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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

You're probably better off looking at pictures of an actual, unromanticized Typhoon/Akula, even if you don't read Russian.

http://community.livejournal.com/ru_submarine/17486.html

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Those are quite nice.

I like final photo: http://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001e72eq

Translation (not exactly direct, but keeping close):

  Submariner!

  Relieved yourself?
  Clean up after yourself!
  And kindly requested,
  Close the door
  of the head.
  People live in this section

  (Violators will be severely punished!)

I'm not sure why I find this amusing.

A lot of the signage is pretty hilarious but I was hoping (rightly, I'm very glad to see) people less lazy than myself would translate it.

These two are decommissioned and are being cut apart.

As are just about all of the rest of them.

That explains why they're in such awful shape.

I was a submarine officer in the US Navy and we would never allow any boat to look like this; literally rusting all over the place. That said, holy st the Russians built huge boats.

Maintenance bill on Typhoon class has been enormous, by any nation's standard. In neglect, they quickly fall apart.

The rockets they were designed to carry are no longer in production either, so the whole class should be slashed by the end of the decade.

The Soviets had to build huge subs. Their missiles and reactors were larger than the US versions. Also, their reactors weren't nearly as reliable, so they put two in each boat. They are impressive to look at, though.

I lol'd when I first read that, thinking that by 'not reliable' you meant their reactors tended to melt down, spike, or blow up, in which case adding a second one wouldn't really help but would nevertheless fit the American perception of the Soviet ethos (they pretend to pay us so we pretend to fix the problem).

By not reliable I mean were much more likely to need to be shut down to avoid something really bad happening. The second reactor allowed them to easily return to base (or even continue their mission) if they were forced to shut one of them down. An American sub with a reactor failure would be more or less stuck, and if it were under the icecap or something like that would be in big trouble.

Yeah, I know what you meant, I just thought my initial misinterpretation was funny enough to comment about. Maybe not...

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