Astuteaphilia

I love the British Navy. The Royal Navy has a little bit of everything the American Navy has, but on a very scaled-down magnitude. It does not seem likely that this will continue for long, as the proud Royal Navy will be cutting back drastically to save money, alongside the rest of the armed services of Great Britain. Despite that, the Royal Navy has, in my lifetime, become the only Navy to sink a surface ship with a nuclear submarine. They have also been the only post-WWII navy to conduct an amphibious invasion completely unsupported by other land forces.

They also have far superior ship names when compared to our navy. A shining example of this is the Astute class of nuclear attack submarines, pictured above. The names are Astute, Artful, Ambush, Audacious, Agamemnon, Ajax (again with the Greek, but they were mighty kings, at least), and Anson (not intimidating, but the man the boat is named for circumnavigated the globe by sail power, so I think it's fine). We in America are now naming ships after battles, which is mildly OK, and states, which is lame, and every single president, which is really lame. Our lone bright spot is the littoral combat ship, and even that is going sour with the Fort Worth and Coronado.
I found the picture above on Google Images, and is very revealing. The Brits apparently eschew the domes that the United States puts on the bow of its submarines. There are also six torpedo tubes, which is a bunch, and some attempt seems to be made to balance the system pressure, based on the overall layout. The extensive use of superstructure is surely expensive, heavy, and costly to maintain, but it is a great environment for putting large mechanisms such as the bow planes seen in the top pictures. A fine looking ship, but unfortunately for the Brits, submarines are not so great as scotch when on the rocks.