Ok, a cheap way to find your sunken ship is to take fighing wire and hook it on a boober(use lots of fishing wire)and hook or glue the end of it the boat EX:
A77|, we already do that. It's called an "emergency float" and it is standard equipment on Big Gun warships. Not all of them use a bobber, though: often, a chunk of superstructure or a deck plate with foam glued on underneath will do the trick much better. Emergency floats are so important that I (the ship recovery expert in my club) require that the skipper swim for his own ship if he does not have a float installed.
first thing that gets tangled and does not come to the surface. I use the entire superstructure (made of foam, guaranteed to make the surface)
I agree the topic wasn't presented in the most ordinary way and the jeckel/hyde thing is weird but new people coming to the hobby will be interested in how to find their ships. I lost mine for 40minutes with 5 divers. They only found it due to the motors running underwater. That will never happen again I hope. The usual method is the bobber, mine failed as many do. The solution is to do something different (and that works). Useful info to all who sink their ships. That is how I learned to use the superstructure.
As the official swimmer in my club, I have a number of policies on the use of recovery floats. As I already mentioned, I require skipper to swim after his/her own ship if they do not have a float installed. I am willing to swim too, so long as the skipper spends the same amount of time in the water as I do. Probably more important is my policy on failed recovery floats. If a float fails to deploy for the first time, I will still swim after a ship. The skipper then gets until the next battle day to fix the float. If no change is made to the float, and it fails to deploy a second time, I will not swim after it. At all. I won't even go in the water unless the skipper is physically incapable of swimming. I don't mind helping if someone encounters a float-failure problem for the first time. I REALLY don't like it when someone knows they've got a problem but doesn't take the time to fix it.
It sounds like you have the recovery float figured out, What is your method? Superstructure as the float but where and how do you have your line mounted. I use a small "hose reel" mounted on the bottom of the superstructure. In effect it lowers the ship to the bottom.
I personally love a good thread necro. Do we already have a thread on floats? If not, maybe we should start a 'Show us your float!' thread.
I do not believe we have a proper "show us your float" thread. Probably a good idea to start one, though. I'm curious what other people have done, and what they've taken into consideration while designing.
That would be good. I have had very little long term success with floats tethered to the ship. For me, the line usually, eventually, gets tangled and does not properly feed out. That being said, I would be as guilty as the next guy for putting most of my effort into cannons/pumps development and not much into recovery... A situation that now that I think about it, is defiantly worthy of some real thought on how to do it right.
I've found that the surest way to keep my recovery floats working properly is to get absolutely "religious" about unrolling & re-rolling my recovery line each & every time a ship touches water. Line can develop tangles, just sitting all rolled up. It can also get stiff so that it won't unroll properly if it doesn't get flexed often. There's such a thing as being "too convenient", & that's a category where I place spooling systems.. If it keeps the line out of the way, then I tend to ignore it, & anything that gets ignored will fail eventually (& always at the worst-possible time). So, I deliberately place my lines where they can't help but be "in the way" for tasks like changing batteries, gas bottle, etc. That way I make sure that I unroll & re-roll them every time, because I have no other choice. I roll the line loosely around my hand, & place the roll on top of bottle/batteries as the last thing I do before closing up a ship. That, plus using complete superstructures as floats (with lots of flotation lifting upward as the hull sinks downward) has not failed to deploy completely since I started using this system. Is this an appropriate R&D topic, or should it be in a "How-to"? I mean, there's nothing being researched or developed here, just different people recounting how they do something. JM
I am going to try a spool system as well. After seeing a member in the local club go swiming in the nice cold water for a long time I thought that it might be a good idea to have one to less time in the water. I have surveyor string and it is attached to the superstructure. I filled it with as much foam as I could. That and the rest being ABS plastic, I hope it floats well enough. The string is then attached to the deck which I hope is fstened well eoungh to the hull. I might get a test in tomorrow. Then again I realy hope not to test the sink float system.
