I was mostly talking about stationary plants. You'll never get a straight story from the navy guys.

There's the slowest safest possible way to carefully test and monitor a power up guaranteed to cause minimal maint issues and longest possible life and highest safety to the civilian city downwind, and then theres OMG the missiles are flying we gotta get outta port right now. And there's numerous engineering changes you can apply to make things faster. And a tiny little 10 MW plant or whatever a sub has is a whole different kettle of fish than a 1 GW stationary plant. And the stationary plant has to care about efficiency because they're trying to pay off construction loans so any PITA that increases output is a win, but the sub boys have no (direct) loans to pay off and as long as the boat moves when the skipper says, the efficiency doesn't matter.

So they're going to be different.

But yeah, even booting up a sub is going to be some time and some work, even if you're in a hurry.

And there's historical issues like xenon poisoning which boils down to if you shut down a reactor in a "bad" state of the chemical shim system (which is kind of like intentionally dissolving a control rod in the coolant) after it was run hard and put away wet such that Xenon builds up in the core, that dude is not going critical for a day or so even if you pull the rods completely out, until the shim system cleans up the coolant... at least on land. I suppose if I was in the .mil I'd have a way to dump distilled water into the coolant for just such a situation and/or I'd have regs to never run the shim system that high and/or I'd have so much excess reactivity in the control system that, well, a landlubber would be nervous about it, so you could just burn thru the xenon poisoning anyway. And/or a regulation that says no shutting down the reactor in a rode hard / put away wet scenario so xenon would never be an issue. I mean if you're not paying for the fuel, and you're worried about xenon poisoning, one way around it is never shut the thing off, ever, unless its a major radiological issue. That's certainly one way around it.

Generally subs compress air before they need it, so there's usually plenty available before something "happens". If you're just pumping up the tanks right before you need them you've probably got serious problems or doing something completely ridiculous...

"Black start" of a sub would strictly be mid-ocean adventures which are probably classified and/or completely BS sea stories. Normally they power up off shore power while in port. I would imagine this does nothing for secrecy, the lights dim at the harbor and the backup generator is idling, hmm, I wonder whats shipping out tomorrow?

There are often no backups. The front of the sub usually isn't as sensitive as the engineering spaces and the engineering spaces aren't large. There's no snorkel coming out of the forward torpedo room so there's no backup diesel in there, besides, where would the torpedos be? I'm told by actual sub people that the front half of plastic models of subs are usually pretty realistic and usually based off completely declassified stuff, but the back half of most models is pretty much modelers artistic license time, and that's all they'll say, which I guess is how it should be...