A full-fledged member in good standing of the AAA*, right? I bet he could tap out 75 wpm in Morse Code with his class ring.
*Annapolis Alumi Association
Or the captain not knowing how to use the toilet.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2011/04/0414toilet-malfunction-sinks-u-boat/
Thanks for that. 
The series I’m making is still developing, they are mostly just short notes in cards right now, but I have put some short episodes that I had in my mind in the writing contests that are regularly made at the SDMB:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15058572&postcount=8
Kinda embarrassing, but that is really a first draft (and that is a perfect example of why I need an editor, the fact that the rules tell you it has to be new writing and done in 60 hours is really a challenge for someone that has English as a second language) and completely original as one has to follow a subject, and specific words, sometimes the restrictions match the ideas I have only thought about, but sometimes I have to completely create new characters and situations, not complaining though, as the contest is forcing me to start what I should had done years ago. Incidentally a few posters that have liked that and other tales from that universe already have figured out that they are not going to be regular books, but sci-fi comics with anime ideas like omnipresent work ethic in the background and their tendency to portray technology sympathetically and with a little bit of darkness.
But I’m digressing, the short episode there happens after the submarine incident, It will be much longer than what you see there. (and edited to death) I can only say that later one of the sisters does organize a rescue of the submarine that fortunately was not in deep waters.
This is funny I bet no one believed that story in Germany after the war lol
Well that happened on a USN diesel boat too back in the early 60’s, but this one was in port at Ballast Point sub base in San Diego and it was late at night and the below decks watch didn’t think anyone would be using the head in the middle of the night … so he goes back to maneuvering to blow the sanitary tanks and he was too lazy to put the sign on the officers head way up forward that he was blowing sanitary tanks.
The captain gets up in the middle of the night to go to the head and you guessed it while the sanitary tanks were being blown using high pressure air and no sign on the officers head the captain goes through all of the routine of flushing which is a lesson in itself never to be forgotten and wham right in the face goes not only his waste material, but the entire contents of the sanitary tanks.
That man is still standing watch on a pier somewhere out there in an old scrap yard probably. The captain was mad as all get out as anyone would be, but not as mad as the machinist mate on my old nuke sub. Seems the valve on the head sanitary tank got stuck and he had to put on scuba gear while in the middle of a patrol and go down inside the sanitary to see what had stuck the valve from closing.
He comes back up with a ball point pen that someone (probably a nuc or a electronic tech) had been wearing in the pocket of his poopy suit (you don’t have to ask why sub sailors called it a poopy suit do you?) and when he bent over to flush the head the pen fell in.
So they hose the poor machinist mate down and his cussing can still be heard something about whoever it was was going to have to buy him a lot of beers to make up for it.
…just out of curiosity, what was the rationale for running at periscope depth at that time and place? Some tactical or technical advantage? Just personal preference?
Which changes the question to: Can a submarine turn right side up?
No.
Sneaking into the main fan room with a bottle of ammonia and a ball peen hammer?
The very advanced (for its day) Civil War ironclad USS Monitor had a complicated flush toilet belowdecks which, an officer reported in his journal, once stinkily drenched a man who turned the knobs in the wrong order. His curses echoed throughout the ship.
Wolf189’s conclusion that an inverted submarine is effectively doomed is correct; however, his statement that modern submarines are trimmed with the main ballast tanks (MBTs) is not. As I stated back in Post #9, the MBTs are the only ballast tanks open to sea on the bottom, and when a submarine is submerged, they are completely full of water. The submarine’s buoyancy is trimmed with the variable ballast tanks (VBTs), which are sealed tanks not open to sea.
Indeed, the valves on the top of the MBTs are periodically cycled (opened and shut again) periodically when submerged to ensure that they stay full of water. (A bubble of air in the tanks might have worked its way out of a corner, or some air from the high pressure air tanks might leak by, displacing some water).
Also, if the MBTs were damaged while the sub is submerged, you would not want a dramatic change in buoyancy. This is important for a vessel that is to be taken into combat.
