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Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
Actually that was also true in real life. In a crash dive all tanks are fully flooded, the trim ballast water is pumped to the forward trim tank, the planes are put on full dive and down she goes. No one yells "Crash dive, but only to periscope depth!" 70 meters is about as quickly as they can level off in those conditions.
It's the captain's (and the duty watch officer's) responsibility to know how deep the water is under the boat. If a plane or destroyer is spotted close enough to warrant an emergency they didn't usually check the conditions, they just shouted "Allaaaarrmm!!". If they were near the coast or knew it was shallow they would probably just say "Periscope depth...NOW!"
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I'm not totally sure about this, as I'm going strictly from memory. But in instances where a sub wanted to assure the absolute minimum time to dive, they 'rode the vents'. Ballast tanks have Kingston valves at the bottom, and vents at the top. What they did was keep open the bottom Kingston valves, open up all the internal valving ahead of time to the ballast and negative tanks, but keep the upper vents closed. This kept water from inflowing and flooding the tanks as the air inside was trapped. But in the event of needing to crash-dive, all that was needed was to open the upper vents and away you went.
Drawbacks to that I would think is if you didn't get the main induction valve or conning tower hatches closed fast enough. --shudders at the thought of prematurely diving without a green Christmas tree--