Ramming Speed

A bit stale by now, but the news is that a French and British sub collided in the Atlantic. What makes this interesting is that it was a French and British sub, and both were missile subs. The Brits and the French each just have only a few boomers - about 5 each. Both nations (espeically the UK) maintain a largeish fleet of attack subs, but most are the smaller diesel/electric kind popular with the Europeans. Two boomers colliding (and these are big boats - almost as big as the US Ohio class) is a rare event - I am not sure it has ever happened before. Boomers are designed to move very quietly at low speeds. Usually, subs have collided in the past when they were playing cat an mouse games tracking each other - the game was that US or Russian attack subs would wait outside of ports and try and pick up the other side's boomers and then follow them for their 6mo tour. Or b, find the boomer somewhere and tail it as long as you could. In this case, it was two allied (sadly, we could so kick France's ass) boomers which collided. What that means is that they just ran into each other totally by accident. My best guess is that they were both moving quietly and slowly in one of the mid-atlantic canyons or shipping lanes (too much ocean otherwise for a collision to be statistically likely) and they just did not see each other. Sounds crazy, but using only passive sonar, both of these boats (both launched in the 90s and very advanced) are very hard to see (hear). Two WWII aircraft carrier sized boats running into each other because they had no idea the other one was there? Thats pretty amazing.