Hacker Cinema
The Hunt for Red October
1990 · Film · 135 min
Part of The Jack Ryan Collection
Directed by John McTiernan
A new technologically-superior Soviet nuclear sub, the Red October, is heading for the U.S. coast under the command of Captain Marko Ramius. The American government thinks Ramius is planning to attack. Lone CIA analyst Jack Ryan has a different idea: he thinks Ramius is planning to defect, but he has only a few hours to find him and prove it - because the entire Russian naval and air commands are trying to find Ramius, too. The hunt is on!
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Like others have said, I don't think it's possible to create technology that cannot be weaponized. I think it's possible (mostly) to design technology so that abuse requires more people, requires the leaving of evidence / paper trail, needs checks, etc.
But still, it's not possible to prevent abuse altogether and sometimes we even applaud breaking the rules (the movie Hunt for Red October for example kicks off with the Soviet captain jumping the guardrails).
Also, the most "benign" public infrastructure is usually the most impactful, e.g., water systems and electrical systems. Don't like the people in that one town who keep protesting and voting against you? Turn off their power, water, and also make it so that their trash doesn't get picked up for a year. See how they like it.
In a movie involving a few archery scenes, a movie with a gargantuan budget - hire an archery instructor. As an advanced amateur archer, the glaring mistakes, from stringing a bow to the draw form and release, it's hard to suspend disbelief and continue watching. Yes, it's a movie based on a myth, but it would have been that much better for me, only if they threw a couple of $Ks to an archery coach.
Same thing with movies with foreign languages. Folks, if you watch "The Hunt for Red October" or anything super recent from Hollywood where there is a Russian or Ukrainian dialogue, they don't speak Russian or Ukrainian. It's just a word salad, mostly.
I really love how kids today are so inundated with 3D CGI that when they see well done practical shots like this and my other go to favorite of the submarines in Hunt For Red October it is immediately assumed as CGI as well. Then again, adults are no less fooled either. The size of the sets is also surprising but makes sense when the size of a film cameras used defined the scales. The HBO intro is another example that makes the rounds.
That aspect wasn't my intent, but in the Red October movie for example, he states that his job is "sitting in an office and writing books", and the story revolves around him doing things that are explicitly not his job, and him confronting how "green" he is for all the field work of the latter half.
I was specifically thinking of that line about sitting in an office writing books, analyzing, strategizing, justifying and criticizing, all of which are crucial guides to action -- hardly something you could describe as "just a tech job", for example.
> Sam Neil writes hilariously about the filming.
That piqued my interest, so I searched for it but Google AI told me to give up. :-/
Sam Neill has not written about the filming of The Hunt for Red October; he was not in the cast of that film, which starred actors like Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, and Scott Glenn. He is, however, known for his role in Jurassic Park, and there are interviews where he discusses that experience and his work with Steven Spielberg.
> Classes are divorced from the practical applications of learning. Apprenticeships train in exactly the situation you’d want to apply the skill.
Hmm .... Something like in the movie "The Hunt for Red October", the US Navy wanted:
(1) Start with recordings by US submarines of underwater sounds, and write software to estimate the power spectra using the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and the Blackman and Tukey, "The Measurement of Power Spectra".
(2) Given ships at sea and a war, how long would the US submarines last? Start with some WWII analysis of search and encounters by Koopmans and do a Monte-Carlo Markov process, generate many independent sample paths and average.
Gee, how could I do those without my academic courses in analysis and probability? And there are more examples, including the crucial, original core math in my startup.
"The Hunt for Red October" had an interesting way of handling this with the Russian speakers. The movie starts with them speaking Russian with English subtitles, does a slow zoom into the Russian-speaker's lips, and switches to English mid-sentence.
Budget cuts?
Want to get paid, by the US Federal Government, for pursuing science or technology?
From experience, in simple terms, a word: Have the work for and the funding from the US DOD, department of defense, military, for some work they really care about.
This sounds like a joke, but it's 90+% real.
For years early in my career in applied math and computing, far and away the best parts, funding, technically advanced work, growth in expertise, and working conditions were on US military work, e.g.:
(1) The FFT (fast Fourier transform) and power spectral estimation (as in the book by Blackman and Tukey) for analyzing ocean audio, close to parts of the movie The Hunt for Red October. Also, the movie uses magneto hydrodynamics (MHD), and the specialty of the guy I was working for was MHD.
(2) Some optimization using Lagrangian relaxation for nuclear war.
(3) Given many ships at sea, some Red, some Blue, and some Blue submarines, war breaks out, and how long will the ships last, in particular, the Blue submarines? Sounds impossible or nearly so, but in WWII there were some cute derivations on search at sea and some Poisson process math by a guy Koopmans, and I did a little more on the math, in assembler wrote a random number generator starting with an Oak Ridge formula, and wrote some Monte Carlo code for the whole thing -- yes, used the speeds of the ships, their detection radii, and for each Red-Blue pair the probabilities of none die, one dies, the other dies, both die.
