Chuck, I know enough to be dangerous. I have some tales from SURTASS ship tech days, too!
Mr. Rule, the SOA of that unit, as you said, was about 26kts at max shaft speed. Also, did you ever visit COSP (Ford Island) in 1969, and bring acoustic recordings of the Scorpion loss?
My only visit to Ford Island was in the very early 1970s (Aug 1972?) after three weeks at Adak for CNO Op-095.
I never had any SCORPION acoustic data until 2008 when Dan McMillin, then retired from WECO/BTL provided me with the Canary Island tape, a copy of which I gave to ONI in Oct 2009. All we now know about the loss of SCORPION is due to Dan whom we lost earlier this year.
Had George Miller and I gotten that tape in 1968, I like to think we could have withstood the misinformation assault launched by John Craven who convinced the Court of Inquiry to ignore their own experts and put forth the completely erroneous conclusion that SCORPION was lost because of an explosive event external to the pressure hull - bum dope that was directly responsible for the conspiracy theories that a Soviet torpedo sank SCORPION.
As discussed in Section VII of my long THRESHER article archived on this site, the Court of Inquiry drew 17 conclusions about the loss of SCORPION from the acoustic data, 14 of which were wrong. That's an 82% error-rate or, in baseball parlance, they batted .176. Who the Court of Inquiry ignored is also archived on this site.
