Morzh class submarine
Russian Submarine Morzh
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| Class overview | |
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| Name: | Morzh |
| Builders: | Nikolayev Dockyard |
| Operators: | Imperial Russian Navy |
| Succeeded by: | Bars class submarine (1915) |
| In commission: | 1914–1931 |
| Completed: | 3 |
| Lost: | 1 |
| Retired: | 2 |
| General characteristics | |
| Displacement: |
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| Length: | 67 m (219 ft 10 in) |
| Beam: | 4.5 m (14 ft 9 in) |
| Draft: | 3.9 m (12 ft 10 in) |
| Propulsion: |
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| Speed: |
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| Range: | 2,500 nmi (4,600 km) |
| Complement: | 47 |
| Armament: |
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The Morzh-class submarines were built for the Black Sea Fleet of the Imperial Russian Navy shortly before World War I.
The class was originally conceived as part of an ambitious programme of naval construction devised by the Naval General Staff in 1909. This envisaged, among other things, the constructions of six submarines for the Black Sea Fleet. The procurement was heavily cut back and delayed; in 1910, the Russian State Duma agreed to a portion of the naval plan to reinforce the Black Sea Fleet, including the construction of the six submarines. Three Narval class submariness were ordered along with three of the new Morzh-class boats. The Narval class was a design developed by the Holland company for Russia.
The design of the Morzh class was based on the Akula, a vessel that was considered to be the most successful of the Russian-designed submarines built to date. The design of the new class was carried out at the Baltic Shipyard under Ivan Grigorevich Bubnov in 1910 and was approved on 30 May 1911, with construction starting at the Nikolayev shipyards on 25 June 1911. The principal objective of the designers was to deliver a high degree of maneuverability and stability. However, aspects of the design provoked controversy, in particular the lack of internal watertight compartments. This issue caused a heated dispute between Russia's submarine engineers and submarine officers; the engineers argued that adding bulkheads would greatly improve the survivability of the vessels while the submariners argued that bulkheads put the commander of the ship at risk of losing control of his crew. In the end, financial constraints required the bulkheads to be omitted.
The Morzh submarines were well-armed for the time, having a deck gun, four internal torpedo tubes and eight Dzhevetskiy torpedo-launching collars. However, the vessels had numerous shortcomings. They suffered from having only a single hull, lacking bulkheads, having a slow diving time of 3½ minutes due to poor ballast tank venting, and a diving depth of only 25 fathoms (50 m / 150 feet). An additional problem was that twin 1,140-horsepower diesel engines to power the vessels had been ordered from Germany, but were not delivered by the time the war broke out. They had to be replaced by severely underpowered engines from the Amur River gunboats Vikhr, Vyuga and Uragan, each of which delivered only 250 horsepower. This meant that the designed 16 knot surface speed could not be attained. The designed 12 knot underwater speed also could not be attained due to a poorly designed hull shape, which was more like that of a surface vessel than a submarine. Many of these failings were replicated in the more numerous Bars class submarines, built to a design derived from that of the Morzh.
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Wikipedia