Surprisingly, a famous probability prof was flown in for a fast review. His remark was: "No way can your Monte Carlo fathom the huge sample space tree." Well, maybe, but so what?
"After some days, say 5, let X be the number of Blue submarines still alive. Then X is a random variable and is bounded, that is, is >= 0 and <= the finite number at the start. Then the law of large numbers applies, and can do 500 independent and identically distributed sample paths, add, divide by 500, and get the expected value for the 5 days, and each of the (times) days, within a gnats ass nearly all the time." The prof agreed but was offended by the gnats remark!
Sure, it was simple, but maybe not fully too simple -- was liked, passed the review, and helped my wife and I get our Ph.D degrees.
Also the military funding let me sit alone for some days learning PL/I that later, with a tricky feature of PL/I calling back into the stack of routines called but not yet returned, used to save IBM's AI product YES/L1! Ah, military worked again!
Ah, the military may (still) be interested in computer and communications security and reliability, system design and development methodology, system monitoring, and management, and now in AI, drones, etc. A commercial server farm or network doesn't expect to be attacked by long range missiles, but DOD systems have to be robust in a war!
Once I was at the David Taylor Model Basin (big tank of water to tow candidate ship hull designs), and they were seriously interested in the Navier-Stokes equations -- maybe they still are! Uh, do they have good solutions yet?
Adm Greenert nicely describes the attitude toward early 90s sub movies (Hunt for Red October vs Crimson Tide). For this audience, in addition to driving maneuvers, he might have added that the main premise of Red October (a clipped message) never could have happened under the existing communication protocol.
I think one person mentioned it. But agree. Other sub movies I enjoyed a lot like Hunt for Red October but they're pretty much movies versus realistic.
If you like this movie, I recommend Jamelle Bouie and John Ganz's podcast "Unclear and Present Danger" (the name is a riff on Clancy as well) which covers the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and how they dealt with the United States' changing place in the world after the end of the Cold War.
They have done two episodes on this movie:
https://jamellebouie.net/unclear-and-present-danger/2021/10/27/the-hunt-for-red-october
https://jamellebouie.net/unclear-and-present-danger/2022/10/30/the-hunt-for-red-october-take-two
One of my favorite movies. The Tom Clancy (Jack Ryan[1]) themed movies are all very good. I wish Hollywood would make more of this type of genre today instead of recycled superhero garbage.
[1] - The Hunt for Red October (1990) - Patriot Games (1992) - Clear and Present Danger (1994) - The Sum of All Fears (2002)
The making of for "The Hunt for Red October" describes some of the other practical effects inside that movie, like the scenes on the surface with the Red October or the set for the interiors of the submarines: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2_epfA20dOY
I liked him as Admiral Greer in the Jack Ryan movies (The Hunt For Red October, Patriot Games, Clear And Present Danger).
Whenever the line „they don’t make them like this anymore“ comes up wrt movies, I think of „Sneakers“ and „The Hunt for Red October“.
"I told you to speak your mind Jack, but Jesus!"
I also am one who thinks of The Hunt For Red October. You already listed the best quote in the movie from him, but the above also makes me giggle every time.
Hunt for Red October
The Outpost
Master and Commander
The Martian
All four Matrix movies
The Godfather Trilogy, best in a single sitting (Connie’s arc is awesome, the cinematography of the third epic; the only problem is how much more of the outside world each of the sequels needs).
Greyhound
A Bridge Too Far (which has changed dramatically as I have learned over the last almost fifty years; I now see it as so subtlety tongue in cheek and cynical).
Draft Day. Possibly the best constructed movie.
Hunt for Red October and The Abyss. I like the low light feel of them. Dark mode movies!
I saw this movie. It's called "HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER "
I know some tech people who are capable of absorbing difficult material, but who never read for pleasure (and that means especially fiction). I think dyslexia may play a part in it.
If reading is really a chore for you, try looking for movies with more literate scripts. Many good writers have written for film, and in most genres.
If reading itself is not the problem and you are just easily bored, don't try to start with "serious" literature, but look for anything that grabs your attention. Not all of these are to my taste, but they have been broadly popular: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Big Sleep (1939), The Color out of Space (1927) (short), The Hunt for Red October (1984), Hondo (1953), Get Shorty (1990).
I managed a small movie theater in the 1980s (and was also the projectionist, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35887809). By that time, audiences were conditioned to follow the posted schedules in the lobby and newspapers. The businesses (many of them parts of corporate chains) were structured to not deviate from the schedules - booth staffing, employees' work schedules, theater cleanings, and other tasks were keyed to it. Customers were expected to show up within 15 minutes before the starting time, and leave when the house lights came up.
