en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)

The training documentation that I was trained on, was that USS Thresher was sunk due to lousy brazing (lousy pipe welding, that helped birth “Sub Safe”), USS Scorpion was sold as a “loss of steam propulsion at depth”. You cannot “fly” through the water without forward propulsion, and like an airplane, will sink.

What made this story worse for me, was that I *literally*, as part of an emergency action, shut steam propulsion valves at depth in response to an emergency steam leak at 2am. We did just fine because my shipmates did what they were supposed to do, and did so *flawlessly*. I had to shut the main valves because some chucklehead decided to cheat as to warm up the distill water system by applying 600 pound steam to piping rated for 150 psi…. The 150 psi piping vigorously disagreed with the 600# steam, and loudly exclaimed as such. One simple valve closure completed by the offender fixed the cause….. but you don’t know that at 2 am.

On a related note, my friend took over for me at Operator, so that I could put my adrenaline shakes to good use and open one of the valves that I closed 15 minutes earlier. Opening the steam valves takes some time, enough to burn off resultant adrenaline. As an added modifier, I was on light-limited due to an injury (jokingly called the midnight rangers), and did my emergency actions with one hand tied *in front* of my back (I had a dis-located left wrist in a sling on my chest). I can’t joke that I did it with one hand tied *behind* my back, because it was, in fact, tied in a sling *in front* of my back.