The Collins Class Submarine Story

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The Collins Class Submarine Story Page 20

by Peter Yule


  class. Consequently, the Swedish navy was no longer involved

  in the improvement of Hedemora engines. Roine Carlsson,

  the Swedish Minister for Defence at the time, recalls telling

  Oscar Hughes that the next generation of Swedish submarines

  would have German diesels, but the Australian project stayed with

  Hedemora for the design advantages and to avoid delays.7

  S E T T I N G T O W O R K 1 9 8 7 – 8 9

  127

  The $60 million contract for the submarines’ batteries illus-

  trates both the international nature of the project and the depth of

  Australian industry involvement. During project definition it was

  widely assumed that the Swedish company Tudor would provide

  the batteries, but the tender was won by Pacific Marine Batter-

  ies, a partnership between Varta Batteries of Germany and Pacific

  Dunlop Batteries of Australia. Ove Gustafsson was the technical

  director of the Scandinavian branch of Varta, which built subma-

  rine batteries for the Swedish navy, and helped put together a bid

  to provide the Australian batteries. Varta won the contract and

  Gustafsson went to Australia to set up the joint venture company

  Pacific Marine Batteries with Pacific Dunlop. He couldn’t find a

  manager and was eventually told: ‘You’ve caused the problem so

  you’ll have to fix it.’ He moved to Australia in 1990 to establish

  the business.

  Originally, the batteries were to be built in Sydney, where

  Pacific Dunlop assembled the Oberon batteries. However,

  Gustafsson believed that it would be better to build a new fac-

  tory close to ASC in Adelaide, largely to save on the transport

  costs of each 400-tonne battery. The South Australian government

  assisted by giving land for the factory and clearing away polluted

  soil. The challenge of starting a manufacturing business ensured

  ‘a couple of very tough years – the learning curve was nearly ver-

  tical’ – but the company provided six batteries to ASC, and now

  has a long-term contract to provide replacement batteries.8

  Below the major contractors were 426 sub-contractors and

  many more sub-sub-contracts. Of the sub-contractors, 306 were

  companies operating in Australia (including both Australian com-

  panies and Australian subsidiaries of foreign companies), with the

  remaining 120 companies coming from Sweden, Germany, France,

  Britain, the United States, Canada, Italy, Holland, Belgium,

  Norway and Denmark.9 Almost half of these contracts (56) were

  with British companies, with 21 American, 15 Swedish and 17

  German companies also involved.

  The ASC site on the banks of the Port River at Osborne was

  always referred to as a ‘greenfields site’, but this conveys a very dif-

  ferent image from the reality of the desolate, polluted swamp seen

  by the notables who came to watch Prime Minister Bob Hawke

  drive the first peg on 29 June 1987. Jeff Rubython from Wormald

  moved quickly in planning the new yard. The essential feature

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  T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y

  of the design was that it was not a traditional shipyard – ships

  were not constructed as a single entity but assembled from mod-

  ules brought from elsewhere. Parts and equipment were manufac-

  tured in every state of Australia and in many countries around the

  world, and brought to Osborne at the appropriate time to install

  in a submarine.

  Concrete Constructions Pty Ltd was the construction manager

  for building the shipyard and employed up to 400 men on the site.

  Significantly, the greatest problems came from wind, sand and the

  unstable soil rather than from labour unrest. Oscar Hughes recalls

  that the promise to keep the unions under control had been one of

  the main attractions of the South Australian bid. In the early days

  of building the yard a strike occurred over a demarcation dispute.

  Hughes was in Beazley’s office and had him ring Ralph Willis,

  the Minister for Industrial Relations. The message was that if the

  strike was not over within 24 hours construction would move to

  Western Australia. Almost immediately John Bannon rang and

  asked if Hughes was serious. Hughes said he was and within

  24 hours the whole issue was dead. For Hughes, the $20 million

  already spent was nothing compared with the hundreds of mil-

  lions it could have cost to continue the project with poor industrial

  relations.

  On 22 December 1987 ASC reached an agreement with three

  key unions on a national agreement covering the submarine

  project. Among other things this limited the number of unions

  on the Osborne site, greatly reducing the likelihood of demarca-

  tion disputes. Industrial harmony was one of the main reasons

  why the facilities at Osborne were completed on time and under

  budget. Karl Bertil Stein recalls that Kockums was surprised by

  this, as: ‘We had heard that nothing was done on time in Australia

  because of the construction workers. We were delighted that there

  were so many fewer days lost on strikes at Adelaide than we

  expected.’10

  All through the process of getting the project up and running,

  Oscar Hughes was always involved – bullying, cajoling, com-

  manding and persuading. His view was that ‘if you don’t behave

  like a bulldozer then the project is going to get into trouble’. As

  the industrial relations episode showed, anywhere there was an

  obstacle that threatened to hold up the project, there would be

  Oscar Hughes with his bulldozer. One of his project staff, Ken

  S E T T I N G T O W O R K 1 9 8 7 – 8 9

  129

  Grieg, recalls that: ‘He was not the easiest person to work with,

  but I guess he wasn’t trying to be easy.’