If a customer came really late and asked to stay to see the start of the next showing we would have let them but it would be regarded as weird. It's a linear story - what's the point of watching the beginning if you already know what happens at the end? And who wants to sit around for 15 minutes while the theater is cleaned?
Tangential: When we first got Hunt For Red October another projectionist spliced the reels wrong. Each film came in octagonal cans, typically six 20 minute segments, before they were manually spliced together on two bigger reels of about an hour apiece. IIRC segments 5 and 6 were switched. People complained ... but no one wanted to stay to watch it again in the proper order.
ETA: An audience segment which was not conditioned to follow posted schedules was porn. In the 80s, there were still porn theaters in the seedier parts of town (for Boston, it was the "Combat Zone" on the edge of Chinatown) with films running all day and night and people could come and go as they pleased. Not many were interested in linear stories. I didn't work in that part of the business, but the old guy who licensed me for the state indicated that the bulk of his licensing work was down there. This was pre-WWW and not everyone had VCRs, and even if you did the only way to get tapes was via specialty stores in the Zone or sketchy mail order operations.
Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising.
I think most people usually don't consider Tom Clancy to be a science fiction writer, but these two books (his best two by far, FWIW) both feature speculative technology central to the story. Red October features a magneto-hydrodynamic drive for a submarine; MHD drives work for real in the small scale but without great superconductors it doesn't scale well to work for a full scale military submarine. In Red Storm Rising there are F-19 stealth jets based off rumors of the F-117. They get a few things wrong (smooth continuous curves instead of flat facets, poor stealth from below, armed with anti-aircraft missiles, etc) but on the whole they were reasonably grounded speculation.
If you're not convinced, here is a longer argument for Red October (the film) being hard science fiction: https://qntm.org/october
Political Officer: “And the seventh angel poured his bowl into the air, and a voice cried out from heaven, saying: "It is done." A man with your responsibilities reading about the end of the world. And what's this? "I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."”
Captain Ramius: “It is an ancient Hindu text, quoted by an American.”
Political Officer: “An American?”
Captain Ramius: “Mmm. He invented the atomic bomb. And was later accused of being a communist.”
--The Hunt for Red October (1990 movie, not sure its in the book)
AI Mett Porker (I see what you did there)
Maybe in my lifetime an AI could generate a few more seasons of Firefly (that got cancelled too soon)?
Another AI challenge would be to super-impose Harrison Ford onto Alec Baldwin in the movie Hunt for Red October. That would give nice continuity to the Jack Ryan character across the Tom Clancy movie series (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger)
Well, one answer is that US hydrophone technology was probably superior at the time - but that's not necessarily a well-established fact, mostly an assumption. Still, it would stand to reason. SOSUS benefited greatly from cutting-edge research into acoustics that Bell Labs had been performing for other reasons, the Soviet Union probably didn't have the hydrophone technology or the undersea cable technology it relied on.
There's a more interesting answer if you want one, although this is decidedly a conspiracy theory with, I would say, "medium" credibility within the realm of conspiracy theories. Some believe that both K-129 and Scorpion were sunk by enemy action, K-129 having been sunk by an accidental collision with the Swordfish and Scorpion having then been torpedoed in retaliation. The story goes that the admiralty of both countries, agreeing this situation could rapidly escalate into an undesirable war, agreed to suppress information on the cause of both incidents. The Soviet search for K-129 and American search for Scorpion could both have been cover operations.
Yeah, it doesn't make total sense, and the evidence supporting this theory is a combination of circumstantial and recollections of people in their 80s. Besides, in the later sinking of the Kursk, Russian leadership immediately blamed a collision with a US submarine. But obviously the Russian political climate of 2000 was very different from 1968. It's a fun conspiracy theory.
A more interesting conspiracy theory is that K-129 was on a rogue mission to launch nuclear weapons on the US and was torpedoed by the US (once again perhaps by Swordfish, it was in the right place at the time) to prevent this after being tipped off by by the USSR. If that sounds a bit like the plot of The Hunt for Red October, well, it does. The evidence for this story is not nonexistent but it's pretty limited, and no one takes it very seriously.
Still, it gets at one of the oddities of K-129: the Soviet Union searched for it in its assigned patrol area, but the wreck was ultimately found far away from its assigned patrol area. I don't think anyone has a really good explanation for this. It was not at all typical for Soviet submarines to go off on their own, Moscow kept very tight control of them. So it seems that either Moscow didn't know where K-129 was (perhaps suggesting some kind of plot, whether of defection or rogue attack who knows), or they knew where it was and searched elsewhere to avoid showing their hand (suggesting K-129 was on some sort of very secret mission). I tend to suspect the latter is more likely, K-129 may have been ordered to leave its patrol area and approach the US as a show of force (this happened at other points in the Cold War) and when it was lost the search was conducted in the normal patrol area to avoid revealing that had happened. All indications are that SOSUS was successfully kept secret from the USSR for quite some time, although certainly not all the way until 1991.
