76 karma · joined December 29, 2018
The point of documentation is to communicate to others how to keep developing a code base - what is does, how it does it etc. What form the documentation takes can be fluid, a full fledged wiki or a single readme.md file can fulfill the same role just as well! Some documentation is better than nothing, so start small and then improve it over time.
During my PhD I would write down what specific task I was working on in a work journal every half hour or so and it would help me refine the specific problem/question I was working on. At the end of the day I would have made a steady progression through a relatively abstract problem which might not have been apparent at the beginning.
I take the same approach with working on the various projects now as a software engineer. I find the act of documenting my progress/thoughts as I go extremely calming. There’s a balance to be struck here - I only take this approach when developing something new and I have to record all the things which didn’t work.
We do see development in ideas over time, but this is separate to the idea that if we don’t understand what they were doing then it must have been religion. Arguments to religion are a classic trope in archaeology. Although this doesn’t explicitly mention that this is the case, I think it’s worth pointing out that people would have known that all dice were fair, but some were fairer than others.
For me, the cool things about this are the size of the installed power and the stability problem in having one submerged object with multiple half empty ballast tanks lift up another object with multiple tanks.
The BOKA Vanguard has an installed power of 27000kW, split between two main diesels and two auxiliaries. This is slightly more than a Los Angeles class nuclear submarine, which goes much faster (perhaps 2x according to wiki) underwater - very much a different resistance problem. There are two 35 tonne and 65 tonne generators/engines. These are not small pieces of equipment. That’s what gets me about these ships - they are on another level of huge.
The stability problem is a significant challenge. You can see in the video that they did it on a flat day. Being able to coordinate the pumping of multiple ballast tanks to make sure that both ships remain upright is another cool thing here. Look up the “free surface effect” if you want to learn about that particular challenge.
Sources; various Wikipedia pages and Wärtsilä technical sheets.