Category Archives: Sailing

Energy, Sailing, Security

Plastiki: Waste as a Resource

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This could be a follow-up to my post about waste surveillance. Is the future really behind us? Bad joke, sorry. Seriously, though, the Plastiki project is an attempt to use some VERY low-tech recycling to make a boat:

David de Rothschild’s plan to sail across the Pacific Ocean, from San Francisco to Sydney in a 60-foot catamaran made of used two-liter plastic bottles, isn’t just an adventure. It’s a crusade. “Our philosophy of throwing everything away has to change,” says de Rothschild. “I want to use the Plastiki as a platform to help people think of waste as a resource.”

Rather than develop or innovate new ways of converting waste, however, the Plastiki seems like mostly an aesthetic and marketing-oriented project. It’s reality show drama more than real discovery or a leap in science and engineering, but nonetheless it carries a good message.

Sailing, Security

Flying Under Water

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The flyingpenguin is excited to find Deep Flight Submersibles has achieved success in artificial underwater flight.

We have evolved the art of underwater flight for its own sake through three generations of pure fliers. The butterfly has finally fully emerged… Deep Flight Super Falcon, the first production underwater flier.

It seems the name falcon has something to do with Tom Perkins’ Maltese Falcon.

Now available for sale to private owners. The first full productionized submersible capable of sub-sea flight. HOT is currently building a Super Falcon for Tom Perkins, founder of Kleiner Perkins Venture Capital. Perkins owns the largest privately-owned sailing yacht, S/Y Maltese Falcon. Deep Flight Super Falcon replaces the experimental prototype Deep Flight Aviator which was sold to another organization as a decommissioned submersible and they are operating the Aviator without any support from Hawkes Ocean Technologies.

The aviator was named for the late, great Steve Fawcett who intended to use it to set a deep-sea diving record. New investor, new functionality, new name…

Imagine flying to shore in rough weather. This could be the best escape path for inclement or emergency sea-state conditions, as well as an awesome interactive experience in regular ship-to-shore travel.

I was already planning to fly above water, but I might just have to enroll in underwater flight school as well.

CNN tries to make a statement about human originality and the usual nonsense.

“It’s not just that they look like airplanes, they actually are,” Hawkes said. “The machines we build underwater should look like airplanes, not submarines. Airplanes don’t look like balloons.”

He won’t take credit for the idea, saying the idea of a submarine with fins and wings has been thought of before. The 1943 French comic book, “Red Rackham’s Treasure,” included a shark-like submarine with dorsal fins and a tail. Hawkes said that although the idea of wings may have been obvious, “The prize goes to he that does.”

Looks like an airplane? Shark-like is more like it because it actually is underwater, but let’s not forget that penguins do actually fly underwater. Let’s give some credit to the little feathered guys who did it first, eh?

Now there’s a graceful image of a flying machine. CNN also provides some stomach-turning marketing speak.

He said Deep Flight submersibles are designed to be more agile than any creature living in the ocean — with the exception of dolphins.

More agile than a penguin? I don’t believe it. Show me some numbers. Dolphins are certainly not the measure, but it makes for nice imagery. I mean I doubt they’d say it’s designed to be more agile than a killer whale, or a colossal squid. That might scare away potential buyers. After all, the Falcon runs at a max speed of just 6 knots, which is slower than many fish (Mahi mahi like to catch squid at 7 knots), and some squid are known to sprint at 20 knots. Like I said, show me some numbers.

Energy, History, Sailing, Security

US Navy Doom and Gloom

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The War Nerd has nothing good to say about the state of the US Navy in a story called This Is How the Carriers Will Die

You know that Garmin satnav you use to find the nearest Thai place when the in-laws are visiting? If you were the Navy brass, that should have scared you to death. The Mac on your kid’s bedroom desk should have scared you. Every time electronics got smaller, cheaper and more efficient, the carrier became more of a death trap. Every time stealth tech jumped another step, the carrier was more obviously a bad idea. Smaller, cooler-running engines: another bad sign for the carrier. Every single change in technology in the past half a century has had “Stop building carriers!” written all over it. And nobody in the navy brass paid any attention.

The lesson here is the same one all of you suckers should have learned from watching the financial news this year: the people at the top are just as dumb as you are, just meaner and greedier. And that goes for the ones running the US surface fleet as much as it does for the GM or Chrysler honchos. Hell, they even look the same. Take that Wagoner ass who just got the boot from GM and put him in a tailored uniform and he could walk on as an admiral in any officer’s club from Guam to Diego Garcia. You have to stop thinking somebody up there is looking out for you.

Remember that one sentence, get it branded onto your arm: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.”

Recommendations are found in the analysis of middle-east combat:

The difference between the Israeli navy and ours is simple: the Israelis learned their lesson and switched to smaller, lighter missile craft. No more ocean-going muscle cars to act like giant magnetized targets. The newer Israeli boats are small enough that when you lose one, like they did in the 2006 war to land-based Hezbollah surface to surface missiles, you don’t suffer 100 casualties.

Got that? No more muscle cars. This is amazing stuff to think about as I find Americans who continue to emphasize “go big” as the best measure of success. The clear lesson is to go efficient, or maybe even to go small, or face a predictable catastrophe.