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Robotic Gliders Soar Underwater
zymano writes "Yahoo has this tech news on ocean gliders that can go on journeys for hundreds of miles and last for weeks using pumps that push ballast water in and out to subtly change their buoyancy. This enables them to alternately rise and fall through the ocean as they glide forward. Oh , $60,000 if you want one." See our previous stories for more information.
You know the rest.
The previous post was a dupe too.
Hot Dupe On Dupe Action!
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
I'd bet the US military would love these things. You could easily weaponize these things! From mine sweeping to hunting down enemy subs these things would rock.
What their towing capacity is? Can they run fiber out to my private island? Or, for the 20 foot ones, do rescue missions (Remember the trapped Russian Sailors in the sub?)
I think you mean "and makes a faint tap on the hull" instead of "starts a war" :-)
I have a feeling this is one that really will take off in time.
How about free, albeit slow, cargo delivery? Get a tug to tow containers/gliders to a 'safe' distance from the traffic surrounding a port, point the glider at its destination, set its GPS coordinates, and let it go. 3 months later, your boxes of widgets arrive at their destination, where another tug picks up the stuff at the other end.
No fuel
No staff
24x7 operation
weather independent
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Well, that looks good and all, but unfortunately my office gift exchange this year has a strict $60,000 spending limit.
Not very cost effective, but an interesting variation of "message in a bottle."
Preliminary analysis of the design suggests its shape should produce speeds up to 10 times as fast as today's gliders, which fly at a pokey half-mile an hour
That is a whopping 5 miles per hour... you won't be able to swim with many schools of fish - or keep up with that russian sub, unless you are being towed by it. It is neat, but slow.
Earl: That's the biggest dang devil ray I ever did see!
Bob: Well get the cudgel, they're bad luck! Damn robot devil rays...
During the August experiments in Monterey, fishermen plucked four of the gliders from the water after the robots briefly surfaced to communicate with scientists by satellite.
Ebay!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I am outraged. We've got dolphins for all of this work.
Where is the Dolphin Workers Union on this? Sitting fat in their own Jacuzzis, that's where, taking handouts from the Man.
Their silence condemns them for the fish-bucket whores they are.
sigs, as if you care.
This seems measuremade for 'dumb' drones that swim (or rather fly) around in the big blue ocean and collects data, but I wonder; could this technology be used for larger, manned crafts too? One possibility is a even more stealty military submarine* - possible with a more conventional propulsionsystem in adition to the ability to fly - but more civilian applications seems possible too. Perhaps giant cargovessels** and supertankers, pulling energy out of the seawater (RTFA) and cruising under the busy sealanes?
_*) Submarines are plenty stealty already...
**)The cargocarreing submarine is not a new idea, the germans launced Deutchland, and later the idea has resurfaced several itmes.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
I wonder if terrorist will try to adapt this to target cruise ships with explosives?
The density of air it to small to generate enough up or down velocity for a land (air actually) to work.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
The next step in weaponization is a torpedo powerplant and seeker. This would be used only in the last stage, when wave motion has brought the thing to a harbor mouth, allowing a final attack run with power. The thing can be launched hundreds of miles offshore. Maybe thousands.
It's back to submarine nets, like WWII. SOSUS isn't going to pick this up; it's just drifting sea junk most of the time.
Fills up with bubbles then sinks....fills up with bubbles then sinks... I ordered one of those subs from Haunted Tank comic book... "Negative Jeb..."
So I want to know how they manage to "sip" power from the warmth of the water. Last I checked, things didn't work like that.
"It sure was strange to see something on Usenet about me that didn't involve Klingon gang rape." -- Wil Wheaton
You mean something like this?
They have an entire series of cars designed. You can view them all on the site. They don't seem to be in active production yet. I don't know when that will happen, but if you're really interested, you can sign up for information here.
