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Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s FLIP vessel decommissioned after 60 years
- _Microft 3y agoHere's a quick link to its Wikipedia entry for some additional information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoI admired the sheer audacity of this ship. I hope there is a replacement in the works.
- jnsaff2 3y agoIf they can't find $8M to extend this ones life for 10 years then I highly doubt they are going to get a new one. Unfortunately.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoGiven how much money is thrown around by rich people, I find it so hard to believe that $8M for something like this is nowhere to be found.
- hgomersall 3y agoThe free market in action! As everyone knows, if nobody is willing to pay, then nobody values it.
- blamazon 3y agoMore like the free market inaction.
- Ekaros 3y agoI think there are probably dozens of things like this(not exactly but random things) that could use also millions. Like that observatory. And there is only so much willingness to spend money.
- gedy 3y agoor maybe California or the federal government's budget?
- kjs3 3y agoDoesn't generate enough clicks.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoA sad commentary no doubt. But, it is always tough to get donors to cough up sustainment funds. The glamor is in the new. Might be easier to get more if the naming rights are offered up. Newer isn't always better but one can hope the same foresight and build quality can be brought to a future design.
- phire 3y agoI suspect there is very little justification for a manned platform anymore. It requires are crew of five (not including the up-to 11 scientists). Much of the science would probably be better off without noise introduced by crew and the generators. Scientists might be better off with an unmanned battery powered platform. Or unmanned ROVs. And if you do need a manned platform, the deep sea oil industry now operates hundreds of them. It might be cheaper for scientists to simply piggy-back on those.
- Certified 3y ago>And if you do need a manned platform, the deep sea oil industry now operates hundreds of them. It might be cheaper for scientists to simply piggy-back on those. Not that much cheaper. At least in the US based oil companies I have worked with, the cost of sending even one person to an offshore platform can easily exceed 20k USD. Everyone on the platform has to have extensive safety training. Only a few training facilities are setup to do things like Helicopter Underwater Escape Training [1] so the cost is pretty high. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHTk3JNtMlw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHTk3JNtMlw
- zirgs 3y ago20k sounds like peanuts compared to the cost of maintaining their own platform.
- gregoriol 3y agoIs it only about money or could it also be about its usefulness? I have no information on this, but like when Arecibo collapsed, there were discussions about how much it would cost to fix it and how useful it could be. Maybe it has made a lot of research, and some new research directions would better make use of another kind of tool?
- yreg 3y agoIt apparently cost 600k to build[0] (6M in 2023 USD), much less than I would expect. [0] https://scripps.ucsd.edu/ships/flip/history https://scripps.ucsd.edu/ships/flip/history
- spoonjim 3y agoIt would cost $600m minimum today
- dtkav 3y agoPolar POD [0] is a spiritual successor to FLIP but is designed to work in the southern ocean. [0] https://www.polarpod.fr/en/polar-pod https://www.polarpod.fr/en/polar-pod
- doodlebugging 3y agoZero emission vessel by design using wind generators and solar panels with battery storage to power things. So much has changed over the years. It really is a great time to be a researcher since all your computing gear fits in a much smaller space and can be powered by options that don't force you to breathe diesel smoke. In contrast, FLIP used 3 diesel generators. I watched the 27+ minute video from 1969 linked by someone else and was struck by how much it reminded me of offshore O&G platforms and drilling rigs with steel walls and diesel generators screaming. The guys in the video wore no hearing protection in the generator room. It was loud on the video and from wandering thru a generator room on land I know it had to be deafening. I have tinnitus from all the loud machinery that I worked around and it does impact your quality of life. As a service company hand you always got the bunks in the cabins closest to the noise sources so there was no way to escape. When you combine the generator noise with the noise from those dot matrix printers you get a nice wide-band noise source. Since the FLIP was studying acoustic signals they must've overcome the constant noise from the platform by filtering. I know from some ocean bottom receivers that I worked with that you can hear individual boats entering and leaving a recording area through a water column that is thousands of feet thick. Since the generators ran 24 hours a day they likely needed some signal processing to mitigate the constant noise. And back in 1969 what OS would they be using? CP/M? The rack they loaded in the FLIP video looked a lot like an old DEC Vax rack-mounted computer that we scrapped back in the 1980's. Another thing I noticed about FLIP is that many of the ladders used to access the different levels appear to be hardware store aluminum ladders as opposed to built to purpose ladders. I think the POD will have the benefit of experience gained with the FLIP to hone their design so that access issues are streamlined and efficient. In their ePOD course (very cool stuff there) about the living quarters you can see that ladders are fixed in position. Thanks for this link. For those that watched the video of FLIP I recommend walking through the courses in the ePOD part of this POD link.
- thrillgore 3y agoThe FLIP was a novelty, and there's really not a need to switch orientation now that ROVs are common. It lived and died as an outlier. Rest in peace, RP FLIP.
- localplume 3y agosome nice extra info and an amusing story from reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/15mrqoc/us_navy_office_of_naval_researchs_rp_flip/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/15mrqoc/us_nav...
- krylon 3y agoI remember seeing pictures of this in a book as a child and thinking how cool that must be. Farewell!
- Animats 3y agoToo bad. It's one of those things that dates from a period in the 1960s when the oceans were seen as worthy of exploration as the Moon. People talked about undersea cities. But only a few very tiny undersea research habitats were ever built. There just wasn't a use case.
