NATO reporting names for submarines

Cold War Soviet submarine classes were named after letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet — Whiskey, Foxtrot, Victor — assigned as the classes were identified, in no alphabetical order, with Roman numerals for successive variants (Delta I through Delta IV) and descriptive tags for conversions (Whiskey Long Bin). The Soviet project numbers behind them were classified or confusing, so the alphabet names became the West's common currency.

By the 1980s the alphabet was exhausted and new designs received names drawn from Russian words or places — Akula, Typhoon, Severodvinsk — occasionally colliding with the real Soviet names: NATO's Akula is Project 971 Shchuka-B, while Akula is what the Soviets called the class NATO named Typhoon. Chinese submarine classes follow a different convention entirely: they are named after Chinese dynasties — Han, Xia, Song, Jin, Yuan.

One lane per naming convention and one dot per class, placed on the year the lead boat entered service. The phonetic alphabet carries the whole Cold War; the Russian-derived names take over as the alphabet runs out in the 1980s, and the Chinese dynasties are almost all post-2000.