Poster submarine Swiftsure class Royal Navy

The Swiftsure class is the Royal Navy's third class of nuclear submarines powered by a British nuclear reactor.

The six units of this class, built at Barrow-in-Furness by the Vickers Shipyard, served from 1974 until 2010.

It is the first class of submarines to abandon propeller propulsion for the hydrojet, depicted on this poster. Only HMS Swiftsure, first in the class, was not equipped with it.

83 meters long for a tonnage of 4,900 tonnes when diving, they could dive up to 400 meters.

These submarines were equipped with three main types of weaponry: torpedo Tigerfish or Spearfish, Harpoon missiles and even Tomahawks from the late 1990s.

They are complementary, and more or less replaced by the Trafalgar class submarines, which are a major evolution of the Swiftsure, and especially by the Astute class, much more modern.