In any event, I’m having trouble picturing a situation in which a submarine could invert in the first place. For one thing, like any other large vessel, a submarine has many tons of fixed lead ballast along the keel to keep it upright. Also, modern military submarines are huge vessels that maneuver like any other large marine vessel. Think “cruise ship”; not “acrobatic airplane.” A submarine certainly can’t invert itself, and anything external that could possibly invert a large military submarine is likely to sink it in the process.
We were in sonar at the time that we noticed on our repeaters that the boat had been at 63’ for a long, long time. We stand 6 hours on watch and 12 hours off watch.
So the sonar supervisor goes out to the conn and asked why are we at periscope depth for hours? The OOD says, “captains orders”
So I don’t really have answer for you due to the separation of officers and enlisted men and the wardroom and the crews mess are also separated, but you should’ve been with us on the next patrol after that captain took off for Colorado we get another one (really nice one this time) and we are just doing our thing cruising close to Italy around some big island at 200’ doing 4kts real slow like always before stealth was invented lol
and wham a very loud metal to metal sound comes not just over sonar, but the entire boat could hear this noise. It scrapped down the entire port side. I know because I was in the crews head facing aft when the noise started. I was off the pot before the sound got amidships and running up the ladder two decks up to sonar.
I open the door and the sonar operator is looking at me and turning on the big reel tape recorder at the same time. Just one problem the tape recorder is suppose to be on all the time, but it wasn’t and at the same time every compartment is reporting the sounds against the hull.
The captain wants to know what it is and sonar can’t give him an answer. The captain has the navigator mark the spot on the chart, plus he has to put all of this in his log. The captain then orders the ship to turn around and go to periscope depth and go back to the same spot we had this unusual contact. I suppose you could call it a USO (unidentified submerged object).
Sonar/Conn “report all contacts” …
Conn/Sonar “Making a sweep around” “Hold no contacts sir”
Sonar/Conn “any biologics” …
Conn/Sonar “No sir” (meaning no whales or porpoises or fish of any kind)
We stay in the area a while, but nothing there. We come back to Rota, Spain FBM sub base back in the 60’s and 70’s probably no longer there due to longer range submarines missiles now reach 4,500 miles to our old 2,500 mile range. We had two crews blue and gold.
We return to port and send a diver down from the sub tender and sure enough there is a scratch down our entire port side. Our crew returns home for three months off and during our off duty time we are not allowed to have any confidential information discussed at our level of just sonarman.
We return to the ship in Rota, Spain three months later after the gold crew’s patrol and the first thing we ask is, “what in the hell was that noise” They had sent the tape to Washington for analyzes and the report came back, “own ships noise”
We of course know different , but by the time the sonar operator turned on the high speed big reel tape recorder the noise was already back by engineering.
What was it?
Well, I’m glad you asked that question, because you see we also wondered what it could be and the best guess was that it was an old ship with water tight doors rigged when she was sunk during WWII in the Med and is probably still floating around at 200’ with one big air bubble inside her.
I just hope no other submarine runs into what we ran into …
PS Mr Quatro can’t lie 
I guess the question is a bit like “How many submarines can reach the bottom of the Marianas Trench?”
All of them, of course.
Seriously? With that last line I don’t know if you’re pulling our legs or not!
And that’s the true mark of any good sailor or submariner!!!
And this one’s a no shitter…
A fine example of the classic sea story. Well executed.
That’s one of the fun things I miss about the Navy, amid so much other stuff I don’t miss at all.
Alright, I’m going to ask the question as an Engineer. Yes, an Engineer. My qualifications for this question? I’ve been through several simulators that involve an MRAP rolling over, and all sorts of shit flying all over the place. It’s a bad day when that happens. So, the question:
“Isn’t shit on a boat designed to be strapped down [close to the keel] to ensure stability?”
I mean, isn’t your machinery, equipment, reactor, gearboxes, etx. made and fuckin’ bolted down in such a way to ensure you can’t flip the boat inadvertently (and even ad-vertently)?