Tom Clancy seems to have based The Hunt for Red October at least in part on rumors about K-129. Yeah, I watched too many submarine movies and read too many submarine books as a kid. What can I say, I had a middle-aged father.
See https://www.criticker.com/explain/ -- it works sort of like what you're suggesting. You rank movies from 0-100, which is different from rating them. Your percentile ranking scores are compared to other users' rankings, and then it can suggest movies that it thinks you will rank highly.
IMO the real problem with something as subjective as books or movies is that even completely honest, well-reasoned reviews are going to be all over the map. My review of a Pride and Prejudice movie is going to be maybe 3/10, but my wife would give it 7/10, while we have the opposite reactions to something like The Hunt for Red October.
I don't care about reviews from experts or the unwashed masses. I don't even really care about reviews that much -- I'm more interesting in ratings from people who like the same kind of stuff I do.
Some movies were political but the politics were far less polarised within the "west" than they are now. Some movies - e.g. "Red Dawn" or "the Hunt for Red October" portrayed a clearly black-and-white division between the "good" west and the "bad" east with the dividing line being formed by the national borders. Outside of academia there was not much support for the "red" side so these movies did not create an internal division, you either liked them or you thought they were mostly over the top but otherwise harmless action flicks. Movies like "The Colour Purple" or "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" were critical of the US but this criticism did not cause division because nearly everyone agreed with it and the movies themselves did not portray the issues as "systemic faults with current society". The few die-hard bigots who might have railed against these movies were ignored as being relics of the past.
How different it is today with movies which are not much more than thinly disguised moral lessons where the audience is lectured on issued of race, gender, "climate", environment, migration and more. The issues - whether real or imagined - are being portrayed as "current", "systemic" and "catastrophic", the "good" vs. "bad" divider goes straight through society where the "good" side is characterised by being "norm-critical" and in opposition to mainstream culture. Those who do not follow are portrayed as "bad" and labelled with a number of -isms and -phobias. Where earlier movies mostly portrayed "the other" - the "reds", the "filthy rich", the "criminals" - as being bad current "political" movies portray "us" as being ignorant, oppressive, wasteful, conservative "white" or "white-adjacent" bumpkins who really need to "be educated".
It wasn’t quite 40 years ago, but there’s a line in the film The Hunt for Red October (1990) that explicitly describes SOSUS as a submarine “warning net”. Knowing Tom Clancy, I’d guess there are similar references in the book (1984).
If it was meant to be a secret it wasn’t well-kept.
Here's one discussion in the book, clearly describing impellers in a tunnel. https://archive.org/details/huntforredoctobe0000clan_l6h7/page/56/mode/2up?q=tunnel
For example, it says the US "looked at this back in the early sixties and got to the model stage before dropping it. One of the things they discovered is that one impeller doesn’t work as well as several. Some sort of back pressure thing."
Wikipedia says, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_for_Red_October :
> The movie is a nearly faithful depiction of the novel even though there are many deviations, including Red October traveling up the Penobscot River in Maine to dry dock, the omission of the Royal Navy task force including Ryan's time aboard HMS Invincible, and the "caterpillar drive" being described as a magnetohydrodynamic drive system, essentially, "a jet engine for the water", rather than a drive powered by a series of mechanical impellers inside flow tunnels.
I recently re-read The Hunt For Red October, and what struck me was that there actually wasn't and mention of Magneto-hydrodynamic drive. As I recalled, the book describes a series of propellers in a duct. Certainly interesting for isolating sound, but it struck me as much more simplistic from the superconducting systems described in the movie.
No shade intended towards Mr. Clancy however. I got the impression that he was quite lauded for not simply describing tech (which other thriller writers did as well) but getting into the nuts and bolts of how they operated. That was what really set him apart.
Strongly disagree. Why two Orson Scott Card books of only nine? Surely Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" gives a better sampling of what science fiction can encompass.
Similarly, why two H. G. Wells books? Yes, both are classics, but if the goal is to read the classics of SF then Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" would again give a better sampling of SF history.
IMO, "Jurassic Park" is more a thriller with science fiction elements. (Another would be "The Hunt for Red October".) While the movie won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, I don't think the book received much in the way of SF award recognition.
I would think Liu's "The Three-Body Problem" or something else more recent than 1999 would also be more appropriate for a beginner than the many old books listed.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
I'd add The Princess Bride. In some ways the book is better than the movie, in other ways the movie is better than the book.
And in the case of The Hunt for Red October I like the movie better than the book.
Yeah I agree. Clancy movie adaptations seem to have all been downhill since Hunt for Red October. Arguably his books too, although Red Storm Rising is still my favorite (and probably impossible to make a good movie of, the scope is too large and Russia too competent.)
You must have read "The Hunt for Red October".
I'm told by ex-(Submarine Commander)s and ex-submariners that it's surprisingly accurate, and one even said that it's used in training. If you read it carefully enough you can plot the positions of the boats throughout.
