Arglebargle III posted:

Fangz is right, friendlies don't shoot Russian torpedoes. Call them and give them a friend-or-foe challenge so they spend their time comically thumbing through an English dictionary instead of evading torpedoes. 3

Magnetic North posted:

So the bowplanes ever respond? Or is that some sort of nautical term for "we're all dead" or something?

I'm not sure if you're in character here or serious, but bow planes freezing on a nuke boat is a big deal. (It's kind of that they're talking about the bow planes, since I think Ohios only have sail planes and tail planes.) Nukes mostly change depth with their planes and forward momentum rather than ballast. If the bow planes are stuck at a down angle, you would have to do an emergency blow and pray that it works. Even then you would be surfacing out of control.

An uncontrolled surface can be very dangerous. The USS Houston nearly sank when its snorkel valve failed, but it managed to surface by going up on the planes and "driving" to the surface with full engine power. But when they hit the surface at 20 knots or whatever, the boat breached and crashed back down, and all the water from the flooding rushed to the front and pulled the bow down before anyone could react. With the engine at full power the boat dived really hard and nearly sank itself again (the valve was still open). They managed to surface with an emergency blow and crash-reverse order, but had anything gone wrong with the tanks or the propeller at that point they would have certainly sunk.

It's kind of a specific scenario but I think it illustrates why surfacing an 18,000 ton submarine at high speed with no helm control can be dangerous.

(It also illustrates the need to check your electronics as often as possible. The Houston crew didn't know the snorkel valve was stuck open because the sensor failed and it showed as closed on their boards. The water pouring out of the ventilation system must have come as quite a shock.)