![]() ![]() The air conditioning in particular had a very practical application too besides comfort. They could be added without impact to the boat's war fighting abilities due to the extra room of the big fleet boat. The Bureau designers felt that if a crew of 60–80 men were to be expected to conduct 75-day patrols in the warm waters of the Pacific, these types of features were vital to the health and efficiency of the crew. The class of boats had numerous crew comforts including air conditioning, refrigerated storage for food, generous fresh water distilling units, clothes washers, and bunks for nearly every crew member these were luxuries virtually unheard of in other navies. After the war, a few fleet boats were fitted with an additional rudder topside at the very stern. Although a point of concern, the turning radius was still good enough to be acceptable. There was no practical fix for this due to the limitations of the installed hydraulic systems that were used to move the rudder. The large size of these boats did negatively affect both surfaced and underwater maneuverability when compared to smaller submarines. By mid war, these measures combined with improved crew training got dive times down to 30–35 seconds, very fast for such a large boat and acceptable to the boat's crew. In an attempt to speed this process, additional limber, or free flooding, holes were drilled and cut into the superstructure to allow it to flood faster. When the dive began the boat would "hang" for a few extra seconds while this superstructure filled with water. The superstructure that sat atop the pressure hull provided the main walking deck when the boat was surfaced and was free flooding and full of water when the boat was submerged. At the start of the war these boats could go from fully surfaced to periscope depth in approximately 45–50 seconds. Based on later wartime experience, the tank was normally kept full or nearly full at the surface, then emptied to a certain mark after the boat was submerged to restore neutral buoyancy. Acknowledging this limitation, the Bureau designers incorporated a negative (sometimes called a "down express") tank into the design, which was flooded to provide a large amount of negative buoyancy at the start of the dive. Sufficient fuel bunkerage to provide the range necessary for 75-day patrols from Hawaii to Japan and back could be obtained with only a large boat, which will take longer to submerge than a smaller one. The Gatos were slow divers when compared to some German and British designs, but that was mostly because the Gatos were significantly larger boats. Without changing the construction or thickness of the pressure hull steel, they decided that the Gato-class boats would be fully capable of routinely operating at 300 feet, a 50-foot (15 m) increase in test depth over the preceding classes. Operational experience with earlier boats led the naval architects and engineers at the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair to believe that they had been unduly conservative in their estimates of hull strength. The outer hull merged with the pressure hull at both ends in the area of the torpedo room bulkheads, hence the "partial" double hull. The voids between the two hulls provided space for fuel and ballast tanks. The inner pressure-resisting hull was wrapped by an outer hydrodynamic hull. The Gatos, along with nearly all of the USN fleet-type submarines of World War II, were of partial double hull construction. The only significant differences were an increase in diving depth from 250 feet (76 m) to 300 feet (91 m), and an extra five feet in length to allow the addition of a watertight bulkhead dividing the one large engine room in two, with two diesel generators in each room. The Gato-class design was a near-duplicate of the preceding Tambor and Gar-class boats. ![]() In some references, the Gatos are combined with their successors, especially the Balao class. Navy submarines of the period, boats of the Gato class were given the names of marine creatures. Gato's name comes from a species of small catshark. Named after the lead ship of the class, USS Gato, the Gatos and their successors formed the core of the submarine service that was largely responsible for the destruction of the Japanese merchant marine and a large portion of the Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II. Together with their near-sisters the Balao and Tench classes, their design formed the majority of the United States Navy's World War II submarine fleet. The Gato class was a class of submarines built for the United States Navy and launched in 1941–1943 they were the first mass-production U.S. ![]() This handcrafted Gato Class Submarine model, in 1/150 scale, is painstakingly built by our skilled craftsmen with a wealth of detail. ![]()
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