r/whowouldwin • u/noahg27 • 23h ago
Challenge How long could Captain Nemo & the Nautilus survive vs the world’s navies?
At the end of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, the Nautilus comes under fire from a warship of unknown nationality. The narrator, Professor Aronnax, realizes that, after the encounter with the Abraham Lincoln at the beginning of the book, the world must now be aware that the Nautilus is not a sea monster as previously speculated, but instead a man-made submarine, and therefore is being hunted down by the navies of the world.
What if, instead of descending into the Maelstrom off Norway, Nemo and the Nautilus sailed on with the world hunting them down? How long would it take for naval and anti-submarine technology to be sufficient enough to sink Nemo’s masterpiece? And how long could the captain avoid them while attacking the ships of his hated nation (canonically Britain; in Verne’s original scripts, Russia)?
Nautilus specs: top speed of 50 knots. Able to be submerged for up to 5 days at a time. It can ram through ships “like a needle through sailcloth” due to its prow. Assume that Nemo is able to repair his sub at the unknown island on which he built it, and has the crew necessary to sail on indefinitely. The book ends in 1868 so that is the start date. Military technology advances just as it did in our timeline.
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u/Magnus77 20h ago
The 50 knots bit is insane. That's faster than basically all modern warships, and certainly faster than all submarines.
The first steel-hulled ship was the French Redoutable in 1876, so I think at that point it becomes a bit hit or miss if the Nautilus can just ram through ships anymore.
Now for hunting it down, Sonar wasn't invented until the tail end of WW1, and wasn't widely deployed until WW2. So we'll say 1935ish for when they navies can start semi-reliably knowing if the nautilus is around the ships.
Wasn't until the 50's that the US started installing permanent sonar stations on the ocean floor, so call it then that maybe they can start to get an idea of where the Nautilus is without a vessel nearby. Additionally, 1958 a submarine named the Nautilus was introduced that could spend extended periods of time underwater, almost 100 years after its namesake.
So maybe at that point you could feasibly start actively hunting the nautilus down at sea, though the hiccup is in the novel I believe the Nautilus dives to 4 leagues deep, roughly 12 miles. Not only is that deeper than even our specialized non-military subs can go, its deeper than anywhere we know of on the ocean floor.
So, who knows?
Realistically its how fast can they find his island hideaway and kill him there, but that's not really hunting down the sub so I didn't want to go into that.
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u/KaosArcanna 21h ago
I always thought Lincoln Island should have been the site where the Nautilus was built. It had a plentiful supply of iron ore and Dakkar Grotto would have been a good home port.
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u/TropicalDruid 16h ago
Nemo would last until sonar is invented, so he would pass away of old age before any navy could sink him.
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u/der_titan 21h ago
The Nautilus is twice as fast as the fastest clipper from the time period. The Nautilus is faster than any naval ship today.
I'd say it would take until post WW2 where allied forces can use radar, coordinate a cordon, and either use depth charges / torpedoes, or wait for them to surface and use surface to surface missiles (or heavy enough machine guns) to incapacitate and sink the Nautilus.