Upholder/Victoria Class Submarine - Design and Development

Design and Development

The Royal Navy was going to follow the Oberons with nuclear powered boats but there was still a role for diesel powered boats, as demonstrated by activities during the Falklands War, and they could be built faster than nuclear submarines. The only yard building nuclear submarines was Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness and it was occupied with the Vanguard class ballistic missile submarines. Accordingly to provide the Royal Navy with a diesel boat for the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Ltd developed the Upholder class from the 1970s onwards.

The design was based on their private scheme for a 2400 tonne submarine for export sales. This was combined with lessons learnt from the Oberons and the design of the Trafalgar-class fleet submarines. They were built with teardrop hulls and the fin was built from glass fibre to keep weight down. The submarines are packed with technology generally found only on nuclear-powered submarines and are still widely regarded as being among the best diesel-electric submarines in the world.

The price of each submarine was published at US$215 million, but actual cost after correcting the design flaws was higher. As in most new submarine classes, the emphasis was placed on standardisation and automation to reduce manning requirements. The first of the class (Upholder) was ordered in November 1983 and completed in 1990, and there followed three more boats (Unseen, Ursula and Unicorn) ordered in 1986 and completed in 1991-1993. The Royal Navy had planned to order 12 of the class; but this was trimmed first to 10 and then to nine before being curtailed at just four as part of the "peace dividend" at the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.