On what basis? This thing is cleaner than any boat they could use to monitor these creatures, does not use military-grade sonar and is not the size of an aircraft carrier. In short, this is the ideal research vessel for these groups.
Why go to court over a tool that can potentially be used to quantify the ecological damage we are doing to the depths? I would think that Sierra and Greenpeace are very excited about the new monitoring potential of this device.
Still, even in Monterey Bay, MBARI has seen all kinds of new siphonophores (look halfway down) and so on -- really amazing animals that may be the biggest group of predators on earth, but that we know next to nothing about.
A low-speed, quiet, long-term observation platform would be made to order for, to use that example, siphonophores: they're slow-moving, they hunt by drifting along extending toxic tentacles, but they're often disturbed by the existing robot subs. Or set this thing to watching a whale carcass as it floats around: scientists have a lot of ideas about the roles dead whales may play, but no way of really observing them long-term.
The lack of speed isn't going to let you follow something like squid around; teuthids have a much better water jet system that'll let them outrun and outmaneuver almost anything we've got. But this'd give us a nice, quiet observation platform for most of the stuff that lives midwater and drifts -- which seems to be a huge share of the life on earth, and almost unexplored by science.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The obvious use will be delivering a nuclear (or large conventional) payload in the middle of an enemy port undetected.
That's the obvious obvious use.
The subtle obvious use: disguise this thing underwater bomb a manta ray, so it can turn Aquaman into shark fodder. Finally, a chance to prove what a second-rate superhero that guy really is!
-kgj
-kgj
Pump the water to the front and it glides downhill in that direction, just like an air glider, while you use the rudder to set the direction. When you are deep enough, pump out the water and the front rises, letting you glide uphill in the direction you wish to go. It's just simple physics and simple aerodynamics. You are trying to make it too hard. You use the force of gravity to sink. (Does that mean you use the force of anti-gravity to rise?)
I like this machine. It's amazing how the most beautiful solutions are often the simplest.
It also reminds me of this...
" It sometimes seems as if our planet has no secrets left - but deep beneath the great Antarctic ice sheet scientists have made an astonishing discovery. They've found one of the largest lakes in the world. It's very existence defies belief. Scientists are desperate to get into the lake because its extreme environment may be home to unique flora and fauna, never seen before, and NASA are excited by what it could teach us about extraterrestrial life. But 4 kilometres of ice stand between the lake and the surface, and breaking this seal without contaminating the most pristine body of water on the planet is possibly one of the greatest challenges science faces in the 21st century. transcript here
The difference in mindset between the Soviet solution and the NASA solution was really interesting.
But that's for sub-to-sub situations, when both guys want to hide their location. If instead of a submarine you're manning, say, Miami, then your best efforts to hide your location are probably still going to fall short. So you can use active sonar to find these things. And then blow them up with torpedoes or depth charges.
Which shouldn't be too hard, given that the ferrari of the class moves at 5 mph. And there's not even any guarantee that these things can work in shallow water. Who even knows what "shallow" is in this case? I wouldn't be surprised if their effectiveness is crippled as soon as they run into a continental shelf -- keeping them quite a good ways off-shore. It seems logical to assume that their efficiency drops off the more up-and-down cycles they have to employ, and the smaller the surface/seabed pressure differential is.
Finally, delivering nukes by sea is not a good way to get the most value from your military-industrial dollar. My understanding is that for maximum wrath-of-god effect, you'd want to blow a nuclear weapon up in the atmosphere over your target -- hence MIRV's horrible destructiveness. Ground level is not where you want to detonate. And certainly not at sub-ground level, in the middle of a gigantic heat-and-radiation absorber.
Admittedly, you are not going to save your city by keeping that nuke covered with 10 feet of water. But it's just one more strike against this as a weapon-delivery system. (Bonus Simpsons paraphrase: "Three month ocean voyage? But I'm mad now!"). A good-old fashioned cargo container would be easier to obtain, easier to retrieve, and only somewhat easier for the feds to detect.