Tripler
I may be Air Force, but I know what a ‘boat’ is.
Yes, all of the machinery, etc. is bolted down (on specialized mounts) so that nothing large should come loose.
The small stuff (pots, pans, tools, etc.) is also supposed to be stowed and/or strapped down. That’s why a submarine conducts large up and down angles (“angles and dangles”) when first putting to sea, because people tend to get lax about this in port.
As to your second question, as I stated in my last post here:
So, with that being said, the rest of the discussion is that if a submarine did somehow invert without sinking, is that it is pretty much screwed at that point. The reactor and power plant will not function inverted; the electrolyte in the battery will empty out, and the main ballast tanks cannot be blown inverted. Finally, there are no escape trunks on the bottom of the hull.
Now, a submarine that “merely” did a barrel roll somehow would be in a bad situation (reactor and power plant out of of commission and battery probably shot, so the sub would be dead in the water with complete loss of electrical power), but they should be able to conduct an emergency blow at that point using high pressure air.
P.S. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a large military submarine doing an Immelmann turn is laughable. Again, think “cruise ship”; not “acrobatic airplane.”
Great story, Quatro. Better yet if true.
Yes, thank you it’s true … 120 other men on board that day probably tell the same story at reunions and family picnics and of course bars like the Horse and Cow.
As for Tripler’s thought that everything is tied down … sort of but the supplies have to go somewhere. The food is not tied down, the cooks would have real problems with the deep fry machine, movies in the movie locker would be everywhere and torpedo’s just sit on cradles ready to load in the tube on an automatic loader.
The supply officer stuffs supplies everywhere around the missile tubes and in every space that would hold a bunch of ‘O’ rings. I don’t know why they use so many 'O" rings, but they do. We still would replace things just to see if it would work again in Sonar so we were just as guilty at waking up the supply petty officer. How he knew where everything was stored was a miracle of forethought all written down before computers.
One more story and then I have to go … as you all well know a submarine can’t see where it is while submerged. Sure we have sonar for listening to other contacts and we have charts to mark where we were, but before GPS all we had was a celestial navigation system called SIMS. The missiles had to know where they were in order to go where they were targeted to go, right? That’s simple enough to understand, but everything is based on time, the correct time that is and the correct time was factored in by a piece of electronic equipment located in the ET section of the boat behind the conn right before you go into the upper missile compartment. It had a little desk like a modern sailboat has a little chart table and this is where the navigator would sit and drink his coffee and calculate all of the problems of where we were and where we were going … with me so far?
So he’s sitting there doing his thing kicking his feet under the this small chart like table when his foot makes contact with the piece of electronic equipment that keeps time for the SINS equipment. His foot dislodges the plug plugged into a regular wall socket and wham everything goes off the line, alarms sound and he is up shit creek without a paddle.
We meaning the entire submarine no longer knows where it is and if we had of received a message from the President of the United States to launch missiles we could not have done our job.
The simple solution was to come up to periscope depth and take sighting on the stars by using the old fashioned methods of sailors for years and years and then radio could get a message for Greenwich mean time too for everything to match. There is even a way to tell where we are by depth recorder, but that’s too complicated.
We all laughed at this piece of equipment so important to our mission just being plugged into the wall so to speak. They of course hand wired it as soon as we came back into port.
I have so many of these true stories to tell that I can’t lie, but back to a submarine doing a roll over … if a Russian torpedo was coming at us we could do a cork screw just like the trick in Red October to knock the fish off it’s course of echo ranging, but the boat can’t do a roll over unless it was going to be hit anyway that would be an option worth considering. All depends on how smart and how quick the captain is.
That is indeed an awesome story, one question. Couldn’t you have used active sonar? I understand subs don’t like to do this because it give’s away your position. In these circumstances though, you’ve hit something, can’t hear a thing on passive sensors, wouldn’t (in a non-wartime situation) the sensible thing to do be to light the area up (metaphorically) and see what was around you.