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Good thread idea. USS Squalus was a WWII-era submarine, launched in September of 1938. She was overhauled in the yard a year later, and started doing a series of test dives off of New Hampshire. Subs of that era ran on diesel engines on the surface, with the engines fed via the main induction pipe, which leads to the outside of the hull. When diving, the main induction valve closes that pipe, so water doesn't flood into the engine rooms and kill everybody. There are a bunch of other valves as well, but that's a really big one. Anyway, there's a board of lights in the control room, called the Christmas Tree because it has a light for each valve: if the light's green, it's closed and it's safe to dive. If it's red, valve's open. So on the 19th test dive, May 23 1939, they look and check that the christmas tree is all green, and it is, and they dive. 50 feet down and the forward and aft engine rooms are both flooding, because the main induction valve failed. They perform an emergency blow of the ballast tanks, but the engine spaces are the biggest internal spaces in the ship, there's just too much water being taken on board, and at this point the aft torpedo room and the living spaces have also flooded and 26 men have already drowned. The ship settles to the bottom, 240 feet down, with 33 crew still alive. Guy leading the rescue mission is named Swede Momsen, he knows a thing or two about diving and designed the underwater escape devices that all subs carry, it's called the Momsen lung. He also had a big part in the design of the diving bell the Navy uses for the rescue. The USS Falcon makes it to the site on the morning of May 24, and over the next 13 hours all 33 survivors are rescued. The boat was eventually raised and rechristened as the USS Sailfish, served 12 patrols during the war, and sold for scrap in 1948.
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Jun 14, 2016 19:29
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Delivery McGee posted:I had a whole loving novella typed up about S-5, which had a similar problem, and then my computer randomly rebooted and it's all gone (I was asking friends to copyedit it, another fifteen seconds and it'd've been safe on Pastebin or Google Docs. I won't post about it if nobody else does! The one that freaks me out is the HMS Thetis. Was on initial sea trials in 1939, and they were trying to dive the boat, but it was too buoyant to submerge. One of the things they could do to take on more weight was flood the torpedo tubes. Then, to verify that the tubes had flooded, they opened these little test-port valves that led to the tubes to see if they were already filled or not. No water came out of the test ports, but that's because they'd been covered over by paint. That and some confusing labeling led to the torpedomen opening the inner door to one of the tubes, while the outer door was already open. It sunk bow-first in 150' of water. Since the boat was 275' long, that looked like this:  The stern was still above the water. The boat had been overcrowded with test personnel, with a population well above the standard crew, and they didn't manage to evacuate the crew before they'd all died of CO2 intoxication. Only four guys got out of the escape trunk before a fifth guy panicked and drowned in the trunk, blocking it from further use. 99 guys died. Apparently there was a suggestion to quickly cut an air hole in the stern, but the admirality vetoed it because they didn't want to damage the hull integrity. Later, the Royal Navy raised her, and recommissioned her as the HMS Thunderbolt. She was sunk with all hands by a depth charge attack by an Italian destroyer in 1943. Probably the only ship in history to have to go down with all hands twice. But that's still probably not as unfortunate as U-1206, a German U-boat commanded by Captain Karl-Adolf Schlitt. The boat was equipped with a new and complicated toilet that you could flush at depth, and Schlitt used it and couldn't get it to flush. We've all been there, and Schlitt summoned an engineer to help, who opened the wrong valve at the wrong time, and started the ship flooding. It wasn't catastrophic flooding by itself, but the water flooded the batteries, releasing chlorine gas, which forced them to surface so they wouldn't die from the toxic fumes. On the surface, they were spotted and attacked, so they had to abandon and scuttle ship. The chlorine gas problem could have been avoided with better ventilation systems, but as it was a submarine, Schlitt could not hit the fan.
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Jun 15, 2016 00:33
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Can I reserve the story of USS S-5 until I feel like writing it all again? I had a pretty good dramatization of it ALL BUT FINISHED (also if you don't know of it, don't look it up, it was basically same as Squalus 20 years earlier.)
