tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Aug 26 19:10:27 2014

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[Tlhingan-hol] supersonic submarines?

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv 'utlh ([email protected]) 

QIpchu’ qechvam.

While I’m finding this quite challenging to discuss in Klingon, I have to say that this technology seems like an indescribably stupid idea. I’m stunned just trying to think how anyone could fail to see the fundamentally unsolvable problems involved.

There’s no way that sending a supersonic submarine through the ocean will ever be safe or financially competitive to flying. The air has fewer things to run into than the sea, and it costs a lot less to run an engine in the air than under water, especially if that engine has to have enough horsepower to push that much water out of the way. Maybe the water doesn’t have to touch the submarine, but you have to push the water out of the way of the bubble, and Newton has quite a lot to say about how much energy it takes to move that many pounds of water out of your way along a tube the diameter of a submarine, the length of an ocean.

Also note that submarines weigh a lot more than airplanes, and you have to accelerate that greater mass through a medium that has greater mass. The enormous waste of fuel required in order to move that much mass through that much mass when you have such obvious alternatives is stupendous.

Also consider that submarines don’t use underwater radar because radar doesn’t work underwater very well. Submarines use sonar, which won’t work in a supersonic submarine. So, a supersonic submarine would be a blind submarine, and it can’t use a GPS to know where it is, either. The water surface is a problem.

The engineers who think this will ever make commercial travel underwater feasible are idiots; the lowest order of morons. This is not appropriate technology.

Do they think this won’t affect fish populations? Can you imagine Greenpeace’s response to this? What about the affect at the surface of this much displaced water? What would the shock wave do from supersonic travel through an incompressible medium? This would change ocean currents. It would fundamentally yank entire weather systems. If it ever became common, likely it would end life on the planet as we know it. The whole “growing food in places” thing would probably stop working.

I’m sure that cockroaches would find a way to survive this, but humanity? Not so much. The biosphere would find a lot of new food in the form of human corpses. Otherwise, it would not be so good for much of the rest of the species.

This is the stupidest thing since atomic power and atomic weapons, and it would produce less benefit than either with more obvious costs.

You want to transport people really fast? It would be less stupid to fly them over with solid-fueled rockets, then let them parachute from high altitude. This is another stupid idea, but it would be easier to do, would cost less and would have less catastrophic side effects.

chaq tlhIngan nap ‘oH napvam. HoH’eghpu’DI’ Hoch tera’nganpu’, ngeD charghmeH Qu’. 

But no. It would be too easy. This is not the Klingon way. ghaytan romuluSngan nap ‘oH.

lojmIt tI’wI’ nuv ‘utlh
Door Repair Guy, Retired Honorably
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