Not really something I'll ever get to... lord knows I have enough projects going on. Just something that intrigued me today & thought I'd write it all down so that I or someone else might come back to it later. Question: How do I get my boat out of the water without me getting wet? Solution I'm going to explore today: the Underwater Recovery Vehicle Premise: Underwater vehicle which can interface with a sunken warship in such a way to recover it, remotely. What process would it use to retrieve the sunken vessel? shore launch, travel to warship, attach to warship, lift warship from the pond floor (can't just drag it), return to launch. continued...
Im imagining a large convoy ship with a deployable robotic hand, clasp, or, at least, camera, to get or at least fins ships. Otherwise, a very big sub that has an area that can engulf most ships, use the flaps to clasp it, and lift it.
What problems will it face? Vision Waterproof (it will submerge) Connectivity (Wireless sucks underwater) System Control buoyancy solid attachment to warship System Control Usbizi seems to be a compact easy to use controller, and it uses my favorite language & compiler! C# + Visual Studio. It outputs several digital pinouts & 5 PWMs... so it should be capable of running a couple motor controllers.. When it comes to programming, the better the language the faster/better the results. Don't cheap out. http://www.ghielectronics.com/ Connectivity No reason for it to be wireless. Battle's over, no reason it couldn't be tethered. The USBizi brings ethernet to the table, so might as well use it. Ethernet wire is fairly inexpensive and has a maximum distance (without repeater) of 328ft.. more than sufficient. Vision Again wireless is not a good option Having two cables is also not a good option But luckily ethernet Cat5 cable comes to the rescue! cat5 (regular network cable) has 8 wires, 4 of which are used for 100base-T (ethernet) data communication! So now we just need a cheap 4 wire camera... And here it is! Use one of these with your favorite (CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP) CCTV camera & you are golden. Infact, this thing only seems to require 2 cables... so theoretically you could have two cameras. (camerae?) Visit this site
So that takes care of the control parts. Which is always the easy part for me. With the above, (depending on quality of the video) I think I can control just about anything. Now I/we need a solid mechanical plan on how to actually attach to the ship and lift it. robotic hand to grab the ship robotic hand to attach a cable to the ship (could get caught in robot) Anyone have any good ideas?
Buoyancy The robot sub with enough buoyancy to lift itself and the warship... either through big vertical props or compressed air. The robot is a surface ship with a long enough arm (impractical... the long arm would sway quite significantly at the bottom) A robot sub which can attach a cable from the surface ship (with enough buoyancy) Other good ideas?
might I make a suggestion... or at least the 70% suggestion. You could interface with a buoy deployed upon sinking that could then pull on the cable... as you can get plenty strong monophillament line for our purposes. It would be far simpler than trying to grab it. Construction as follows: two sections of 4" diameter by several feet long capped pvc tube (pontoons basically). in between is a method to hook and grab the line and reel it in. then returning to shore. Would not work if the float doesn't deploy... but might be the easiest approach.
I thought about that before, I also though that would be far easier. But I couldn't come up with a great way of grab & hook the cable. I'm sure I could grip the float with a simple fork-ish scoop... but how do I grab the cable well enough to pull the ship up? two vertical wheels to the far V of the fork? Red is the wheels which would turn to pull up the cable. The other problem with this method is it'll pull the ship up by one side, it'll never come up level... so again we are dragging the ship the whole way to shore.
grab and hook is not too hard.... I have some easy ideas on how to do it but I can not put them to words very well. I figured it would be something with a V to catch the float. below the float, there would be a knot, weight, or something solid to grab ahold of. that would be grabbed by a slot in a cylinder. the cylinder rotates, winching up the ship. level recovery is dependent only on where the cable ties in. tie it in in the middle of the ship and have it come out of the middle of the superstructure, and you come up level.
In theory pulling from the center will pull the ship up level, but I really don't know if it will work in practice.
it really depends. I think we will have to try (kinda like the popping balloon under water for mines idea, I'd love to try that one, )
and I should note... if one goes through the extra trouble to tie down the innards... coming up sideways is not a big deal...
Hmm... Since I'm in the mood for purely throwing out ideas... Here's another idea, the float deploys, but only 1 foot... then a sub has a much easier time grabbing it. ... Guess I'm in a sub mood today Realistically, a recovery surface ship with a fork seems like the best first approach. Any idea how to calc weight of a sunken ship so we know how much ballast is needed??
find the volume of water it displaces when sunk. find that weight of water. subtract from dry weight. as long as you accelerate slowly and do not try to lift the ship all the way above the surface you don't have to worry about lifting the water in the ship. It will weigh less submerged than when on dry land... I remember my Yamato, it weighed about 15 pounds submerged.. 55 on dry land.
We should aim for Yamato... then it'll be able to lift anything. If I did this right... 7 kg = 15 lbs 7 kg = 0.000713558 m³ * 1000 kg/m^3 * 9.81 m/s/s 0.000713558 m³ = 43.5439808 cu in We need 3.5" x 3.5" x 3.5" of air to lift yamato?
keep in mind, that different ships, same class, will have different weights. In my yamato, I had a full sized otter box for a watertight box... that added a lot of buoyancy. -Greg
I calc'd 60 lbs (dry weight of yamato)... provided my methods are right, the air-box became 5.5" x 5.5" x 5.5". (Just shy of a cu.ft.)
