Re: design team

[Ray Keefer <Ray.Keefer@eng.Sun.COM>]

Hi,

Well I stayed away from this design team because I was involved with two
previous teams and they fizzled out in under a month. You have some
significant challenges ahead and they are mostly due to geography.
So here is some lessons learned from previous attempts.

1. You need a leader. Someone willing to head the project, make tough
   choices regarding design tradeoffs, and with adequate communication 
   skills and spare time. The leader will probably end up doing most of the 
   hard work so they need to be willing up front to do it.

2. Communication. I have seen so many projects suffer due to lack of
   communication. Do it any way you can. E-mail, list group, fax, phone,
   personal e-mail, in person. In person is best. One day in a face-to-face
   meeting is worth a month any other way.

   Decide on a method or standard to send sketches and drawings back and
   forth. Snail mail will add significant time to the project. IF you can
   pick an electronic medium the pace will be faster.

3. Too many people give too many conflicting design notions. This is where
   a strong leader is important. Out of all the ideas the leader needs to
   pull together a workable design. 

   However too few people and you don't have enough synergy to be innovative.
   Your leader must be able to draw out ideas from the team and pick the best.

4. Where you going to build it? Who is going to build it? Who is going to fund
   it? Who gets to use it? :) These are very tough questions. Due to the fact
   that PSUBers are spread across the world these will be amongst the 
   toughest issues to address.

5. Another tough issue is deciding the basic question: ambient or 1atm.
   I won't go into the pros and cons of each approach.

6. For what it's worth, my design input would be:

	1 atm
	Hull Form: like a fast attack submarine, streamlined
	Depth: 200 ft
	People: 2 (can operate with 1) in tandem
	Speed: 3 knots
	Endurance: 4-8 hours
	Trailerable
	Lead-acid batteries
	Two electric motors on horizontal planes (simular to SportSub)
	Soft tanks (at least 2) for ballast, fwd and aft
	Hard tank for trimming (many of the WWII midgets failed due to not
		being trimable)

Good Luck,
Ray