> Of course, that takes some chutzpah, you wouldn't see Cameroon doing that to the US or something.
Well, not so much chutzpah as the ability to project force, which the US has and Cameroon hasn't.
Now I consider it, I'm having a hard time coming up with a space-SF universe which has a submarine analog.
Submarines can be considered stealth cruisers, sure, but only in the commerce-raiding role -- admittedly this was a major preoccupation of cruisers in the Age of Sail, but less so afterward, with submarines taking over most of the role by the time of World War I.
Cruisers do a lot of other jobs that a submarine can't, though, as for example the projection of force. And, vice versa, fleet ballistic missile submarines exist precisely because they can provide an inherently stealthy platform for nuclear missiles, a capability no surface ship can match.
In short, the submarine is a highly specialized type of ship whose existence and role arises from a very specific combination of capabilities and requirements, and which I think probably has no generic sf analog simply because the nature of (fictive) space combat differs from that of wet-naval combat fundamentally enough that no close analog has the opportunity to arise.
"I'm having a hard time coming up with a space-SF universe which has a submarine analoG"
Klingons in Star Trek have cloaking devices that allow ships to operate slowly and invisibly, but require them to reveal their position to fire weapons.
That's fairly close to a submarine, I would say (the match would be better if they could do, say, warp 1, instead of no warp at all)
More of a submersible than a submarine, since they don't cruise under cloak, and really only in the TOS era -- "Balance of Terror" has Enterprise and the cloaked Romulan ship in almost exactly the relative positions you'd expect a WWII heavy cruiser and submersible to occupy. (The Klingons and Romulans share cloaking technology; IIRC, the former are said to have bought it from the Romulans in exchange for modern ships, which is also why both Romulans and Klingons are shown to use the "Bird of Prey" spaceframe.)
By the TNG/DS9 era, they've improved on the technology so that ships are shown to cruise at warp under cloak, and cloak-capable ships are shown to hold their own, without needing to cloak, against their cloakless opposite numbers. As such, they're not really any longer in the submarine/submersible role (since a surfaced submarine is easy meat for anything with naval guns); if anything, they're more like a (nonexistent) submersible cruiser, in that they can conceal themselves without needing to compromise other capabilities to achieve it.
Well, not so much chutzpah as the ability to project force, which the US has and Cameroon hasn't.
Now I consider it, I'm having a hard time coming up with a space-SF universe which has a submarine analog.
Submarines can be considered stealth cruisers, sure, but only in the commerce-raiding role -- admittedly this was a major preoccupation of cruisers in the Age of Sail, but less so afterward, with submarines taking over most of the role by the time of World War I.
Cruisers do a lot of other jobs that a submarine can't, though, as for example the projection of force. And, vice versa, fleet ballistic missile submarines exist precisely because they can provide an inherently stealthy platform for nuclear missiles, a capability no surface ship can match.
In short, the submarine is a highly specialized type of ship whose existence and role arises from a very specific combination of capabilities and requirements, and which I think probably has no generic sf analog simply because the nature of (fictive) space combat differs from that of wet-naval combat fundamentally enough that no close analog has the opportunity to arise.