Soviet submarine Scorpion

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Career
Laid down:	1972
General Characteristics
Displacement:	1952 tons surfaced, 2475 tons submerged
Length:	299 feet 6 inches
Beam:	24 feet 7 inches
Draft:	20 feet
Powerplant:	three Kolomna 2D42M 2000 hp diesel engines, three electric motors; two 1350 hp and one 2700 hp, one 180 hp auxiliary motor
Propulsion:	three propeller shafts, each with six bladed propellers.
Speed:	16 knots surfaced, 15 knots submerged, 9 knots snorkeling
Range:	20,000 miles surfaced at 8 knots, 11,000 miles snorkeling, 380 miles submerged at 2 knots
Endurance:	three to five days submerged
Depth:	300 meters (985 feet)
Complement:	12 officers, 10 midshipmen, 56 seamen
Armament:	ten 21-inch torpedo tubes, six forward and four stern

Scorpion (B-427) was a Projekt 641 podvodnaya lodka -- a Foxtrot-class diesel-electric attack submarine. (Note that some sources either treat podvodnaya lodka -- the standard Russian language word for "submarine," literally "underwater boat" -- as the name of the boat, or misspell it "povodnaya lodka," or both.) Her keel was laid at Sudomekh Shipyard of Leningrad. She was commissioned in 1972.

For twelve years she patrolled the Atlantic, protecting the ballistic missile submarine bastions of the Northern Fleet. In the mid-1980s she was partially retired to school boat status, training crews from Cuba, India, and Libya.

In 1989, Scorpion was returning to Vladivostok from Vietnam when it ran into a typhoon. A mechanical breakdown that could not be fixed in time prevented the sub from diving. The storm battered the boat mercilessly, destroying the light hull and damaging the ballast tanks and high pressure air bottles. Scorpion limped back to Vladivostok where it was repaired and refitted with a new light hull.

She was decommissioned in 1994. On 25 July 1995, she sailed from Vladivostok to spend nearly three years at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. She left Sydney Harbor on 31 May 1998 for Long Beach, California, arriving on 25 June and tying up next to RMS Queen Mary. On 14 July, she opened to the public as an exhibit.

References

Scorpion's Web page: http://www.queenmary.com/QMweb/html/sub.html