Conning towers and stuff

[Seb <sebastian.hunt@virgin.net>]

Hi everyone. Great mailing list! My learning has accelerated greatly since finding the Psubs site and this list, and of course it has made me realise just how much I have yet to learn. I hope no one minds me asking some basic questions.

I keep hearing about conning towers. The general design that I see and read about seems to be a cylindrical hull with a tower on the top with a hatch attached. Why the tower? Is there a problem with having a hatch amidships on the cylinder? It would have to be a curved hatch to fit, of course, but isn't that an easier option than effectively welding two tubes together at right angles to each other? (I've got a lot to learn about welding as well!)

I recently went on a large tourist sub in the Canary Islands (my only submarine experience so far). It was spacious, air conditioned, with 1m dia. windows. It went down to 30m and stayed under for about 40 minutes (with a constant dreadful commentary). Not speaking Spanish, I had some difficulty in finding out more information. Does anyone know who builds these large tourist subs? What do they cost? To my mind, 30 passengers + 2 crew + 1 tour guide x 40 minutes is a lot of life support, even without the air conditioning!

An on units of measurement: Does anyone else suffer as I do? Talk of cubic feet, gallons, atm, pounds etc is the language of my Grandfather (An aerospace engineer during the 60s) I thought the modern scientific world used Meters, Kilograms and KiloPascals. Most confusing trying to convert everything before doing the maths. If I'm in tiny minority, I'll live with it, otherwise it might be nice for people with formulas to state them in Imperial and Metric? I'd hate to drown because I wasn't using enough firkins per league! ;-)

And lastly, I'm a web designer. If anyone needs any advice or help getting their submarine-related material on the web, I'll do all I can.


Cheers!

Seb Hunt

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