165 m private submersible superyacht

Performance craft = stripped down to weight as little as possible, adjustable bunks, no showers, no kitchen, the toilet is usually a bucket.

https://youtu.be/T7cL3tx1voo

I think the implication was that nobody bothered to check, which is humorous and so we are willing to jump straight to it. But I suspect the truth is subtler if still as dumb. A tall vessel is likely to have a large draft, so a dry spell may mean bridge clearance but getting stuck on a sandbar (or worse, bedrock). There may be very few days a year where the water level is high enough to avoid sandbars but low enough not to clip the bridge.

They might pressurize the crew spaces, a little, but it's really not possible to crank up the air pressure meaningfully for any duration, too hard on the body, and totally lethal if they come up too fast. On that subject google up "saturation diving" for some frickin' horrors. Those dudes make bank, but whew, talk about earning it.

I read their adverts to mean that the ship was so expensive even the helicopter got it’s own pressure hull. But I should understand it as the helicopter can’t do without a pressure hull, and the special part is that it’s _separate_ from the human hull.

If you bring a submarine to market, intelligence agencies and smugglers will absolutely be interested in it.

That said, this is a submersible. If I understand correctly, that means it doesn't operate independently, but in tandem with a conventional vessel. So that may be far less useful.

I read that a typical load in a narcosub was worth about 100 million dollars and a narcosub itself costs 2 million dollars. Two narcotrips will not only pay for the submarine but also make a huge profit, your idea that smuggling is for those low on the totem pole and that it has to be dangerous is something that you invented.

If the drug trade doesn't work, they probably have the expertise to get involved in navel drones.

It's ok if there's an excess of materials and the shipbuilders have nothing better to do.

More likely it will slightly drive up the prices of batteries, etc. And maybe the yacht builders would have otherwise gone to work making sailboats for normal-rich people, or gone into defense, driving down the price of labor there, and allowing taxpayers to get their next destroyer for a hair cheaper.

Or, worst case, there'd be no demand for these shipbuilders, and they'd have to reskill as something else. Maybe they know how to do fiberglass layups and would try making surfboards, I don't know.

In short, I don't worry so much about wasting money per-se, as about luring people and resources away from better uses.

Kind of like VC's role for the last 20 years. "Greatest minds of my generation", etc.