TIFU by breaking a £35 million warship.
Full disclosure, the usual, this did not happen today, but many years ago back in the heady early 90s, when the music was grungy, beer was cheap, and I was but a mere slip of a lad in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy.
This tale of woe is a fine example of why, when in uniform, it is sometimes wise to question an order instead of blindly following it, especially if there are witnesses, even if the end result is the same. But enough background, on with the tale.
For those not aware, most merchant and naval vessels didn’t use magnetic compasses, and instead rely on gyroscopic compasses supplemented with GPS data in order to get a fix on true north. In the case of warships, there are usually two separate gyros, so that in the event of one failing, the other can still provide navigation data. This data is feed to both the bridge gyro repeater, as well as both bridge wing repeaters, to allow accurate compass sightings to be taken unobstructed by the ship’s superstructure (these details are important for the story, so hang on).
On this fateful day, the ship I was serving on as an Artificer Apprentice was happily steaming towards home via the Patagonian Canals (technically fjords), which are a very scenic but tricky route up the western sea-board of Chile if you want to avoid the open seas of the South Pacific. As they are fairly tricky to navigate, having good positional data at all times is essential. As such, the Gyro Chief (whose sub-department I was assigned to at the time) decided this was a fantastic time to diagnose why the starboard bridge repeater was not working correctly, whilst one of the two redundant main gyros was also offline. Guess who he picked to be his (un)willing accomplice for this? Yep, get the ‘tiff to do it, what could possibly go wrong?
After a bit of visual examination of the various feeds from the one functional gyro, the decision was made (by the Chief) to start testing the outputs from said gyro using an AVO meter, and I was duly ordered to test the voltage between a pair of contacts.
“Is this a good idea Chief, we might….” I began, only to be cut off with a curt “Just follow the order, Apprentice”. Well, that told me.
Applying the first AVO probe without a problem, I proceeded to apply the second probe, to be met with a small spark, followed by the sound of the one remaining gyro rapidly spinning down. Within moments, the tannoy sounded out with “Gyro failure, gyro failure, gyro failure”, closely followed by the ship gracefully slowing to a complete stop. Oops.
Luckily for myself, there were two other bodies in the gyro room that day, along with myself and the Chief, so there was no option to pass the blame downwards onto myself. This did not stop a fair amount of (largely good-natured) ribbing to follow, but better that than a less-than-cordial chat with the skipper.
It took about two hours at anchor to re-spin the gyro and get it calibrated before we could continue on our merry way, and we never did get to the bottom of the bridge repeater issue in my remaining time on-board.
tl;dr Stuck my probes where they really shouldn’t have been stuck, rendered a £35 million warship dead in the water for two hours.