Definitely better than the film, although the film is excellent.
This is wonderful! I can't help but to be reminded of the book (and excellent movie) The Hunt For Red October, where a [edit] "caterpillar" drive on The Red October sounds like seismic activity, but when sped up is clearly mechanical. This is not he same, I know, but it has the same vibe.
https://geohazards.earth.utah.edu/tones/BigArrowhead.html has a distinctly underwater sound to it.
Whoever thought to do this... Kudos to you! (And I... was never here...)
I don't know why you are going to such inordinate lengths to deny the obvious but that's your affair.
The facts are these and they are verifiable (based on unclassified public domain knowledge):
1. From various accounts, inertial navigation systems on modern submarines are phenomenally accurate and have been so since at least the 1970s. The absolute accuracy depends on (a) the initial calibration and the location of that calibration, (b) on the path or trajectory of the submarine (cumulative errors inherent in the inertial navigation system and charting errors, etc.) accumulated over the tour of duty; (c) unique/specific calibrations for certain operational requirements, locations etc. All this assumes the sub remains submerged and has no external calibration reference (but the fact that it remains submerged doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have the means to re-calibrate its inertial navigation—as it often does!).
2. The length of time a submarine can remain submerged and operate safely† on only its inertial navigation systems sans external calibration is usually classified but indications are that it can be months for nuclear submarines (again, much depends on operational requirements and the locations of those operations, the technical parameters of the inertial navigation, etc.).
† As discussed—excluding uncharted seamounts, etc. (whilst a rare event, we've now seen it happen twice within 16 years—the USS San Francisco being the first to collide with one).
3. However, the basic inertial navigation system is an open-loop system and thus subject to both long-term drift and long-term calibration imprecision—and other 'compensation' calibration stuff can only go so far in holding accuracy. Eventually, a submarine's inertial navigation system needs to re-calibrated. That said, in recent years, reports indicate newer inertial navigation technologies have led to even further substantial increases in open-loop accuracy. Obviously, the precision of this accuracy is classified.
4. Since the 1960s nuclear submarines have been able to communicate with the outside world whilst remaining submerged using VLF radio, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines. Years ago, I used to take an interest in this and I could detect the RF carriers from the high power transmitters (≈1MW) used to communicate with submarines on ordinary radio equipment but obviously the modulated data they contained was meaningless to me. I've now only a brief public domain knowledge of how these days, say, the US uses this and associated newer communication technologies for calibration but you don't have to too bright to know that using atomic clocks you can triangulate a position with considerable accuracy (as per GPS). Using geopositioning in conjunction with gravity gradiometry, etc. cannot only act as a backup but it can also improve the 'local' location picture/accuracy.
5. "Under #4, the first one is about navigation. Again, if you don't know somethings't there, then this doesn't help you. The second one is about detecting other submarines. This was an underwater mountain."
I cannot understand why you cannot picture this. If you can detect another submarine by its small, somewhat reduced local gravity signature then you can also easily detect an unknown or uncharted seamount by its hugely increased local gravity signature (rock being denser than seawater and it being much larger than any enemy submarine is ever likely to be (ipso facto, as the sub's gravimetric detection equipment is capable of detecting a comparatively small submarine then it must also have a detection sensitivity many times more than is necessary to detect a huge seamount). Moreover, a submariner can use the very specific signature of a known seamount to re-calibrate his sub's inertial navigation system—as no two seamounts would ever have exactly the same gravimetric signature (and if by some billions-to-one chance they ever did, then they wouldn't be anywhere near each other to cause confusion).
For example, say a submarine has not surfaced for months and its captain has orders to fire a missile on date xyz. Whilst he knows pretty much where he is from the sub's inertial navigation system, its drift over the several months the sub's been at sea is not precise enough for him to determine the precise location needed to launch the missile (and the inertial navigation system of the missile also has to be calibrated/to be precise). He cannot surface for fear of being detected so what does he do to re-calibrate? Simple, he heads for a seamount (or some other underwater phenomenon) whose location and gravimetric signature has already been properly charted during some earlier survey, and he uses the sub's inertial navigations system to get him into the near vicinity of said seamount—as it's still accurate enough to do that with ease. Moreover, the sub won't collide with the seamount as its precise location is now clearly visible on the sub's gravimetric equipment. As he already knows the EXACT location of the seamount, he now has the perfect means to recalibrate the inertial navigation system. At no time has the sub surfaced, nor has it broadcast its position, as both of its underwater navigation systems are completely passive.
6. The links I provided were a first-pass effort, and sure, it's dead easy to nitpick them as you've done. The fact remains that all the references I've provided are relevant in that they all refer to various technologies that are integral to both submarine geopositioning and undersea collision avoidance. Separating them out is about as stupid as saying 'I'm going to build a computer but with only CPUs—RAM and monitors are off the menu, I won't be using them'.