- defrost 3y agoMore specifically it dates from that Cold War period where submarine related activity was disguised as "Ocean Research" and slathered with pictures of dolphins. FLIP was all about those undersea sound waves, thermal gradients and sloping ocean bottoms. Less underseas cities, more total atomic warfare.
- ethbr0 3y agoThings funding for atomic warfare has given us: - Nuclear power - Access to Earth orbit - GPS - Mapping of the world's oceans - Miniaturized circuits - The Internet - Interstate road systems - Hubble Space Telescope - Earth observation satellites For such a horrible technology, humanity seems to have made out okay.
- Jalad 3y agoThe flipside of course being, that in a rather not uncommon set of circumstances we get: - Destruction of the current human civilization Although I agree that it is nice that we scrapped some benefits out of it along the way
- shellfishgene 3y agoHere's a video of someone walking all around the ship. With the number of ladders to climb it seems like everyday was leg day for the scientists aboard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shPATcV9Dzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shPATcV9Dzw
- DemocracyFTW2 3y agoIf the catwalk doesn't make you sick, the narrow hatches and the confined spaces will.
- m2fkxy 3y agoI find it amusing how prudish the article is about its purpose, ie. support "U.S. Navy [ocean modeling] research objectives". that pretty much means submarine and acoustic warfare.
- ctenb 3y agoI had to read the title 5 times to understand what it says :)
- ctenb 3y ago(Not anymore, title has been changed)
- drybjed 3y agoThis ship was the inspiration for the MS Curie vessel in SOMA. https://soma.fandom.com/wiki/MS_CURIE https://soma.fandom.com/wiki/MS_CURIE
- thrillgore 3y agoI honestly thought that the CURIE was such a ridiculous idea in game I was shocked to find the FLIP really existed.
- keane 3y agoI think R/V FLIP was also the inspiration for the Operation Hennessey underwater sea laboratory in Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou that Zissou's crew steals an espresso machine from. NED: Steve are we allowed in here? ZISSOU: It's the scientific community, man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbFdjq-QIRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbFdjq-QIRc Interestingly, in a life imitates art way, an R/P FLIP crew member describes the culture onboard the actual sea lab as resembling Life Aquatic here: https://rvsallyride.ucsd.edu/2017/04/04/week-3-report-from-flip/ https://rvsallyride.ucsd.edu/2017/04/04/week-3-report-from-f...
- Mistletoe 3y agoI'm sure this is a stupid question but why was it stable/impervious to waves when flipped?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mkl 3y agoFrom Wikipedia [1]: "When flipped, most of the ballast for the platform is provided by water at depths below the influence of surface waves, hence FLIP is stable and mostly immune to wave action similar to a spar buoy." Its mass wasn't sitting on the moving surface, but largely surrounded by water that wasn't moving much. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP
- thom 3y agoHadn’t really thought about this before, but I suppose this is a fairly obvious result of Archimedes’ principle.
- Mistletoe 3y agoNeat thank you. That makes sense.
- puzzlingcaptcha 3y agoA more modern approach using that principle would be SWATH vessels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-waterplane-area_twin_hull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-waterplane-area_twin_hul...)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- robryk 3y agoI think that the reason is that waves only move water close to the surface, and FLIP's drag is centered way below it. It's clear to me how this should reduce rolling and lolling, but am less certain how it should affect bobbing.
- mkl 3y agoA more informative official article: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/storied-research-platform-retired https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/storied-research-platform-reti...
- runlevel1 3y agoI worked at SIO for 5 years around the mid 2000s, but not on FLIP. Many of the folks there were remarkable people. One such person was one of the people who got FLIP started, Walter Munk.[^1] He was an interesting guy. He left Austria during the Anschluss and started working on his doctorate at SIO. When the US entered the war he put his PhD on pause to enlist in the US Army Ski Corps. As a native German speaker and former ski instructor, he thought it was a good fit. A little over a year later, the Department of War found out from Roger Revelle and Harald Sverdrup that they had a talented oceanographer deployed to the front lines. So they pulled him out to help with submarine warfare and the planning of some upcoming amphibious landings in Africa, and later, Normandy. He was still working at SIO into his 90s. And, as was the case with all the scientists and staff at SIO, he was an all-around nice person. SIO was a chill place to work. A good portion of the folks kept surfboards in their offices so they could surf before work. You weren't going to get rich working there, but the people and the location were hard to beat. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Munk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Munk
- julian_t 3y agoI visited SIO briefly in the late 80s, and my most vivid memory is of a long haired dude in a Hawaiian shirt bursting into our meeting to announce "surf's up!", at which point everything stopped and everyone left. Back then it all seemed impossibly exotic to a PhD student from London.
- ethbr0 3y agoAs someone who recently started surfing, I understand the cultural timing a lot more now. Good surfing requires pretty particular types of waves. Which in turn requires particular wind. Even at good locations, these are transient conditions that can appear and disappear at the whim of nature (even over the course of an hour). Ergo, surf's up = drop things that don't need to be done ASAP They'll be there later. Good waves probably won't.
- defrost 3y agoIt's a mixed blessing hitting peak wave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFA6jUdJMb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFA6jUdJMb8
- gorgoiler 3y agoThe spirit of FLIP is inspiring to me — it emphasises the importance of doing things and gathering data. In our field of technology, ideas, performance, growth, and debugging there’s only so much value talking and so much more value in measuring. Data and experiments have driven my projects forward so many more times than ideas and meetings. You don’t know what you don’t know.