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Unmanned submarine earmarked for Irish Sea freight crossings
- athenot 5y agoSounds interesting but the article doesn't mention how many containers would fit in this sub.
- themodelplumber 5y agoBased on the illustration, easily hundreds. Based on the model sitting on a wooden table, none.
- tppiotrowski 5y ago> A self-driving hydrogen-powered submarine is among the winners in a UK government competition to tackle emissions from shipping. > But what kind of cargo will the submarine be carrying? "That's what we're going to figure out over the next few months," he told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme. > The creators say it will also collect micro-plastic from the water column and feed the data to researchers. I think it's an interesting concept but selling it as a fix for emissions for shipping seems like greenwashing to me.
- munk-a 5y agoAdditionally, unless I'm missing something, we don't actually have the economics at scale to produce "green hydrogen" right now - it's definitely cleaner than oil, but it's still rather environmentally expensive to produce.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoIt's not evironmentally expensive, but it is currently money expensive due to a combination of implicit subsidies of the fossil fuel industry and small scale of production.
- nradov 5y agoAt the moment most hydrogen is produced by reforming natural gas. So in some ways it's less "green" than just burning the natural gas.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoIt's a complicated area but the key difference is to only use it for things that can't be otherwise electrified, which are mostly chemical input tasks, but cargo shipping on (or under) water is probably one of the sensible uses. Here's an article with a handy chart: https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/liebreich-oil-sector-is-lobbying-for-inefficient-hydrogen-cars-because-it-wants-to-delay-electrification-/2-1-1033226 https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/liebreich-oil...
- c_o_n_v_e_x 5y agoUnless the sub has a snorkel to the surface or some ability to extract dissolved O2 from seawater, the sub will also need an onboard supply of O2.. presumably compressed O2.. or they use hydrogen peroxide like in torpedoes?
- nradov 5y agoYes fuel cell powered submarines always carry an onboard oxygen supply, either compressed gas or liquid. It's not practical to extract that much dissolved O2 from seawater.
- belorn 5y agoIt not that crazy concept for an actually functional drone delivery system. Ocean based wind farms that generate green hydrogen has been suggested as a possible future method to solve the grid stability issue in a future without fossil fuels (especially in the camp that would rather use fossil fuels than nuclear). If you are already producing the hydrogen in the ocean, having a delivery system of drones that operate on hydrogen and can travel independently to those wind farms to refuel seems like a good match. This assuming that the cost of building the green hydrogen producing wind farm near the ports, the cost of the drones, the control systems and loading/offloading can be competitive to simply using very large ships that burn cheap fossil fuel.
- Meerax 5y ago> But what kind of cargo will the submarine be carrying? "That's what we're going to figure out over the next few months," he told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme. Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
- rasz 5y agoThis submarine was designed to transport green energy grant money straight to designers wallet.
- kitd 5y agoAIUI, GPS doesnt penetrate very far below the ocean surface. It would be interesting to know what alternatives they are planning for navigation.
- cyberge99 5y agoSome auv’s have a (retractable) tether to a surface GPS. I’m not sure about this one though.
- usrusr 5y agoSimple: put the receiver on the tractor kite. I mean, what self-respecting future green sea transport solution wouldn't have a huge tractor kite? And what would be more impressive than a huge tractor kite? A huge tractor kite on a tether that dives 50m beneath the surface.
- munk-a 5y agoHaving something extending above the surface would help with visibility for small ships as well - cargo vessels will track this automatically and most modestly sized sailboats do either have a built in unit for tracking nearby ships or folks just use their smartphones - but for really small water craft (like rowboats/dingies and personal sail-craft (sunfishes)) I'm concerned that collisions would be extremely easy.
- ryankupyn 5y agoThis is an intriguing concept, but given that the submarine is small and suitable for mostly high-value cargo (whisky is the example cargo given in the article) I'm not sure how it'll offer significant advantages over other forms of transportation in practice. Although submarines are more effective navigating through storms, one could simply wait for the storm to pass when shipping non-time-sensitive cargo, then use a regular surface cargo ship (which could be automated if desired just like the submarine). Surface ships also have the advantage of compatibility with our already-established shipbuilding and maintenance infrastructure, while a submarine would require the proliferation of new skills and tools to support it. For time-critical cargo (where one can't wait for a hypothetical storm to pass), it's likely aircraft would be a better option for most shipments - certainly in severe storms aircraft can't operate either, but in that case the very act of loading and unloading the submarine would be hazardous as well.
