Mike, Steve,
Hope I didn't hurt your feelings. I just wanted to put your commentary into context.
I did check my facts; they are based on what I read in the archive. Thanks for pointing out that I am correct. Despite whatever projects you say you may have built in the past, by your own admission you never actually operated any of them, so your involvement with submarines is still limited to exercises in theory and is unsupported by any practical experience.
Mike, as far as "back engineering 19th century designs", I suppose you mean Simon Lake's Argonaut Junior. I've read about it in the archive. I think I also read you've been exploring submarine design for something like twenty years (?), but haven't haven't actually gotten around to building one, or at least not the Argonaut Junior. When were you planning on starting? It would seem to me that fifteen or twenty years spent contemplating something that had never come to fruition would be an indicator that perhaps one was better suited for something else?
And Steve, it's wonderful that Psubs is frequented by physicists, archaeologists, astronomers, psychologists, and divers. On a website dealing with those subjects, I'm sure their advice would be most welcome. Psubs is declaredly about the "design, building, and operating" of personal submersibles, though.
I agree the internet is a wonderful place to get information, but I think the information should be reliable and come from people with hard experience. Giving advice on how to build subs when you haven't proven yourself yet is irresponsible, and a lot of you guys here do that all the time.
After reading through the archive, I see there are a few experienced people still here occasionally. I feel I can rely on what they have to say. But I also see there have been a lot of other experienced people who once participated on this website, (and in fact provided the bulk of the information available at Psubs), but no longer do. In their absence, I see a continuing cycle of new arrivals come and go, trying to take their place as information sources to others wanting to build submarines, mostly repackaging what has been said before, and passing it off as their own, sometimes inaccurately. As an illustrative analogy, that's like a guy who has only seen war movies trying to tell other people what actual combat is like. And so, the credibility of this website suffers.
On a positive note, I will say that, in recent days, I have seen a shift in this group from silliness to a greater focus on technical discussion. That's good. But it's the inexperience level of those offering technical advice I find questionable.
Honestly, I think most of the people in this group are more serious about socializing and furthering this website as a visible presence than they are about actually building and operating submersibles. From what I've read, that has led to a split between experienced and non-experienced psubbers, and as a result, most of the experienced guys are gone, and what remains are predominantly unexperienced people more intent on camaraderie than construction. That's my opinion based on a study of the archive
I offer this as constructive criticism aimed at improving what I see are flaws in our group, not criticism for criticism's sake alone. If your feelings are hurt by what I say, I'm sorry.
If you guys want to talk about submarines, that's fine. But please don't tell newcomers that you are "the best" or "the only" source of information about subs, because you're not.
Best,
Gail
Michael B Holt <tlohm@juno.com> wrote:
On Sun, 7 Mar 2004 02:12:18 -0800 (PST) Gail Paleka writes:
>
>Welcome to Psubs. Here you will find people very willing to give
>advice about submarines. What Carl, Steve, and Mike didn't tell you,
>though, is that they haven't actually built a submarine yet. Just
>thought you should know so you can put their advice into proper
>perspective.
Check your facts, first, Gail. I built a Markham-style boat
that never got used due to a medical problem I developed. I've
reverse-engineered a pair of very old submarines (19th -century)
and I've designed (but never built) a gliding ambient diver's
vehicle. No one ever asked about this, so there was no reason
to talk about it.
Mike
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