HMS Torbay (S90): Trialling a Blue Coat of Paint

The Fourth of Her Class

HMS Torbay was the fourth of the seven Trafalgar-class nuclear fleet submarines, and the fifth Royal Navy vessel and second submarine to carry the name Torbay, fitted with a Rolls-Royce PWR1 nuclear reactor and notable as the first submarine of her class equipped with the new SMCS NG command system.

She was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 3 December 1982, launched on 8 March 1985 and commissioned on 7 February 1987, and she spent her working life based at Devonport. The Trafalgars were the Royal Navy's second generation of nuclear hunter-killers, quieter than the Swiftsures before them and built around the idea that a submarine's most important weapon is its sonar. HMS Trafalgar led the class and HMS Triumph outlasted every one of them.

The name is a considerable one to be given. HMS Torbay (N79) was the wartime boat commanded by Anthony Miers, who took her into Corfu harbour after a convoy, waited there overnight among the enemy and fought his way out again, and was awarded the Victoria Cross for it. Following that is a hard brief for any submarine, and the modern Torbay went about it in a way that would have baffled her predecessor entirely.

The First Warship to Go to Sea on Windows

SMCS NG deserves rather more than its acronym. The Submarine Command System is the machine that takes in everything the boat can hear and see, builds a picture of what is around her, and works out the firing solution for her torpedoes. Its next-generation version was a rebuild of that system on top of Microsoft Windows, and Torbay was the boat it went into first. That made her the first Royal Navy vessel ever to put to sea with her fighting system running on a commercial desktop operating system, a distinction the press could not resist and promptly labelled Windows for Warships.

It sounds like an accident waiting to happen and it was not. The point of it was cost and obsolescence: bespoke naval computing had become ruinously expensive to maintain and impossible to upgrade, while commercial hardware and software got cheaper and better every few years. The trials in Torbay went well enough that the Ministry of Defence put contracts to BAE Systems to refit the system into most of the rest of the submarine force, the ballistic missile boats included. The rollout finished in 2008, and at one point the entire command system of HMS Vigilant was ripped out and replaced in eighteen days. Whatever else Torbay did, a good deal of the Royal Navy's submarine fleet fights today on a system that was proved in her.

An Unusual Experiment

In 2006, Torbay took part in a notably unusual trial, having her hull repainted blue in place of the Royal Navy's traditional black, an experiment aimed at improving her ability to avoid detection from the air, a small but telling example of how even something as basic as paint colour could become a subject of serious naval research.

The reasoning behind it is better than the anecdote. Royal Navy submarines had been painted black for generations, essentially because that is what submarines had always been, and somebody finally got round to testing whether it worked. It did not. Research found black to be about the worst colour available for a boat trying not to be spotted from the air, because a black hull under clear water reads as a hard dark shape against a lighter background. It had mattered less in the North Atlantic, where the water is murky and grey and nothing much is visible from above at any depth. It mattered a great deal more once the Navy's work moved to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, where the water is clear enough to see a long way down.

So Torbay left Devonport on a six-month deployment in a carefully chosen shade of blue, and was looked at from the air, from the land and from the sea to find out whether it helped. She was eventually repainted in the traditional dark scheme, which suggests the answer was not a resounding one, but the idea did not die: HMS Trenchant came out of a long refit in 2017 wearing dark blue. There is something quietly pleasing about a navy spending real money to establish that the most famous thing about submarines, that they are black, was a habit rather than a decision.

A Long Working Life

Torbay completed a refuel and modernisation in February 2001, and in May 2011 took part in Exercise Saxon Warrior alongside the American carrier USS George H. W. Bush.

She ran aground in the Eastern Mediterranean in April 2009, and underwent extensive revalidation and maintenance at Devonport Royal Dockyard between 2011 and 2013, a period that also saw a fire break out aboard her in 2013.

Two things about that stretch of her career are worth adding. In 2008 she went back to sea with the Block IV Tomahawk, the longer-ranged version of the cruise missile, which gave her the ability to strike a target on land up to a thousand miles away from a position nobody could see. And the grounding was not announced at the time. It surfaced in a written answer in the Commons in November 2010, a year and a half after it happened, which is a fair illustration of how little of what these boats do reaches the public in the ordinary course of events, including the things that go wrong.

The End of Her Service

Although originally scheduled for retirement in 2015, Torbay received a two-year life extension through further maintenance work. She entered Gibraltar Naval Base flying her paying-off pennant on 6 June 2017 and was formally decommissioned at Devonport on 14 July 2017, closing out more than three decades of service for one of the Royal Navy's longest-serving nuclear submarines.

The paying-off pennant she flew into Gibraltar is worth explaining, because it is one of the few naval traditions that is also a measurement. A ship coming home to decommission flies a long streaming pennant from her masthead, and by custom it runs to roughly a foot for every year she has been in commission, sometimes with an extra allowance for the length of the final commission. Torbay commissioned in February 1987 and paid off in July 2017, so hers measured out thirty years and five months of service, most of it spent somewhere nobody was told about.

Thirty years is a long life for a nuclear submarine and she got two of them as a late reprieve, having been due to go in 2015. That extension was not generosity. The Astutes meant to replace the Trafalgars were running years behind, and the older boats were kept going because there was nothing else to hold the line with. The same pressure that gave Torbay two extra years is why HMS Triumph was still in service long after every one of her sisters had gone.