vented through funnels the boilers themselves raised temperatures in the surroundings to alarming degrees now these all presented design challenges that the admiralty had to overcome they started by making the K class into a monster of a submarine the old E-class boats had been about 180 ft or 55 M long but the Kass boats would be a whopping 339 ft or3 m in length now looking at the plans it's clear to see why an enormous amount of the submarine interior would need to be taken up by the massive propulsion the boilers the turbines and the auxiliary Machinery in fact about half the sub's massive length is taken up by the Machinery alone giving the k-class crews the unique and unfortunate distinction of serving in both the largest and the most cramped boats in the fleet now the idea was for the K class to use their turbines to steam along at 25 knots on the surface but then dive below and switch over to their electric motors as usual to charge the batteries and provide a backup power plant a diesel generator was fitted for good measure which took up yet more space and added more weight now driving along at 25 knots sounds well and good but in the event of a crash dive the crew of a steam powerered submarine are presented with a unique situation to vent all the gases and smoke out of the boilers funnels needed to be fitted which meant to put it simply so did holes too many holes submarines rely on their watertight design and the elimination of natural weak points in their holes in order to stand up to the crushing pressures depth adding more holes into a submarine's hull is just about the worst thing designers could do it just added more possible failure points the cruise would need to be impeccably well drilled and trained to close all the vent hatchers and trunking off to the water in order to actually dive the boat now in practice this proved to be a fairly elaborate procedure and added just more steps for the subs crws to keep track of under pressure this too by the way is a nice bit of foreshadowing the first k-class Boats were completed by May 196 and the good news was that the ever reliable and Powerful steam turbines could do their thing and the boats could zip along at about 24 knots on the surface unfortunately that's about where the good news ended for these white elephants of the sea the boat's massive length and bulk made them extremely difficult to control as swordfish had been in testing but the issues of controlability were almost nothing compared to the issues with the process of actually diving the idea went like this if running on the surface at speed under steam power then the boilers furnaces would first need to be safely doused and put out because if they stayed burning below the surface it could prove lethal to the crew thanks to the buildup of gases and fumes Hydraulics would lower the Smoke Stacks into Wells in the deck and secure them in place while the holes Left Behind for venting the smoke would be closed over with hatchers the other holes that were needed to feed the boilers with air from above and sea water from below called the main injectors would all need to be closed and secured as well only then could the submarine attempt to dive but here too was an issue the whole filled Hull meant the k-class sub could have a maximum safe dive depth of about 200 ft or 61 M now this was similar to the older E-class boats but the K Boats were more than 200 ft long and it meant that submarines which are already hard to control could dive improperly trimmed with one end of the ship still on the surface in plain view and the other end approaching maximum safety depth Crews were said to sardonically quip I say number one my end is diving what's your end up to speaking of the crew it seems almost as if there was something of an afterthought when it came to designing the Kass boat how exactly 60 men were supposed to live comfortably in close pack conditions with boilers running hundreds of degrees behind them is unknown of course conditions were hellish with temperatures nearly unbearable and humidity was absolutely off the charts the massive exterior size of the KBS was offset by the fact that around half their length was packed full of Machinery men sweated and suffered down below as their boats lumbered and stumbled over the waves testing got underway and the results aside from the speed were worrying first of all the elaborate dive process was difficult to pull off quickly the quickest kbo dive speed is argued about to this day with times ranging from 5 to about 30 minutes now the original design specification called for a dive time below 5 minutes in practice a safe dive took somewhere around 20 to 25 minutes to pull off but a crash dive could be affected by ignoring or at least rushing certain safety protocols in close to 4 minutes or so but in a sub full of hatches vents holes and burning hot boilers rushing it is something the crew would probably not want to be doing surface testing showed the subs capable of their design speed but nearly impossible to turn effectively it was said that they had the speed of a destroyer and the Turning circle of a battle cruiser now that wasn't all the boats had low freeboard there just wasn't enough of them above the waterline considering their enormous weight and bulk they would ship massive amounts of water over their boughs as they steamed at speed but fortunately the crew were given a fully enclosed bridge on the deck to make up for it now all these issues and failures of logic were to catch up with the k-class boat and the submersible Destroyer idea itself first was K13 she was on her sea trials in January 1917 which culminated in a series of Dives the boilers were dowed the vents were shut and the funnels folded flat and down she went but she did not come up a vent hatch had failed to close and lock and at depth water roared into the turbine engine room 80 men were on board including her crew and members of the shipyard that had built her the submarine sank and despite blown ballast tanks it went down to the bottom messages were sent Up From Below in cap shs and remarkably K1 13's Captain was able to escape he reached the surface and began to coordinate a rescue mission but inside the sub the engineers had calculated there had been just about 8 hours of air left and The Saga of getting the boat Skipper up had chewed up about seven an airline was attached from Rescue vessels above but couldn't pump any down from below came Morse code tapped on the side of the hle by the survivors inside give us air give us air over and over and finally the blockage in the line was identified it was successfully passed down and the subs boughs were refloated the surface enough that holes could be cut in and Men could get out just over 30 had died mostly trapped and drowned in the massive engine rooms AF reports showed that the main vent hatch in the engine room hadn't shut and in fact indicators in the command room had showed that it was open but when one fact is in the human element it