I would indeed expect the same, indeed the mentioned sonars do not provide 360° coverage, but they do have some overlay in arcs, which enhances your capability. Then comes the Alpha idea, do you have any clue how an Alpha captain would ever know where the blind arc of his opponent is??? The only way to do that is really knowing the heading of your opponent, something practically very difficult. You need your sonar for that, a tracking, but when an Alpha wants to track, he’ll have to slow down, have his sonar find the opponent at a decent range, with his crappy sonar, that is less likely than the opponent tracking him, then he would have to accellerate very rapidly, move to that proposed blind arc and then move closer? I don’t know how much experience you have with ships, but it’s quite unlikely that they could be capable of that without coming in dangerous collision courses. And that all without being heard?!
So basically they would need the luck of being behind an American sub that is sailing at high speed. It can happen once, but it won’t happen that much.
Alpha and agile? Haha, no sub is really agile, their rudders are in front of their propellor, an inherent cause for not being agile. The LA was the first sub capable of turning 180° within 4 times its own length.(as reference, even the most bulky merchant ship has to be capable of that, be it a 400m tanker or a 300m container vessel, surface warships can turn sometimes within their own length)
So being Agile for an Alpha, I doubt it and if so, it would still have to bring him quite close.

Yes the ’70s, and who was the most likely opponent back then? Indeed USN, and which boats did USN have? The Sturgeon class, with bow mounted sperical arrays, towed arrays and lots of other equipement. Their Sonar was practically aimed at any direction. As you said, Lira was “on paper” a deadly combination with Skhval, take in account that Shkval has a rather short range and the fact that Lira is not that quiet as you mentioned yourself and what does that mean? Yes indeed, on paper, like many things, that’s what it means…

You got it wrong. The two drawings Wanshan posted, are different lay-outs. The Diesels are used for Cruising, the Turbines for boosts. Gas Turbines use a LOT of fuel and are hence not good for cruising around. They are also maintenance demanding and very complicated compared to the Diesel engine (and hence not economic).
Turbs are always pain in the asses, when they are supposed to be stopped, they are still turning, annoying when you are manoeuvring. You can’t reverse them either, anothing thing that is quite annoying for manoeuvring, although I suppose the P-17 will have controllable pitch propellors to solve this?

WHERE ARE THOSE PICTURES????????? I WANNA SEE!!!!

Pure hydrodynamic improvement. Dives faster this way as it limits the flow of water from the “overpressure are” to the “underpressure” area above and below your diving planes. Same can be seen on the latter Russian submarines, both Lada and Kilo have such ending parts on their rudders for that very same purpose. Long and low rudders, like the one on Kilo are a lot worse than short high rudders, because in the short rudder there is just a little edge over which this waterflow occurs, while in the long rudder there is a longer edge and due to its low signature the effect of this flow cannot be neglected.

Gathering intelligence should be done silently, if you run away then at 45kts and are heard over 100miles away, then your mission was quite useless as they know you were there and might have an idea of what was going on. Neither were Alpha’s electronics advanced enough to be any good in that role. Add to it that her diving depth is about the most hyped thing on the net. The design flaws were obvious, the reactors were crap, the demands were a super small, fast and low crewed-boat, they achieved the target, but made some very bad compromises. The reactors as mentioned were crap and appeared to be not shielded enough, so they added some bulkheads to the design. This created a problem as their submarine was already finished when those flaws were discovered/thought about. The result, they made those bulkheads concave, bent, around the forward and aft compartment. This creates a much reduced diving depth as normally thought as transverse bulkheads are the most important strength members in any ship design. By bending them, you lose much of your strength and run the risk of getting the collapsed. And yes they sometimes dove as deep as mentioned, but only sometimes, more regularily they operated at only 400m, which is a depth well within the reach of most ASW weapons.

As for SOSUS, it was actually “underhyped”, you’ll really have to read that book I sent you, you get an idea on how good it was. Why do you think Russia so badly wanted their own SOSUS? because such things can’t hear a silent sub? Quite useless against US then!

just go to http://www.subcommittee.com, there in the forum you’ll see the thread!

The only ones are indeed the Indian ones, I’ve seen the tests of that, it’s an entire cabin, not just a “chamber”.

I forgot to send you that book again Wayne, sorry for that. I’m not sure if it has pics of the intake though. The guy’s build on Oscar is indeed amazing, quite nice how he did the torpedo tubes, I’m not entirely sure the upper ones are correctly done though.

I think I’ll agree, although it should be noted again that this is indeed only based on whatever the general flow of thoughts says on the net. AND, on what you are doing with the sub, the SeaWolf would normally remain more quiet than an Akula when it’s travelling at 25kts, while that Akula travels maybe at a lower speed, on the other hand if that Akula is just hanging around on its electric motors, then it might be more silent than for example an LAI. So it all depends in which environment and what you are actually doing at that moment. If you’re turning, you will make more noise due to the disturbance of the water, if you’re just peddling ahead at 2kts without the use of any rudder (which will cause you to deviate from your track, but that’s unimportant while on the hunt) you will be more silent!