  The Swedes, both at Kockums and in the Ministry of Defence,

  respected and admired Oscar Hughes. Major General Kurt Blixt,

  who chaired the committee supervising the memorandum of

  understanding between the Swedish and Australian governments,

  says: ‘We had no problems getting on with Oscar Hughes – he

  had a role to take the project forward. He was rather hard when

  it came to discussions but he was always fair.’ Similarly Tomy

  Hjorth, managing director of Kockums and chairman of ASC from

  1990 to 2000, thought Hughes an excellent project director: ‘He

  made many decisions at a time when decisions were needed on a

  continuous basis; he made deals, most of which were reasonable.’

  However, Hjorth also observed that: ‘Oscar Hughes was running

  the project outside the rest of the navy. This was necessary but it

  created enemies for the project.’

  Others shared this view that the project had become dissoci-

  ated from the navy. Paddy Hodgman, who was the navy’s public

  information officer from 1990–93, observed that:

  In the late 1980s there was a substantially independent and

  powerful submarine project. They still saw the chief of the

  navy as being in charge but there were centrifugal forces and

  divergences of view and approach between the project and

&
nbsp; stakeholders such as the submarine community, the rest of

  the navy and others in defence and government. This meant

  that ASC was always able to find folk to play off against each

  other. Defence did not have it in one sock – it did not have

  unity in what it wanted, what was wrong, what the fix might

  be – effectively defence had disempowered itself.11

  The consequences of this were not evident at the time, but became

  clear when the submarine project ran into strife later in the 1990s.

  Generally, the feeling around the project – at ASC, Kockums and

  the project office – was that the project’s early stages had been

  well managed and that all was going well.

  C H A P T E R 12

  Designing the Collins class1

  Sweden is a country with few tall buildings. There are none in

  central Stockholm and few in other cities. Malm ö in the south

  is a slight exception to the general pattern. Today the main fea-

  ture of the skyline is the new 54-storey ‘Turning Torso’ building,

  built on the old shipyard, but for the previous 25 years the city

  was dominated by the huge gantry crane and the 11-storey head-

  quarters of its largest employer, Kockums. It was in this solid,

  cylindrical building overlooking the increasingly derelict shipyard

  that Australia’s new submarine was designed.

  Traditionally Sweden’s submarine force was made up of several

  classes, with each class being an evolution from the previous class

  rather than a completely new design. Kockums’ designers did not

  sit down with a blank sheet of paper, but rather had an evolving

  submarine design that they were always testing and modifying.

  The process of designing the new Australian submarine began

  even before the navy’s operational requirements were released.

  Olle Holmdahl, Kockums’ head of systems engineering in the

  late 1970s, recalls that when Kockums’ designers first heard of

  a possible submarine project in Australia they pooled their expe-

  rience and knowledge of Australia’s Oberon operations, and then

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  131

  put together a design to meet the anticipated requirement. The

  emphasis was on long range and endurance, with the battery size

  paramount. Roger Sprimont and Olle Holmdahl discussed this

  conceptual design with an Australian navy team led by Bill Rourke

  as early as December 1981.

  The conceptual design became a more detailed proposal dur-

  ing 1983 in response to the Australian request for tenders. From

  the start the primary aim of Kockums’ designers was to meet the

  Australian requirements and avoid presenting a generic design

  with the message ‘This is what you want’. The shape of the Aus-

  tralian submarine was based on the V ästergotland, which entered

  Swedish naval service in 1986, but was enlarged and redesigned

  to meet Australian range and endurance requirements.

  Once Kockums was selected for the project development phase

  in May 1985 a far more detailed process began. A core design team

  headed by Olle Holmdahl worked exclusively on the Australian

  project, with many more involved when their particular exper-

  tise was needed. The Kockums designers worked closely with the

  Australian navy team at Malm ö, taking their guidance and occa-

  sionally arguing for the revision of some specification, either to

  reduce risk or improve results.