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Delivery McGee posted:The sinking of the Bismarck Came for the posts, stayed for the Johnny Horton reference. CommieGIR posted:
The Hughes Mining Barge (the cover story for this operation was that they were doing an R&D program to mine manganese nodules from the seafloor) was later used as the drydock for the Sea Shadow, an experimental stealth ship, and eventually placed up for auction. I don't know what's happened in the meantime; unfortunately since the terms of the auction dictate that the buyer has to scrap everything there's not much fun to be had there. Speaking of boats and radiation: The largest nuclear device the USA ever detonated was a bit of a fuckup. The first hydrogen bomb ever was wayyy too large and heavy to actually be dropped from a plane. The thing weighed over 80 tons, mainly because it had to have a big cryogenic tank filled with liquid deuterium. Rough idea being that you have a conventional plutonium fission bomb outside the tank, and a plutonium cylinder running through the middle of the tank, and when you set it off all that deuterium is compressed between two nuclear explosions (again: rough idea), some of the deuterium absorbs the neutrons flying out of the fission reaction and transmutes to tritium, and then the deuterium and the tritium fuse and make a bigger boom. Even turned into an actual weapon, the hydrogen bomb was still gently caress-off large, weighing 20 tons, only the B-36 could carry it. Because again, you had that cryogenic stage. Castle Bravo was the program to develop a dry-fuel bomb. So-called because instead of a big insulated tank of liquid hydrogen, the fusion fuel was in the form of nice, solid, light, lithium deuteride. It's less dense than table salt (which it's fairly similar to, as an ionic compound). Now, naturally occurring lithium is a mix of two isotopes: lithium-6 (7.5%) and lithium-7 (all the rest). The fuel used in Castle Bravo was enriched in lithium-6, about 40%. Idea was the lithium-6 will absorb a neutron, and them break apart into an alpha particle and a tritium nuclear, the tritium fuses with the deuterium, boom. It was expected that the lithium-7 would also absorb a neutron and turn into lithium-8, which would then decay into two alpha particles, which for the purposes of a bomb is not something you give a poo poo about. But unfortunately, they missed the fact that there's a side-reaction where the lithium decays into an alpha, a neutron, and a tritium. So basically 100% of the fuel was capable of breeding tritium, not just 40% of it. Which meant that there was a lot more fusion than anticipated, a lot more excess neutron activity, and therefore a lot more fissioning of the surrounding U-238 tamper. The bomb was expected to generate a yield of around 5 megatons. Instead, it yielded around *15*. Cut to the Japanese fishing boat the SS Lucky Dragon 5, with 23 crew on board. They're fishing outside the US's declared danger zone for the test. But that danger zone was based on a much lower expected yield, and didn't count on most of the coral atoll being turned into radioactive ash and blasted into the atmosphere. The crew saw the blast and decided hey, let's go the other way, but in the time it took to retrieve their fishing gear they'd been exposed to the fallout which covered the ship like snow for several hours. Cleanup was using their bare hands to pick it up and put it in bags. One crewmember even tasted it. They started feeling sick on the following day, March 2 and turned for home. They got home on the 14th, and the radio operator was the first death, succumbing to acute radiation sickness about 7 months later. Most of the other crew have died since then, most of them dying of liver cancer; it's probable that they were also infected with hepatitis in the course of the blood transfusions used to treat their acute radiation sickness. Hundreds of other fishing boats were outside the declared danger zone, but inside the effective danger zone, and were contaminated to varying degrees. Not to mention many Marshall islanders. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jun 20, 2016 |
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Jun 20, 2016 19:38
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CommieGIR posted:HSV-2 originally was designed to be a combat vessel for the US Navy. Not as a combat vessel, it was a logistics ship with no weapons or anti-missile capability or even watertight compartmentalization. HSV-2? Did the US Navy really name a ship after genital herpes? Yes, of course they did. That's hilarious. "Set sail on the USS Gonorrhea!"
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Nov 2, 2016 18:21
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Saint Celestine posted:Holy poo poo is that the Kuznetsov? If I didnt know, I would have guessed that ship was burning. Maybe they ran out of heavy fuel oil and switched back to coal. Edit: Or this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq0eFkptu2c Phanatic fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Apr 9, 2017 |
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Apr 9, 2017 18:07
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