Unmanned submarine earmarked for Irish Sea freight crossings
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> But what kind of cargo will the submarine be carrying? "That's what we're going to figure out over the next few months," he told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme.
> The creators say it will also collect micro-plastic from the water column and feed the data to researchers.
I think it's an interesting concept but selling it as a fix for emissions for shipping seems like greenwashing to me.
Here's an article with a handy chart:
https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/liebreich-oil...
This assuming that the cost of building the green hydrogen producing wind farm near the ports, the cost of the drones, the control systems and loading/offloading can be competitive to simply using very large ships that burn cheap fossil fuel.
Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine?wprov=sfla1
> Some express concerns such vessels could potentially be used for purposes other than smuggling.
I guess "but what if it facilitates the drug trade?" just wasn't available as an objection here.
Wouldn't it be awful if someone used a narco sub for recreational boating without crossing any national borders? Or what if they used one to transport goods or people across borders and stopped at customs/immigration as required?
That would be concerning indeed!
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/fe...
one of the major advantages of (most) ocean-going vessels, aside from usually having a crew aboard to negotiate with over VHF as to who goes where when trying to navigate around them , is that the above-water visibility aids in navigation and avoidance.
a future where trade channels are filled with AI-driven low-depth submarines that have no real crew aboard to communicate with sort of worries me, but all I can do is hope that the people who put them together and control them get it right -- otherwise it could turn a lot of trips dangerous.
for those that are in the business : is there an established method by which these unmanned ships that I keep reading about deal with VHF traffic of those around them? Perhaps the ship is receiving and sending back to some proxy site somewhere for a crew to communicate to nearby ships offsite?
1. it will run at 50m depth in trade routes
2. it can work in shallow waters where container ship can not
So I think the idea is that it does not need deep-water port infrastructure, but will get deep and out of the way when it's out of port. So a big ship would never see it.
And it can potentially go under the polar ice.
Getting a tow line onto that thing is going to be hazardous in any kind of rough weather. As often happens in the Irish Sea.
But how will they be out of the way of each other?
Solvable problem, but not without some complexity.
Reminds me of:
You realize that submarines can travel at different depths depending on the direction (bearing), just like planes do?
When you move in 3 dimension it's very easy to avoid collisions.
The question of course arises, why aren’t submarines used for shipping? We were taught that the problem was buoyancy control. The weight of a ship carrying freight can vary greatly on a round trip.
This sounds off. Conventional ships experience drag when they try to go forward and there's a bunch of water in the way. When they shove that water out of the way, it has to go somewhere else, and meanwhile some other water has to flow into the space where the ship used to be. That motion of the water generates the wake.
But all of that applies just as well to submarines moving below the surface of the sea, or cars driving around within the atmosphere. If a car passes by you, you'll feel wind blowing after it. That is the car's wake. And when a submarine tries to move underwater, it runs into exactly the same problem as the surface ship -- there's a bunch of water in the way. How can it possibly move without generating a wake?
That’s why the bow of modern submarines looks more like the nosecone of a rocket than like the bow of a surface vessel.
See https://navalpost.com/submarine-cavitation-drag-underwater-s...)
I'm not challenging the idea that a submarine might require less energy to move one knot than a surface ship does. I'm challenging the idea that a submarine leaves no wake.
In the photo heading the article you link, a wake is visible behind the submarine.
The surface of the water allows a unique mode of energy transfer (surface waves) which doesn't exist without a surface. Underwater, energy can still be transmitted by sound, but that's not the same mechanism as surface waves.
I'm skeptical that picture is a photo since it doesn't have blueing and darkening with distance. Maybe it's been doctored or is a small scale or something unnatural.
They do, and it's detectable through the bioluminescence it generates
In what sense are these different things? How could you have one without the other?
Subs require significantly more thrust per cubic metre of cargo.
Communication and navigation are more difficult because GPS and satellite comms don't work underwater.
Loading and unloading in comparable times to a standard container vessel.
If subs are designed for cargo then unload/loading operations can be optimized.
If the pressure is balanced, removing the need for a pressure hull, the sub could have a more rectangular cross section, allowing it to be packed full of regular shipping containers.
Nothing insurmountable, but it's not as simple as running under everyone which is what the article implied (to me atleast).
That's a really good point, how do you get a signal to a submerged unmanned submarine under all that conductive saltwater? Military submarines use VLF radio waves that can penetrate saltwater fairly deep, but those long wavelengths require enormous aerials and powerful transmitters that are one thing if you're the navy of a nuclear power, quite another if you're a shipping line looking to make a profit.
[1] https://www.navy.gov.au/ran-aviation-history/laser-airborne-...
Perhaps the harbor can have small tugboats that simply hook the freighters and push it into the harbor
Although submarines are more effective navigating through storms, one could simply wait for the storm to pass when shipping non-time-sensitive cargo, then use a regular surface cargo ship (which could be automated if desired just like the submarine). Surface ships also have the advantage of compatibility with our already-established shipbuilding and maintenance infrastructure, while a submarine would require the proliferation of new skills and tools to support it.
For time-critical cargo (where one can't wait for a hypothetical storm to pass), it's likely aircraft would be a better option for most shipments - certainly in severe storms aircraft can't operate either, but in that case the very act of loading and unloading the submarine would be hazardous as well.
Based on the model sitting on a wooden table, none.
I agree and would love to see some capers like that. Even if tongue in cheek, like an Ocean's 12-style billionaire who lives in a customized one because they suffer from severe OCD and introversion or something. Everybody on the squad rolls their eyes and the audience rolls the eyes right along with them, because nope, we're not sensitive billionaire techie weirdos here! Just good ol' fashioned types.
(Meanwhile, Wolfram is probably literally trying out one for off-site workplace-hacking IRL, or something stranger than fiction...)
And what would be more impressive than a huge tractor kite? A huge tractor kite on a tether that dives 50m beneath the surface.
?!? Anything you could do to keep an unmanned ship from being robbed, you could do to a manned ship too.
> autonomous ship could just has easily be a Trojan horse!
?!? A manned ship could be a Trojan Horse too, in much the same way that the actual horse in the legend was.
This would be the most hi tech rum-runner (er whisky?) ever...
To distract the public from the various shitshows currently going on with absolutely daft crap, like this and the "return of imperial measurements"..