Hey Vance,
Karl likes an adventure so he might let you drive. You'll just have to ask him. I know there are a couple areas where he dives that have some serious entanglement issues, but he would be able to tell you were those are, so you can stay clear. I only know of one veiwport failure on Idabel. The lower flat window had at first a bad design and it caused the window to flex unevenly. That was changed in the last refit. There were a couple other viewports that failed in the C-BUG. One reason for those Karl said the conning tower bases needed more reinforcement, so there wouldn't be as much flex as there was. The conning towers will be upgraded in the C-BUG 102 model.
The main large dome window has another thinner dome over it the serves as a front MBT and dome protector. So the scratches to the dome the guy talks about are on the outer MBT dome. I'll have to double check my data when I get on my other computer, but I pretty sure all three spheres are made from hot stamped HY-80. I don't know about the connecting rings. All the weldments were stress relieved twice.
Regards,
Szybowski
To:
personal_submersibles@psubs.org
Subject: Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Jurassic Shark will air soon on National Geographic
Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2009 21:16:17 -0500
From:
vbra676539@aol.com
The narrator is right (eventually!) about the shark's sensitivity to a sub's electrical field. They just don't act like that normally. I've spent thousands of hours underwater in subs and can count on my hands the number of sharks that I have seen close up through a viewport. If they had hair, I'd suspect it would be standing up like a static charge will do to a mammal. The light blinds them, and the bait saturates their smell-o-vision, so I'd suspect the behavior filmed is a result of that land critter that Karl talks about baiting with. Otherwise, the sharks would be getting the heck out of Dodge, and pronto.
They baited 6-gills off Bermuda for a couple of years, using a Pisces to do direct observation, but they kept the sub back a bit. Then HBOI ran into one, or rather it ran into them, a couple of years back, and had kind of the same experience with the animal blundering around and hitting stuff. Those folks were some rattled at the time, and maybe still are. Still, it would be seriously cool to see those big dummies down there. And mostly you ain't going to do it any other way except in the Stanleymobile.
What worries me is that the web page says Idabel has had four port failures, fractures large enough to spurt water onto the paying customers. I'd be renting me some strain gauges and a test tank, if it was me. Something is moving too much in there. It seems like I read that the forward sphere is HY100 and the other two are something else. The only thing I know about that is that the Navy refused to classify the old Deep Diver because of disparate metals in the aft DLO compartment, and the sub never worked again in anything deeper than about 300'.
Still, I'd love to see those sharks... Wonder if Karl would let me drive?
Vance
-----Original Message-----
From: Brent Hartwig <
brenthartwig@hotmail.com>
To: PSUBSorg <
personal_submersibles@psubs.org>
Sent: Sun, 4 Jan 2009 7:00 pm
Subject: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Jurassic Shark will air soon on National Geographic
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