Customer Reviews

The Submarine Alliance (Anatomy of the Ship)

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Based on the A type submarine class that served the Royal Navy for nearly 40 years, The Submarine alliance goes into incredible detail. If you have ever seen inside a submarine it is an amazing jumble of pipe, wires and gauges encapsulated in a tiny cylinder. This book depicts how it all works and is more like an engineers manual than the typical Anatomy of the ship book. Every system is drawn in detail, from the ballast tanks, how the pipes go through the ship, to the gauges that control them. Even the batteries are drawn in cutaway. This is the most intricate of this series in have seen.

Having bought several "Anatomy of the Ship" books in the past, and browsed through others, I've pretty much known what to expect. These books range from stunning (John Robert's titles on Dreadnought and Hood) to hopelessly mediocre (the recent book on Bismarck, for example). But I was blown away by "The Submarine Alliance." This is certainly the most detailed "Anatomy" I've seen so far.

While other books in the series focus on three-view drawings, this title is packed with perspective and exploded views of the submarine's machinery, armament, and propulsion systems. There are General Arrangement drawings, of course, but they aren't the meat of this book. Along with schematics of the diesels and electric motors, you'll find drawings of the propeller lifting gear, battery ventilation system, torpedo firing gear, periscope optics, air compressors, low and high-pressure air systems, and more. Seven pages are devoted to the Admiralty-pattern diesels that powered six of the A-class subs, showing the engine framework, air start, lubricating oil, and circulating water systems, cylinder heads, fuel pumps and injectors, engine controls, supercharger, and valve gears. Submarines are incredibly complicated machines, and this book really shows it.

"The Submarine Alliance" is an impressively detailed book, and the quality of the drafting is of a high standard. The introduction includes additional technical detail, and the photographs provide a nice study of the class's evolution. Too bad it's out of print and John Lambert only created one other Anatomy title. This is one book that any serious submarine or naval architecture enthusiast will want on their shelf.

IN A NUTSHELL: ONE COULD BUILD THIS SUBMARINE AFTER READING - ALMOST

THE ANATOMY OF THE SHIP SERIES = 1 BOOK IS ABOUT 1 SHIP [SERIES]

For those avid naval and modeling enthusiasts that really have to know where everything is and how it works, this is a book for you. Want to see what everything inside the submarine looks like?
2/3 of this book is dedicated to sketches and schematics of the interior of the "A Class" submarines. Unfortunately, they were not in service until after World War 2 ended, but were designed so well that they survived in service into the 1970s, despite the dominance and advantages of nuclear subs.

I'll probably never build a model of the Alliance, but I've always been interested in submarine technology. This volume has completely satisfied my desire for detail! Page after page after page of labelled isometrics of telemotor steering systems, Kingston valves, periscope optics, and other goodies. Wow! And for the modeller who *will* be building the Alliance, there are lots of pages of photographs of her and her sister ships in their various incarnations. Truly a cool book!