The two authors of this book have been involved in the design of submarines for the Royal Navy for upwards of thirty years, and have also been involved on and off in the teaching of submarine design for much of that time. They both have connections with Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Limited (VSEL) the only builders of submarines in the U.K., Louis Rydill as a design consultant and Roy Burcher as the VSEL Professor of Subsea Design and Engineering at University College London (UCL). Roy Burcher runs a postgraduate design course at UCL, which is attended by students from many countries.

With this background, we are only too well aware of the dearth of textbooks on submarine design and engineering. There are also relatively few technical papers on the subject. There was a seminal paper in 1960, published by the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers of the U.S.A., entitled Naval Architectural Aspects of Submarine Design by Arentzen and Mandel, which we regard as an outstanding contribution to the subject but, no doubt because of security issues involved in military submarine design and operation, that splendid opening up of the vistas made possible by the advent of nuclear propulsion for submarines has subsequently become largely closed off to view.

Yet there is still much about submarine design and engineering which can be said without risk of offending against security obligations. The course at UCL is, in fact, completely unclassified and is open to all prospective students with the appropriate qualifications.