Hi Ian,Simplicity of construction was the goal for Coelacanth (ISDB 1260167606) as well, primarily because I don't have room for a lathe and knew that I would have to contract out much of that work. I settled on a "thick" hull design using no ribs as well, however I took a different approach to viewports. I concluded that a conning tower incorporating a single acrylic hemisphere hatch (K250 design) and an acrylic hemisphere replacing a tank head on the front (Bionic Guppy design) offered a good compromise between cost, fabrication, and application.
Also, I want to spend more time looking at Lawrie's (australia) drawings regarding the breakaway ballast system and support frame. That struck me as a unique alternative to the traditional MBT. The shallow water of Ft. Pierce forced me to think alot about how to trailer launch a large draft sub into shallow water. A couple of things I had considered was a temporary inflatable surface float ring similar to the float NASA attached to the Apollo spacecraft during recovery ops, or movable side MBT tanks that could pivot from their normal location to amid-ship providing less draft during launch from a trailer. There are obvious stability issues with these concepts that I have not followed through with at this point.
Jon On 2/10/2011 3:35 AM, irox wrote:
Hi, I while ago I started designing a small 2 person 1-ATM sub. The aim of the design was to be simple to construct, but once constructed easy to reconfigure and play about with. I guess one goal of this design is to counter the lack of proven (i.e. K-*50s) used small subs on the market. I've code named the project SSP for "Small Submersible Platform". It's borrowing heavily from the K subs, but a slight large diameter pressure vessel with no ribbing. There is still a lot of design work to be done before it's ready for the construction phase, but I'd like to get some feedback from people, particularly submersible owners, before I invest more effort into finishing the design. Missing parts include a clear idea of the MBT design (I want to add some "stove pipes" on the bottom, and "top-hat" style vents on the top), VBT plumbing/placement, HP air plumbing, electrics, drop weight release (I am think K-350, but maybe something better could be done) and a bunch of other things (feel free to suggest things for the TODO list)... I am trying out the subdb.info site for communicating information about the sub. Main ssp page on subdb.info, not much info here yet: http://www.subdb.info/database/showvessel/index.cgi?ID=1296535743&VN=SSP-001&VT=1 The design doc and drawings (work in progress): http://www.subdb.info/database/vessels/1296535743/vdocs/manuals/design-outline-preview.pdf Thanks in advance for any comments and feedback. Cheers! Ian.
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