
sferrin wrote:tincansailor wrote: They still have light hull sections in the bow and stern, which house main ballast tanks and provide a hydrodynamically optimized shape, but the main cylindrical hull section has only a single plating layer.
And those are basically fairings with relatively little structural strength. If you check the nose of the San Francisco underwater collision, you can see that the nose fairing was obliterated while the pressure hull was intact.
sf.jpg
These fairings don't cover the entire submarine but only certain sections. For example, the Ohios have one encasing the upper ends of the missile tubes.
USS_Ohio_SSBN-726_hatches.jpg
The -688s have one between the nose and forward end of the pressure hull that can be seen here:
I stand corrected. I thought the light casing or fairings covered the whole hull, your correct they don't. I never suggested they were any type of armor, like the Russian doubles hulls. They serve the function I said they did. They protect the ballast tanks, arrays, and other equipment mounted outside the pressure hull, and maintain the hull shape. I've seen the picture of San Francisco before. Hitting an underwater mountain at flank speed with the pressure hull fully intact is an impressive test, that no one wanted to take.