The effects of a fluid‐loaded spherical shell on the propagation to the farfield of an internally generated, transient acoustic pulse is obtained. The pulse is generated by a spherical transducer that is located concentrically within the shell and has a specified spatial and temporal velocity distribution. A shell theory that incorporates the effects of transverse shear and rotary inertia is used. The fluid between the transducer and the shell, and the fluid external to the shell, is described by the linear acoustic wave equation. The spatial dependence of the transmitted pulse is expanded in a series of spherical harmonics. The temporal dependence is determined by numerical inversion of the Fourier transformed solution. Computations are performed for axisymmetric transducer velocity pulses of realistically short duration. It is found that a steady‐state analysis is incapable of predicting the nature of the farfield pulse, since the applied waveform and the farfield waveform were dissimilar. The shell membrane breathing mode, shifted up in frequency from itsin vacuovalue because of the stiffness of the confined volume of fluid between the transducer and the shell, is found to dominate the farfield response.