7. "All that lets us know it isn’t ‘child play’." I beg to differ, when a technology has been in use for going on 50 years and has been through multiple stages of evolution of over this time to the extent that now commercial operators are using it on a day-to-day basis on their undersea ROVs etc., then essentially it is child's play to the big players such as DARPA, the Military and so on (however, that's not to say, there aren't any remaining difficulties). What we currently know from public domain sources is that this technology is already very sophisticated and it's not just theoretically possible, as it's working in practice and it has done so for decades. One would have to very stupid not assume that it's now much more so (given it's highly classified nature). Did you actually take the time to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_gradiometry ?
"Gravity gradiometers
Lockheed Martin gravity gradiometers
During the 1970s, as an executive in the US Dept. of Defense, John Brett initiated the development of the gravity gradiometer to support the Trident 2 system. A committee was commissioned to seek commercial applications for the Full Tensor Gradient (FTG) system that was developed by Bell Aerospace (later acquired by Lockheed Martin) and was being deployed on US Navy Ohio-class Trident submarines designed to aid covert navigation. As the Cold War came to a close, the US Navy released the classified technology and opened the door for full commercialization of the technology. The existence of the gravity gradiometer was famously exposed in the film The Hunt for Red October released in 1990."
8. I'm not responsible for why so many are still in WWII mode and are only thinking of [the limitations of] active sonar. Perhaps the Military has been smarter than I've given it credit for, in that it seems to have managed to keep an understanding of this technology even out of the eyes of many techies.
I cannot believe there's any argument about this. There are literally thousands of references. Below, are links to the first few references that I found.
Note: you'll see that in the first link in item #5 the comment about the strategic nature of this information, that means don't expect to get how-to-do-it plans from the military but you can bet your house to a brick that the military is deeply involved in gravity detection (specifically because, like inertial navigation, it's silent and doesn't broadcast its presence).
Also note the dates, this stuff goes back to even before the 1970s, the technology is now very mature.
"Google only brings up gravity wave detectors."
See Google's patent in item #5.
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Links as requested:
1. General Information/Overview
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_anomaly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_gradiometry
https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/magnetic-and-gravity-methods-in-mineral-exploration
https://www.911metallurgist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Airborne-Gravity-Gradiometry-in-The-Search-for-Mineral-Deposits.pdf
http://www.ga.gov.au/pdf/RR0027.pdf
2. Commercial
https://www.geologyforinvestors.com/gravity-surveys/
3. Underwater
https://www.whoi.edu/cms/files/08oceans-1_41284.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0029801815002516
https://library.seg.org/doi/10.1190/geo2018-0090.1
4. Military specific
https://www.navysbir.com/n09_1/N091-092.htm [Note the comment re the strategic nature of this information.]
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/1012150.pdf
https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/the-hunt-for-red-october-movie-revealed-classified-information-about-u-s-submarines-because-tom-clancy-knew-his-stuff.html
5. Even Google has a patent!
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5339684A/en
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Edit: Just found this very specific reference too, but it's not free: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/tle/article-abstract/34/12/1498/136542/How-do-submarines-use-gravity-gradients-to-avoid
I'm not sure it isn't. It is naturally unpopular among USians to contemplate that they might not be perfect rulers of the world. But it is pretty obvious that one party rule is not a good idea. The US is bad enough with checks on its absolute power. Heaven forbid they should be unchecked.
That's not anti-American. The sentiment applies equally to everyone. Russia should not have complete control of the world. Nor should Holland or Iceland. The USA has way too much power and influence as it stands. Thank goodness there is some opposition to provide some balance.
USians watch a movie like "The Courier" or "Hunt for Red October" and applaud the courage and foresight of a man who was willing to be a traitor to the USSR in order to save the world. But they villify anybody who would be so treacherous as betray the USA. NATO missiles in Poland: good. Warsaw Pact missiles in Poland: bad.
Unproven vulnerabilities in Huawei equipment: unacceptable. Replace it all with American products proven repeatedly to be espionage vectors of the USA government: good.
I wonder if a post like this one will attract more interest from Chinese intelligence or from USA intelligence.
You play it on a table with miniatures or markers, or even on a big sheet of graph paper. You can even play it on a whiteboard. The rulebook gives various stats for your assets (ships, planes, missiles and weapon systems), and you roll dice for things like sensor detection (radar, sonar, etc), scoring hits and damage to the target. There might be modifiers to various dice roles for weather, countermeasures, equipment and troop quality, etc.
I played an early version a few times in the 80s, and read The Hunt for Red October the year it came out. Funnily enough I watched the movie last week, it really holds up.
