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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?)
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.
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.
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 last time you checked, thermal energy didn't work? Odd, I'm pretty sure I didn't turn that off...
Seriously, I can see two ways of doing this: Either you find some way of bringing the heat from the upper layers down to the colder ones and tap part of the energy as it radiates, or you bring up somethign cold from the deapth and tap part of the energy as it is warmed up. One system I saw described in a popular science magasine a few years back involded phasechanging wax from solid to liquid and back again.
Basicly, to 'sip' power from seawater is not significanlty different than making electricity with geothermal energy - it's just a bit harder to pack all the bits into a tiny topedoshaped hull.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
The thing works on gaining and losing elevation, so if there's a temperature gradient at different depths, well there you go. Or maybe they're talking about the hot springs where steam comes up through fissures? I don't know. But there's certainly some energy there, enough to support life in fact.
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.
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.