The propellers on nuclear subs are powerful enough to ignore seaweed and almost anything else, it’s (edit: 100’s of thousands HP) rotating a multi story steel building with literally tons of momentum.
They do have divers which can get out without surfacing to deal with some problems, but Nuclear subs can move forward without the propeller.
Water is so dense those stubby wings you see on the side can when angled properly create forward thrust when the sub moves up or down which they can do repeatedly by adding and removing water from a ballast tank. Essentially acting like gliders who can swap gravity to keep going.
Everything I think about them. As you state, just the fuel pumps (that pump fuel at cryo temperatures) are hundreds if thousands of horsepower and are amazing fears of engineering on their own. Each piece of that engine is like that.
I had the immense privilege of seeing a few F1s in person recently in DC and I was not let down.
It probably isn’t millions of HP, 746MW is roughly equal to 1 million HP. Regardless, it’s still several hundred thousand horsepower driving the propeller, so your point still stands!
They do have divers which can get out without surfacing to deal with some problems, but Nuclear subs can move forward without the propeller.
Water is so dense those stubby wings you see on the side can when angled properly create forward thrust when the sub moves up or down which they can do repeatedly by adding and removing water from a ballast tank. Essentially acting like gliders who can swap gravity to keep going.