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Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

I thought the photo of the two basins at 90 degrees to each other was a nice example that it sometimes makes sense to violate the DRY principle.

Someone must have looked at installing a gimballed basin, realised how complicated the custom-made gimbal and plumbing would have to be, and thought "screw it, let's just order a second basin".

Also, someone really needs to put a lid on that soap container!

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And they'd better flush too!

You're over thinking it. It only needs to move +/-45 in one plane. Weld a hinge to the wall above the sink. Suspend the sink from the hinge. The radius can be determined by how much flex hose you want to purchase for the drain and supply lines.

The same should work for toilets and showers.

Run all your drain piping toward the corner of the ship that's always under water.

Install these on your showers.

http://d2ydh70d4b5xgv.cloudfront.net/images/2/7/shower-head-...

You might want to let things move more than +/-45 or install pins to lock stuff. Taking a crap in rough seas could get weird when you and the toilet can stay level as the ship moves but only in one direction.

It all comes down to weight vs tolerance for squeaks and rattles. Maintenance should be in the same ballpark. Greasing hinges and more flexible plumbing/wiring/infrastructure to worry about is probably not much worse than twice as much everything.

Honestly, I would have just towed it out empty, flipped it vertical, then loaded people on. That way, only one orientation needs to be supported at all.

That's what they wanted to do initially but since everyone wanted to be on the flipped ship when it was flipped they refitted it to house people. At that point you may as well find a way cram them in when it's horizontal rather than incur the cost of bringing them out and back on a separate ship.

FLIP doesn't have engines, so it must be towed into place, so you have to have another ship out there in any case.

There's accommodation for 16 people. I imagine that means something like 4 or 5 showers/toilets/sinks.

Probably more sinks, it would be interesting to see the actual numbers of duplicated fixtures. I didn't find anything with a brief search.

That means you need an additional ship when towing it into position, and more time is wasted transitioning people to and fro. Here everybody boards in port and they can do on-board setup during towing.

I imagine it might be quite dangerous to transfer people from one ship to the other in heavy seas, and in the article they were talking about seas of 30 feet.

It can be dangerous. If you want to see something cool search for Ampelmann and Billy Pugh. I haven't been on an Ampelmann but I have transferred with the crane-lifted basket and it's really fun.

But they sure as hell are not moving between ships in nasty, dangerous sea conditions. At least not if they can help it.

> I imagine it might be quite dangerous to transfer people from one ship to the other in heavy seas

The article states that daily transfers of people was the M.O. initially and that they only installed sleeping quarters so experiments could be run 24/7.

> Maintenance should be in the same ballpark

Lots of custom moving parts in salty air should be of similar difficultly to maintain as commonly-made things fixed in place twice?

Are you sure J-dawg's the one overthinking this?

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