- jcun4128 5y agoThat's neat imagine a heist to catch one underwater with a net
- themodelplumber 5y ago_Modern cargo submarines: Born out of, and into, criminality._ I agree and would love to see some capers like that. Even if tongue in cheek, like an Ocean's 12-style billionaire who lives in a customized one because they suffer from severe OCD and introversion or something. Everybody on the squad rolls their eyes and the audience rolls the eyes right along with them, because nope, we're not sensitive billionaire techie weirdos here! Just good ol' fashioned types. (Meanwhile, Wolfram is probably literally trying out one for off-site workplace-hacking IRL, or something stranger than fiction...)
- wefarrell 5y agoA clandestine means of transporting cargo without relying on humans who can steal or be traced back to the owner. I wonder if they'll accept cryptocurrency.
- siod 5y agoI love the concept of submarine cargo ships but there are three main issues that make them less appealing than ships. Subs require significantly more thrust per cubic metre of cargo. Communication and navigation are more difficult because GPS and satellite comms don't work underwater. Loading and unloading in comparable times to a standard container vessel.
- newsclues 5y agoLess turbulence to move the cargo, which could lead to less breakage. If subs are designed for cargo then unload/loading operations can be optimized.
- munk-a 5y agoDeep water subs require serious fixed reinforcement (like gigantic periodic rings) to prevent being crushed at low depths that would stop you from easily exposing the interior for unloading - but given that they're only going 50m deep I'm sure you could have some mechanism to pop the sub in half and get all the access you need. I feel like turbulence is sort of a solved problem by way of pallet packing - but that actually raises a larger concern of mine - the sub they display is pretty tube-shaped which means it's either not going to use pre-packed pallets (definitely the case if the image shown is to scale) or it's not going to use pre-packed pallets efficiently. Habours leverage pallets to minimize the manual labour needed for loading/unloading so while the ship might open like a sardine can it's not going to see a lot of use if someone needs to lift boxes out of it one at a time.
- serf 5y agoI like the idea, but as a mariner who has ran into mysterious things in the sea i'm more ambiguous. one of the major advantages of (most) ocean-going vessels, aside from usually having a crew aboard to negotiate with over VHF as to who goes where when trying to navigate around them , is that the above-water visibility aids in navigation and avoidance. a future where trade channels are filled with AI-driven low-depth submarines that have no real crew aboard to communicate with sort of worries me, but all I can do is hope that the people who put them together and control them get it right -- otherwise it could turn a lot of trips dangerous. for those that are in the business : is there an established method by which these unmanned ships that I keep reading about deal with VHF traffic of those around them? Perhaps the ship is receiving and sending back to some proxy site somewhere for a crew to communicate to nearby ships offsite?
- munk-a 5y agoI think they'd need some serious lane marking around wherever they're going to come to surface (unless they somehow intend for these to surface vertically within a reception depot). I can imagine how "fun" it'd be to be in a teensy sailboat (like a sunfish) and have this thing surface under you - possibly chucking you into the sub's engine when you're thrown from the boat.
- contingencies 5y agoI have been on a small sailboat and had a submarine surface nearby. Good times!
- anonymousDan 5y agoWow, do you think they knew you were there? Must have been a shock!
- oh_sigh 5y agoProbably not, considering even advanced nuclear subs just pop up without checking if there is a 200' ship above them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehime_Maru_and_USS_Greeneville_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehime_Maru_and_USS_Greeneville...
- oaiey 5y agoUK sponsored, in the Irish sea? Is the UK smuggling stuff over to northern Ireland to circumstance the EU Brexit treaty?
- tehbeard 5y agoIt's a comedy act by Bojo the clown (Boris Johnson) and co... To distract the public from the various shitshows currently going on with absolutely daft crap, like this and the "return of imperial measurements"..
- Aspos 5y agoThere is a whole industry ready to throw money at a vehicle which does not need humans to operate, can evade detection, can be cheap enough to be discarded after transporting a highly valuable cargo.
- sdoering 5y agoThis industry is already employing subs albeit with people aboard [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine?wprov=sfla1
- thaumasiotes 5y agoI have to say, I'm amused by the strength of the pearl-clutching impulse illustrated by the wikipedia intro: > Some express concerns such vessels could potentially be used for purposes other than smuggling. I guess "but what if it facilitates the drug trade?" just wasn't available as an objection here.
- toast0 5y ago> Some express concerns such vessels could potentially be used for purposes other than smuggling. Wouldn't it be awful if someone used a narco sub for recreational boating without crossing any national borders? Or what if they used one to transport goods or people across borders and stopped at customs/immigration as required? That would be concerning indeed!
- Talanes 5y agoWhich is "Cited" by an article that says nothing of the sort. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/feds-cant-catch-cartels-cocaine-filled-submarines/323833/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/fe...
- wheybags 5y ago£380,000 seems like... a drop in the ocean for a project like that. Surely they will need multiple millions just to have a chance at commercial success.
- Ekaros 5y agoIn general that isn't much in submarine business... Even used reasonably sized tourist submarines cost more. And those have very limited dive times ranges.