RIP Sean Connery.. Hunt for Red October was a decent movie...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_for_Red_October_(film)#Filming
The film caused a minor sensation in the black projects submarine warfare technology community.[13][14] In one scene, where USS Dallas is chasing Red October through the submarine canyon, the crew can be heard calling out that they have various "milligal anomalies". This essentially revealed the use of gravimetry as a method of silent navigation in US submarines. Thought to be a billion dollar black project, the development of a full-tensor gravity gradiometer by Bell Aerospace was a classified technology at the time. It was thought to be deployed on only a few Ohio-class submarines after it was first developed in 1973.
I assumed that North would be 0 degrees, based on a scene from The Hunt For Red October "set course, 180" which was due south. A plot line from a movie with some accuracy in the real world. See kids, watching movies isn't all a wast of time.
The 30/45 degree differences were not difficult to discern. At least you didn't go for odd angles (I would have been tempted).
“A torpedo cannot be ‘command-detonated’ as seen in the movie Hunt for Red October.”
Why is this so? The wire controls seem sufficient.
Logan's Run is such a 70's scifi movie, but hey, Farrah Fawcett. Richard Jordan acted in this film and my favorite role he played was the Secretary of Defense in The Hunt for Red October "When I'm not kissin' babies, I'm stealing their lollipops."
Such a good film. It's one of a short list of films that I keep on my iPad for long flights and can watch over again at the drop of a hat. The tone, the dialog, and the casting all work so well. I don't know how well-known the actors in it were at the time, but for me it actually works better that they're not know very well-known (at least to me)--it helps preserve the suspension of disbelief not to be looking at Al Pacino or Sean Connery and trying to forget who they are. (Of course, that said, one of the other movies on my iPad is 'Hunt for Red October', so...)
> The hunt for red mercury
Play on 1990 movie title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_for_Red_October_(film)
One thing leads to another, and one ends up listening to the Hunt for Red October movie theme ...
Basil Poledouris - Hymn to Red October: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRG1UixHvos
I don't see the public interest angle here. This is merely entertainment. If even entertainment is something the government should be butting into because of unspecified "public interest" considerations, then what is outside the government's role?
Goodfellas, Dances with Wolves, Edward Scissorhands, Total Recall, Ghost, the Hunt for Red October, Back to the Future III, Pretty Woman, and the Godfather Part III were all released in 1990, 29 years ago. These were all created by a group of individuals, and studios spent millions of dollars paying those people to make those movies. The government had nothing to do with creating any of those movies. Why should the government be able to take those movies and release them for free?
No one got the reference. Unfortunate.
(for those looking, it's to the movie The Hunt for Red October)
>...so good that nobody needs to do such things anymore.
There is a lot of CGI that just looks fake. I would even say most, at least to me. I go back to Star Wars (ep 4). The physical models still look good. The original Blade Runner still looks good. I've also noticed that CGI movies look okay in the theater, but once they hit the high compression formats like Blu-ray or streaming, the CGI really becomes noticeable. The practical stuff still looks good in these formats. Go back and watch Hunt For Red October, and know that during the submarine underwater scenes are just physical models in rooms of smoke to simulate underwater. I really notice when they do 100% CGI characters like Spiderman and Hulk.
The book is fabulous - way better than the film, and I'm a huge fan of the film. The same is true of "The Hunt for Red October" and "The Englishman who Went up a Hill but Came down a Mountain".
There are other cases where the film is better than the book, but specifically those three favourite films of mine are genuinely better in the book version.
> This is not the greatest example because it's very rare that a story needs a chase scene to drive it forward. The end result will boil down to "they get away" or "they get caught" and both of these can be accomplished instantly, no full chase sequence required. Chase scenes are things you add to visual media because they're exciting. You never get them in books!
I disagree. A chase scene is a great way to build tension or provide a test of character, and maybe even a way to provide exposition. Using "The Hunt for Red October" (since I just watched that over the weekend), the first half of the film is essentially the main character chasing after a sub. It's not a fast-paced foot chase, but it provides a character test (how far he's willing to go to catch the sub), obstacles that are interesting when overcome, and provides an urgency to some of the exposition that's delivered at the film's start.
I'm fascinated by how this ended up with the same name as the fictional stealthy propulsion technology from the Hunt For Red October. They're both called "magneto hydrodynamic" propulsion.
The book was published in 1984. Was this widely theorized? Did Clancy speak to someone with non public information? Were the researchers at Duke fans of the book / movie? Did they just copy the name of his technology or did the fictional description of how it worked actually inspire their research?
Documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHOMRsHS6no
Compare with the interior as imagined in "The Hunt for Red October" :-)
Giant Bomb have been dabbling with this in their "Film & 40s" podcasts (more for entertainments sake than being well-informed though).
For anyone with a GB Premium account, links are:
Rocky IV - http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/film-40s-rocky-iv/1600-1151/
Hunt for Red October - http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/film-and-40s-the-hunt-for-red-october/1600-1303/
In the movie The Hunt for Red October, a sonar technician trying to track another submarine reports detecting "milli-gal anomalies." This caused a bit of a stir at the Navy because at the time, the use of gravitational sensors on submarines was thought to be a secret.
