HMS Astute: Royal Navy's world-beating £1.2bn nuclear submarine What caused this four-year delay? The end of the Cold War and the gap between designing the Trafalgar class submarines meant a lot of nuclear submarine-building experience had disappeared, and contractor BAE Systems struggled with Astute's computer-aided design. Eventually, in 2003, the Ministry of Defence had to promise more money and help was enlisted from US submarine builder Electric Boat, owned by General Dynamics. So finally, in November 2009, Astute started 18 months of sea trials. Rear Admiral Simon Lister, the Navy's director general of submarines, insists Astute will be an "asset" before the end of that period. The Astute class submarines are built at BAE System's huge yard at Barrow, which employs 5,000 people in the Cumbrian town. The company and the Navy have an order from the Ministry of Defence for a fourth boat, HMS Audacious, and are in negotiations over numbers five and six. Seven Trafalgar class submarines are due to be withdrawn over the coming years, and seven Astute vessels were planned to replace them. During the Cold War, submarines were used to tap telephone cables, and at present, there is a British submarine somewhere "east of Suez" every day of the year. HMS Astute has the capacity to send out a launch and recover personnel, although for security reasons neither BAE or the Navy would go into detail. There is also an access hatch for special forces troops. The "quantum leap" in Astute's capability also has a more human side. One of the benefits of the submarine being so much bigger than its predecessors is that her crew of 98 men will be the first in the Navy to have their own beds. Submariners at present work round the clock and have to "hot bunk," or share a bed with someone on the opposite shift pattern, one sleeping while the other one works. But conditions are still hardly luxurious. The captain is the only man who has his own room and wash-hand basin. The bunks for everyone else are stacked three high, with the middle bed the favoured choice - the top one is harder to get in to and the bottom one means being close to people's feet, which after 90 days without fresh air is not a desirable place to be. Each submariner has one small locker to keep all his worldly goods in during the three-month tours. The invention of the Sony Reader electronic book has transformed the life of one bibliophile submariner, who previously filled his tiny locker with novels and kept his clothes under his mattress. There are five showers and five toilets for the sailors. Astute is a huge improvement, but it will still be a special kind of person who can live on a submarine. A final piece of information that might disappoint devotees of Second World War films - the Astute is the first British submarine not to use an optical periscope. Instead of using what one of Astute's submariners described as a pair of glasses on the end of a pole, fibre-optic cables will stream footage down to TV screens.