I enjoy reading about engineering SNAFUs, which is why this story amused me so much:
An attempt to deploy a new submarine for Spain’s navy has run aground again, after it emerged it cannot fit in its dock, Spanish media report.
The S-80 boat was redesigned at great expense after an earlier mistake meant it had problems floating, and it was lengthened to correct the issue.
In the immortal words of Billy Mays, but wait, there’s more!
Excess weight of 75 – 100 tons has been added to the sub during construction and the current design is not able to resurface after diving. A former Spanish official says the problem can be traced to a miscalculation — someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place or by the addition of new technologic devices.
Billions of dollars flushed down the toilet because nobody bothered to double check the math. That ranks right up there with the old National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) SNAFU that resulted in a Mars probe crashing because an engineer failed to properly convert English to metric units.