[ollie1983]

I spoke to former serving Sub officer back at a wedding a while back, he turned up in proper uniform including the sword etc.

Anyways, I spent the entire afternoon talking to him. They spent a lot of their time in Soviet waters, basically spying. Certainly through his duration in the navy he said they were not particularly concerned about their torpedoes because they knew about their performance from observing soviet exercise.

The one thing they were gravely concerned about was the Soviet use of these RBU rockets. The Soviets would regularly fire these at anything they caught a sniff off, even in peacetime and it was never pleasant. Soviet surface vessels knew NATO subs would often spy on them and so it was common for them to park a surface ship up drifting on the edge of any exercise, knowing it would be virtually invisible and then use it to fire rockets at anything that came close enough. If you got hit, of course the Soviets would have said a foreign vessel in their waters was there on a hostile spying mission and had 'strayed into a live fire exercise by accident' etc etc etc.

One of the other very risky things they used to do was trail other NATO boats very closely and then report to high command that they had managed it. The message would then be passed to the other country. The main risk from this was basically running into the opposing friendly sub. I don't doubt for a second this still goes on. I think a British Sub scraped a Frenchie not long ago playing games. Of course, around the North Sea and English channel the water isn't all that deep so detecting each other a bit more straight-forward than in the open ocean.