  One area where Kockums disagreed with the navy team was

  over the proposed requirement for automation, seen by Kock-

  ums as excessive and potentially dangerous. Frequently struggling

  to crew submarines, the Australian navy sought to automate as

  many functions as possible to reduce crew numbers in the new

  submarines. The initial requirement proposed an automatic sur-

  facing system autonomously blowing the tanks and surfacing if

  a hatch or valve was not closed. The Kockums designers argued

  that this could be extremely dangerous if the submarine popped

  up like a cork without knowing what was above. The requirement

  was modified.

  The use of flexible hoses was another element that the Aus-

  tralian navy opposed, but these were central to the Kockums

  design philosophy. Modular construction allowed Kockums to

  place all machinery on rigid, heavy platforms that were then slid

  into the hull as completed units and mounted on rubber isolating

  blocks. This resulted in less machinery noise being transmitted into

  the water through the hull and reduced the chances of damage to

  the machinery from explosive shock. The benefits of isolating the

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  T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y

  submarines’ mechanical components would have been compro-

  mised if machinery was then connected to the hull by rigid pipes,

  so flexible hoses were used.

  Conventional submarines have diesel engines to charge their

  batteries. Needing air to operate, they can only run when the

  submarine is surfaced or close enough to the surface to draw air

  through a raised pipe in an operation known as ‘snorting’. On or

  near the surface and running hot and noisy engines, submarines

  are at their most vulnerable while charging their batteries. Conse-

  quently, the diesels need to be powerful to recharge the batteries

  as quickly as possible, and when snorting are subjected to extraor-

  dinary stresses, as when the air supply is suddenly cut by waves

  washing over the snort tube – salt water and diesel engines are nat-

  ural enemies. Submarine diesels are far more complex and operate

  under far more difficult conditions than any other diesel engines.

  During his navy service, Roger Sprimont had seen turbo-

  charged diesels aboard a Soviet Foxtrot submarine. Such systems

  use a turbine driven by engine exhaust gases to pre-compress air

  entering a cylinder and increase power output. They are more

  efficient than the mechanical superchargers that have been used

  in most designs and Sprimont thought they would provide the

  performance sought by the Australians. He approached MTU,

  one of the largest builders of diesels in the world, but they

  would not adapt their design to use a turbo-charger. Designing a

  turbo-charged diesel to operate while snorting is difficult – engine

  operating pressure varies through the troughs and crests of the

  waves and varying exhaust back-pressure applies stresses through

  the turbine. Kockums went back to Hedemora, the company

  that had supplied reliable diesel engines for most of the Swedish

  submarines.

  In any case, the Hedemora engine had some advantages. It

  was rugged and able to operate with some components disabled,

  and the crankshaft could be removed horizontally without hav-

  ing to cut open the submarine. The company was also expe-

  rienced in turbo-charged engines. Importantly, the Hedemoras

  could be built in a country like Australia with no established

  diesel engine manufacture, and this would help achieve a 70 per

  cent Australian industrial content.
However, the engine for the

  Australian boat was bigger, with more cylinders, than any subma-

  rine engine Hedemora had built previously; it had an additional

  starter motor added for operational safety reasons and, following

  D E S I G N I N G T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S

  133

  a design review, had the flywheel removed to save weight and

  improve connection to the generator unit.

  The large amount of fuel oil needed meant that the designers

  ‘had to look for tank space everywhere’.2 Consequently the fuel

  supply system was complex, with 15 separate tanks each able to

  supply the engines either separately or through the complete sys-

  tem. Pelle Stenberg comments that this made it necessary to follow

  strict sequences in emptying the tanks to keep the boat in trim.

  The detailed requirement for the new submarines included

  many specifications that were based closely on the Oberons,

  extending features that had worked well. Kockums thought this

  left too many things based on what, by the late 1980s, was a very

  old design. They proposed alternative solutions based on the latest

  Swedish submarines, such as a trimming system based on that of

  the V ästerg ötland. Such differences were generally resolved ami-

  cably and both parties felt that the design improved as a result.

  A major concern during the design phase was ensuring that

  the components to be supplied by the major sub-contractors met

  the Australian requirements and were compatible with the overall

  design. The need for close liaison between designers and suppliers

  is illustrated by the design of the periscope masts. The original

  requirements specified that these should be faired to minimise their

  wake, but somehow this requirement was lost along the way. Ian

  Hill, who was a member of the Australian navy team at Malm ö,

  thinks that this was due to excessive confidence on the part of the

  periscope company that their design would not need modifications

  to suit the Collins’ ambitious requirements. Consequently they

  had not studied the benefits of streamlining the periscope mast.

  The fundamentals of the design were settled before the contract

  between ASC and the Commonwealth was signed. Nonetheless,

  the design task facing Kockums after June 1987 was daunting.

  Gunnar Öhlund recalls that:

  The design of Collins was a huge challenge. It is a big

 

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