A friend's dad loaned me The Sum of All Fears when I was 11, and that was the first Clancy novel I read (Having seen the movie of The Hunt for Red October, I figured I'd enjoy it). Those 914 pages took me a couple weeks to read while relaxing in a recliner, especially since I was kind of OCD at that age about looking up every word I didn't understand in a massive dictionary that sat on my lap. After hearing about nukes throughout the 80s, the story felt to my young mind like it could happen any moment in real life.
All the other books clearly are written with (movie/video game) in the back of his mind, but that one was just straight prose.
His next four books were written before The Hunt for Red October came out in film form.
If you've never read it, this is as good a time as any to pick up a copy of The Hunt for Red October. I had never actually read it until three or four years ago (though I had seen the movie as a teen). It has held up remarkably well.
It is different, very different. Obama avoids blame. He's terrific at avoiding blame. E.g., at Harvard Law, he was editor of the Law Review but didn't write anything so never got criticized for writing anything. In the Illinois Senate, he voted "present" some huge number of times and, again, avoided any blame.
Reagan? He got blamed for Iran-Contra. Obama's not getting blamed for NSA, Snowden, Benghazi, Morsi, Syria, etc.
Obama is uniquely good at avoiding blame.
Also Obama is uniquely good at pulling together a coalition with the technique I described.
Obama managed to avoid any significant role or blame for the response to hurricane Sandy. W seemed to be involved in responding to Katrina and then took everything that went wrong in the neck.
I like the remark in the movie Hunt for Red October: "I'm a politician which means that I'm a liar and a cheat and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollypops. But it also means I keep my options open.". In other words, avoid taking a public position.
If a president has a vision or program he feels strongly about, then he will do all he can to push it, expend his political capital, and maybe get something done. But another approach is just to step back and keep fingerprints off things that might not work. In Obama's case, it also helps, maybe has been crucial, that long the MSM was on his side.
I actually like Hans Zimmer a lot more than John Williams - the latter has a very distinctive style that can seem very in-your-face, more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that best fits the film. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones are all recognizable as Williams soundtracks, even though they're very different films.
Zimmer seems to vary his music a lot more to fit the needs of the film - it's just universally good, it's not universally Zimmer. The Lion King is very different from Crimson Tide, which is very different from Gladiator, which is very different from The Dark Knight and Inception.
BTW, I think Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October, Wind) was another underrated film composer whose music is much better than his reputation.
Well, the story is a combination of typical archetypes retold with pretty pictures. That much I cannot argue about. And I think that what you are really saying by "the plot sucked" is "it's too archetype driven". I'm basing this on:
>I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious
Sure the characters ranged from a bit 2-d (the Col.) to well fleshed out (Neytiri (watch it again if you don't believe me)) and the acting ranged from "will probably win an award it was so good" Saldana to "thanks for showing up and picking up your paycheck" Weaver. But that's nothing different than you'll find in almost every movie -- the principles are fleshed out and the supporting cast is flat.
Why can't we have more 'smart' movies like Erin Brockovich/Schindler's List/Fight Club/District 9/Oldboy/etc. (archetypes of David vs. Goliath, Greed and Bullies) or The Incredibly True Story of Two Teenagers In Love/Léon/American Beauty/Mississippi Masala/South Pacific/Moulin Rouge/West Side Story etc. (Forbidden Love) or Lawrence of Arabia/Dune/Hunt for Red October/etc. (Lovable Turncoat)... you ask? And I'd counter that all of those are as archetype driven as any other well known flick (archetype stories provided in parens).
You see where I'm going with this. Even if you don't agree with all my movie choices as being "good" or "smart" you'll at least have to agree that most movies that are at least reasonably well known are pretty much based on a dissection or aggregation of common archetypes. How many times has Romeo and Juliet been retold almost verbatim? And by and large the audience enjoys these things and says "oh the plot was so good" when really, they are just a rehash of old story ideas. We even group movies into archetype driven categories "love story", "ghost story", "suspense", etc.
So yes, I was being "cute" with my notional art-house flick. But if you want to find something not driven by archetypes, where the artists consciously try to avoid those things, you have to go there, or to France or Italy perhaps. Here, http://www.imdb.com/chart/top this is the top 250 movies on IMDB not by dollars but by rating. How many of these are "smart" movies meaning "not a rehash of archetypes"? Very few if any.
It's pretty simple really, if you don't want your intelligence to be insulted (meaning you don't want an archetype driven story), you end up with a movie about a vapid cowgirl/model with giant thumbs or a movie director that can't focus on making movies because he's too busy with all his mistresses (which is actually just a retelling of the "guy with too many girlfriends archetype"). And given that non-archetype driven movies are typically poorly rated and attended by the open public, either you are particularly "smart" or those movies tend to suck.