French military engineers / DGA always go for the most reliable system, with the lowest maintenance, space and weight , either for the submarines or the fighter planes. No Dassault planes have a retractable fuel probe for that reason.



Even if a SSBN has a lot of space, if the need of a retractable towed array has been evaluated to have more drawbacks than advantages, the space could be used to add more food, more redundant systems, more noise reduction systems, ......


And yes French SSBN have Towed Array but not internal.


The US subs had snap on until the 70's, here some stories:



https://www.quora.com/Is-a-towed-arr...t-always-towed

From what I asked, the snap on procedure is done on the boomers while surfaced near l'Île Longue, and the specialized blog post indicates that a retrieval system was experimented on a Redoutable-class SSBN a few decades ago before the conclusion was reached that it was an unnecessary complexity considering the boomer's missions. These boats leave Brest, "dilute" themselves in the Atlantic and come back to Brest, all at creep speeds. The retrieval system is therefore deemed not required.

Update: Suffren's nuclear reactor has been activated successfully.

Good to hear. Physical launch of the reactor is an important step.

An observation on SSN build times.


https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...t_08.01.57.pngI

The line about Suffren is wrong, it seems. The boat was plagued by numerous delays due to the loss of some know-how by the builder in the time between Terrible and Suffren.