- tgb 5y agoThere are "underwater gliders" that propel themselves by ascending/descending via changing their buoyancy and using fins to direct this forwards. They have low speed but are much more efficient than most subs. Would be interesting to see such a glider take on freight, though it would probably need thrusters for navigation in harbor.
- throwoutway 5y ago> though it would probably need thrusters for navigation in harbor. Perhaps the harbor can have small tugboats that simply hook the freighters and push it into the harbor
- cfn 5y agoSome current gliders already have a propulsion system for fine adjustments that is also used for manouvering in port. I believe they would be too slow for any practical use in the merchant navy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_glider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_glider
- todd8 5y agoAs I recall from my class work in a hydrospace vehicles course I took decades ago, submarines have the interesting property of being more efficient that surface vehicle because they leave no wake. A wake is a set of propagating waves that require energy to generate and this, naturally, is felt as drag by conventional ships. The question of course arises, why aren’t submarines used for shipping? We were taught that the problem was buoyancy control. The weight of a ship carrying freight can vary greatly on a round trip.
- jareklupinski 5y agoI can imagine loading and unloading a sub full of containers to be more difficult than an open-top cargo ship
- HomeDeLaPot 5y agoThat's surprising to me... is it because handling the variance in buoyancy would require massive ballast tanks? I was thinking the primary blocker would be the sheer complexity and cost of the technology required to go under the water rather than on it for a long period of time.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> submarines have the interesting property of being more efficient that surface vehicle because they leave no wake. A wake is a set of propagating waves that require energy to generate and this, naturally, is felt as drag by conventional ships. This sounds off. Conventional ships experience drag when they try to go forward and there's a bunch of water in the way. When they shove that water out of the way, it has to go somewhere else, and meanwhile some other water has to flow into the space where the ship used to be. That motion of the water generates the wake. But all of that applies just as well to submarines moving below the surface of the sea, or cars driving around within the atmosphere. If a car passes by you, you'll feel wind blowing after it. That is the car's wake. And when a submarine tries to move underwater, it runs into exactly the same problem as the surface ship -- there's a bunch of water in the way. How can it possibly move without generating a wake?
- 5y ago
- ajay-b 5y agoThe future of shipping will be autonomous. It will end the horrible labor abuses, and quite possibly halt piracy. However it would require trust. An autonomous ship could just has easily be a Trojan horse!
- wahern 5y agoI doubt the most abusive shippers will switch to autonomous shipping anytime soon. Rather, reductions in labor will attract the more responsible, better paying shippers that some global communities (e.g. in the Philippines) heavily rely upon for income. Because being responsible is expensive; automation replaces employees, not slaves.
- knodi123 5y ago> quite possibly halt piracy ?!? Anything you could do to keep an unmanned ship from being robbed, you could do to a manned ship too. > autonomous ship could just has easily be a Trojan horse! ?!? A manned ship could be a Trojan Horse too, in much the same way that the actual horse in the legend was.
- exporectomy 5y agoPirates use human crew as hostages. Without hostages, the other country's military could just shoot them.
- dane-pgp 5y agoCorrect, and the submarine could even include explosives designed to destroy the cargo and puncture the hull if it was opened without authorisation or lost GPS and radio signal for longer than a pre-determined length of time.
- aaron695 5y agoYou can't burn hydrogen under water. Hard hitting journalism from the BBC when even simple school science doesn't cut it. That's the end. But even if it was fuelled correctly it would be a shipping hazard. No human safeties and invisible below the water. Very hard to navigate and inefficient. This would cost 10's of millions to develop. Obviously an autonomous boat could do everything and follow the laws of physics, and be safer and have GPS and existing frameworks of navigation and safety (like GPS and Navigation lights) and not take enormous amounts of fuel to go underwater for reason unknown. There's even a meme how narco subs are really low-profile vessels and even drug money can't make them autonomous (which is about security not replacing cheap labour) Good on this company for ripping money from the government I guess to virtual signal 'tackle emissions from shipping', good hustle on hustlers on a brain dead public. Very HN If you really cared about emissions you look at efficiencies in current shipping, like harden and increase capacity on the Suez canal. But the public doesn't actual care about that. They like self-flagellation and it's important for the people controlling them to keep them in a state of confusion. Hydrogen powered submarines collecting mico-plastics will keep them distracted while a billion people live on less than a $1.90 a day.
- caycep 5y agoI'm just amused that the first thing they can think of is whisky... This would be the most hi tech rum-runner (er whisky?) ever...
- rjsw 5y agoThink sausages or Percy Pigs [1] would be more likely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Pig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Pig
- jdblair 5y agoThere’s a market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine
- mbrodersen 5y agoWhat a waste of money. They are only now thinking about the business case after getting the grant. That is the cart pulling the horse.