B-515, Soviet submarine museum at St. Pauli Fischmarkt, Hamburg, Germany
The vessel is a Soviet submarine now preserved as a museum ship at St. Pauli Fischmarkt in Hamburg. The craft belongs to the Tango class and features six torpedo tubes in its forward section.
Built at the Krasnoye Sormovo yard in Nizhny Novgorod in 1976 in eight months, B-515 served with the Soviet Northern Fleet. Between 1980 and 1984 it made several patrols in the Mediterranean and visited Havana in October 1985. It was placed in the fleet reserve in 1998 and decommissioned in April 2002. Investors then bought it and had it towed to Hamburg, where it became a museum ship.
Visitors walk through the command center with its periscopes and the narrow bunks where the crew slept during months-long underwater missions. The original fittings show how the men spent their shifts below the surface and shared the limited space.
You board the submarine through a narrow ladder and move through tight corridors between the compartments. The spaces are low and in many places you need to watch your head or bend down.
The submarine's hull carries a six-centimetre-thick rubber coating that was applied to make sonar detection harder. During a dive, temperatures above 40 °C were measured on board and above 60 °C in the engine room, despite a ventilation system meant to keep conditions bearable.
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