becomes clear that so complicated a dive process as the kots had introduced many different points of failure the admiralty had other ideas the first six KBS were put into their own flotilla and given the bizarre task of hunting the smaller nimbler German uots now the kbo's issues are legendary and their spotted careers border on the Monstrous ly unlucky and the unjust K5 was conducting trials when she went for a routine dive but was never heard from again K3 Dove out of control to way below the safe 200t dive depth hitting a maximum of 266 ft somehow avoiding catastrophic Crush failure the boat managed to surface and she actually survived hmsk K12 took her sea trials in the same lock as K13 she encountered a similar issue and ended up stranded on the bottom but fortunately her crew were rescued then the same thing happened to k16 moral and the submarine flotilla plummeted during the first world war as if conditions weren't already bad enough word had got around that new bulbous bow was to be installed on the remaining K class boats indicating to the crews that the admiralty thought them incapable of adequate seeke keeping the problems of containing hot Steam and boilers within a submarine Hull were tragically demonstrated when k26 steam lines failed and scolded two stokers to death with with superheated steam men who volunteered for service in submarines and were assigned to the K class boats began to refer to themselves as the suicide Club the Kass boats ungainly bulk earned them a reputation for terrible terrible handling as Crews of other vessels watched them Bumble about and in late 1917 the flotilla was out at last steaming alongside large Fleet ships as they had been designed to do when the cruiser HMS blonde set a new course it caused chaos the KBS altered their courses too but their awful maneuverability in close confines caused Defender bender and K4 slam straight into K1 in January 1918 though the kbo suffered their most infamous incident the entire Grand fleet was to undertake exercises off the ory Islands the KBS had been split into two flotillas the 12th and ominously the 13th and they set off each led by a lead vessel for the 12th the cruiser HMS fearless and for the 13th the Destroyer HMS ethereal passing the aisle of May at the mouth of the F things began to go horribly wrong lights were spotted by the 13th flotilla ahead and the vessels changed course to avoid them there were probably fishing trollers or other small Merchant vessels but in typical kbo fashion K1 14's Rudder jammed and she swerved off into the night and out of line K22 behind her had lost sight of her fua mate when to their horror the submarine was spotted Dead Ahead across their boughs now K22 Cuts straight into k14 and they stuck fast the massive battle Cruisers from the fleet swept past and one gave K22 a good tap as she went by causing serious damage and more flooding now the submarines were floating dead still in the water incapable of moving and not sinking thanks to their watertight doors the 13th latilla received word of the collision and turned back to help their comrades HMS ethereal and the other Kats fully illuminated to prevent a collision from turning and running back through the main Fleet while heading back to K22 and k14 but suddenly out of the Mist appeared the 12th flotilla with HMS Fearless at the lead and the result was catastrophic Fearless smashed through k17 and cut her nearly in half and left her sinking while k6 smashed into K4 the two were locked together and began to sink now all the other boats twisted and turned to a try avoiding one another creating a scene of absolute utter confusion dozens and dozens of men were left in the water and then the unthinkable happened the fifth battle Squadron three dreadnots and their escorting destroyers came barging through at near full speed the men in the water were run down and killed by the score nobody from K4 survived and 48 from k17 died as well in the end around 105 men lost their lives three KBS were badly damaged and two were sunk outright without ever having encountered the enemy but the tragedy came to be sardonically referred to as the Battle of May Island now it should have been the end for the K class as a concept but remarkably they were kept on until well after the war had ended in May 1918 K15 took a huge sea in through her funnels which extinguished the boiler furnaces leaving her powerless and with a flooding engine room the stern sank but the bow was left with just enough buoyancy to float above the waterline thanks to her fast acting crew the ballast tanks had their valves jammed and it took eight harrowing hours for the boat to be properly refloated now this speaks nothing of the many many collisions and near accidents throughout the boat's careers it seems like even despite the design issues and faults the boats were just haunted by some kind of curse K7 had finally got a clean shot at an enemy submarine on the surface a spread of torpedoes saw one hit the German boat fair and square on the conning Tower but it failed to detonate despite the classes many many failings it has to be pointed out that the men that actually crewed and operated them worked like lions to make the submarines work at all and they deserving of every praise in the end the concept of a fast Fleet action submarine filling steam turbines was soundly and decisively disproven ironically today modern nuclear submarines are equipped with reactors that are essentially a refinement of steam propulsion in a way but unlike those hungry boiler powered Kass boats they don't need the huge amounts of ventilation and extraction action and they certainly don't need any funnels between 1921 and 1926 the KBS were scrapped with a couple of incomplete holes used to create a new diesel powered boat called the mclass in the 1920s a fleet submarine capable of quick speeds was designed and could hit 22 knots thanks to advances in diesel engine propulsion the story of the k-class submarine is like that of Icarus the admiralty aiming for new and exceptional technological Heights only for them to be reminded of the lethal consequences of overreaching after all that it's still difficult somehow to look back on planners and designers from back then with too much of a judgmental eye considering that so much of this technology had been untested and it was in its infancy at the time but even so Lord Jackie fiser had known it way back in 1913 when he had said that the most fatal error imaginable would be to put Steam Engines in a submarine and he was proven tragically correct

Channel: Oceanliner Designs

Views: 621,019

Keywords: great ocean liners, maritime history, ocean liners, famous oceanliners, ships documentary, history of ships, engineering, history, ships, documentary, origins explained, world history project, animated history, open educational resources, titanic, shipwreck, sinking, boats, ocean, disaster, tragedy

Id: QgQxO7WFG50

Length: 28min 0sec (1680 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2024