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A Comment On The Fake Type-100 'Sun Tzu' Class submarine
This ginormous 210m (690ft) long multi-hull submarine was created for an April Fools' piece I penned for Naval News. In the tradition of these pranks it is not real, and was not meant to genuinely deceive. I am putting this article up so that, in future, if people find misinformation about this submarine they can easily get to the truth.
We attempted to create a submarine which was at the same time both plausible and incredible. It had to be fantastic and crazy, yet not so silly as to be dismissed immediately by most readers. So the plot twists got progressively sillier through the text. Anyone with any defense awareness, so if they read al the way through, would spot that it was an April Fools. We had references to it being in a parade, deploying to the Arctic, the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. We had 'hydrosonic' torpedoes.
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The alleged project number, Type-100, is not in strict series with Chinese Navy (PLAN) nuclear powered submarines. These are numbered in the 90s, e.g. Type-093, -094, -095...). However it is not far off either and is a nice round number, easy to remember and seeming important. The connection to the 100th year of the Communist Party, which is being celebrated this year, is convenient. And the name "Sun Tzu" is deliberately out of sync with Chinese submarine reporting names which are of dynasties. These were clues that it is a hoax.
Some famous pranks. Clockwise from the top:
► The spaghetti harvest, BBC News, April 1, 1957.
► A fake image of the unconfirmed Aurora spy plane, 1980s (origin unclear. If you know the original source...
► Hoax in Aviation Week alleging that the USSR had flight tested a nuclear-powered bomber. December 1958. The aircraft is in fact the jet-powered Myasishchev M-50 BOUNDER.
► The Daily Reflector of Greenville N.C. published a doctored photo of a submarine in the Tar River, April 1, 1961. The submarine is USS Seawolf (SSN-575). It appears to be sailing astern.
The design was not well thought out. It had to be the largest in the world, so I simply took a satellite image of a Type-094 Jin-class submarine and started hacking it about in MS Paint. It pasted it three times side by side and extended the central hull. I made the hulls longer so that each hull had twice the number of missile silos. It had to be larger than the TYPHOON because, well of course.
Initially I thought to have missiles in all three hulls but then I had a brain wave. Why not add a docking station for another submarine on its back? Like Belgorod has, but on top so that it is visible in the faked satellite image. Naturally I suggested the genuine and currently unexplained 'sailless' submarine.
For good measure I added Poseidon Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedoes. Only I made them "hydrosonic" instead of autonomus. Eight because Belgorod only has four.
I was going to do twin screws and X-rudders but because I had a Type-094 stern in the satellite image, I stuck to that. On the sketch I added contra-rotating skewback screws.
No idea where the forward hydroplanes would be, I didn't think that far. Sonar? Whatever you want really. Then I finished my sketch in MS Paint and threw the graphic together in typical style.
Media Reaction
This is why it is so important to post this article. Very few people in the Defense world seem to have been duped, and many of those who admit that they were took it in good humor. But some media outlets took the report at face value and published 'me too' articles which perpetuated the fake sub. They did this without checking with Naval News or myself. The media outlets who did reach out were told that it was an April Fools' joke.
So there are sources out there, over whom we have no control, who have unwittingly presented the joke as fact. Some examples:
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There are more for sure.
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