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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33485 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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Proper real time communication with the mothership

This would require a cable connection which gets tricky for 4000 meter deep dives. Radio communication rather famously doesn't work underwater. You can only get ground to sub data transmission at a few bits per second and even that requires tens of kilometer long antennas with megawatts of transmission power.

If the ship was directly above, I don't see why a few kilometres of cable wouldn't work.

Alternatively, acoustic communication.

Bouys that maintain their depth are not an option? It's not like the sub needs completely freedom of movement if they're just exploring a wrecked ship.

You still need a cable all the way to the surface, whether that's a single long one or multiple shorter ones (much more likely to break). There's a reason deep sea dives have traditionally had the support ship right above the sub.

Somehow it feels counterintuitive that you can't use buoyancy for support.

I saw some tweets saying that a cable would buckle under its own weight, but some quick math shows that not to be much of a problem. Amazon shows 100ft coax cables are about 2.5 pounds. A 4km version would be roughly 330 pounds. And that's in water, where bouyant force is going to reduce the apparent weight by quite a lot, especially if you jacket the cable with something not so dense.

And that's in water, where bouyant force is going to reduce the apparent weight by quite a lot, especially if you jacket the cable with something not so dense.

That's exactly the principle that seems to be in question. Whether you rest the cable on a bouy, or jacket it in something buoyant, the result should be the same. Though I can't tell you whether that means it's going to work or not.

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