In your second posting you said that you were performing repairs while this was going on. The other thing that you may not have realized is that if your sub has flooding, it will affect the angle your boat sits in the water.
If the flooding was in the front compartments the nose of the boat will be angled down, sometimes as much as 30-40 degrees. At full or flank speed, you are driving your boat to the bottom. There is no amount of dive plane or blowing ballast that will overcome this. Been there, done that.
When you send your repair crews to control the flooding make note of which compartments are damaged and follow these guidlines.
- front compartments - perform flood control and watch depth, when you start getting too deep, go to back full or emergency. This will start decreasing your depth. Keep going back and ahead until flooding is under control.
- middle compartments - no affect to diving (ballast and dive planes work normally), other than you are heavier and will need more speed to maintain depth.
- rear compartments - since boat is sitting nose up in the water, a little extra speed is all that is needed to maintain depth. Thing to watch here is if you have damage to engines or drive systems. Do not assume that if you hit flank speed that you are going flank speed. If the engines are damaged, flank speed may only be 2-4 knots until repairs are done. Set depth for 50-100 meters and go ahead full if you have major flooding. Wait, no change, go to flank, wait blow ballast as last resort.
Happy hunting.