YES! Along with carpenter ants, termites, and B-1 RD seaplane bombers. They'll make a mess on your superstructure, hull, and anything else in their way
And don't forget the spy seagulls that may conduct bombing runs. Not so much on the ships but on the Captains. I've been bombed a few times.
GU-11's are a specific type of B-1RD. They are specially tasked with attacking the command structure of both sides. SW-4N's are just plain dangerous. Fortunately, they keep their distance. I also see some M4-114D's around our pond sometimes. One of our backup ponds (for Gunnery and Maneuvering only) has a serious B-1RD problem. The water is heavily polluted with bombs. I always wash off my boat after events there.
THat was excellent Carl. I had to reread the post a few times... LOL Great stuff! I guess in that scenario my onboard system would be an eggfryer. And a cannon full of ketchup!
Refloating your boat is entirely doable, just needs some extra gas and space. What you do is take something expandable say a balloon ( I'd find something tougher myself) attach it to a poppet valve and run through the ship where you want it to expand. Depress teh poppet and hold it down, instant displacement of water and inflation of boat. This might not bring the boat all the way back up, but it could bring it close. Also be tricky not to mess up your i nternals with the ballonish thing.
I've never had a combat ship with that much free space inside. Maybe a Yamato would have enough spare room, but enough air to float one of these babies is not a trivial amount. My biggest is Vanguard, and she's 45 pounds, and not nearly enough room.
Fuzzy, that was my & Mark's Idea as well... He tried it & kept poping the balloon. I intend to try it as well, but I intend to try using a couple ballast tanks. However, I haven't spend enough time trying to calc this out. We need to answer the following before we know how plausible the concept is: How many pounds lift is required to lift a 45-55 pound boat to the (near) surface? Don't say 45-55, I believe material bouyancy will take an effect here. How many pounds lift is created from 1 cuin CO2 submerged?
As far as lift from gas... 1 cubic inch = 0.00432900431 US gallons So, you would need 231 cubic inches of gas to displace one gallon of water (8 pounds). That sounds like a lot, but it'd be a ballast tank (or combination thereof with dimensions of 11" x 4" x 5.25". Not too bad, but I still wouldn't have room in my ship for it, and that's just 8 pounds of bouyancy. As far as how much to lift it to near the surface... Not nearly 45-55 pounds, I would think. Most ships get decks awash before sinking, and there's not much air inside them at that point, so I'm guessing not much bouyancy would be needed... More than 8 pounds though. I'd guess (with no sciency calculations) that it'd be more like between 24-32 pounds to float the hypothetical ship(sticking with multiples of 8 for ease of math on my end). If we want metric, it's easier. 1 cm^3 of water weighs 1g, so every 2.212# of lift requires a ballast tank 1L in volume. So think 10L of CO2 at Patm + Pdepth. You'd need a 9oz CO2 bottle just for the flotation. Sorry if it sounds like I want to rain on anyone's parade. It sounds like a cool concept, just tough to accomplish within our scale.
It would be entirely do-able in an unarmed transport vessel. If ever I build a super-liner like Normandie or Queen Mary, it will need such a system. 'cause all ships sink, and recovering 70 lbs of Queen Mary plus 100 lbs of water in it from a 7-8 ft deep pond is not my cup of tea. Actually, the real trick is to strap foam to the bottom of the deck, until it's near neutral buoyancy submerged. Then I'd only be carrying 1-2 lbs of weight back to the surface, rather than 70 lbs. much easier.
Absolutely, Carl... I forgot about convoys, where it'd be EASILY doable, especially like you say, on the great biggies. Maybe it's time to dust of my plans set for SS Vaterland... lol so many ships, so little time.
Hmmmmm... You might be right.. I'm not good a judging weights. I thought its more like 8 pounds to just get the thing lifted to the decksawash state. Like I said, I haven't put any calc into this. I'll start to think a bit on it once the Iowa is finished.
I just think of it in common terms, then around the math. I can't associate a cubic inch with anything other than V8 engines But I know that my 1L water bottle weighs about 2.2 pounds heavier when it's full, or my gallon canteen weighs 8 pounds with water in it. Helps for making quick calculations.
I think we are looking at this wrong. We don't need to displace X amount of water out of the ship.. We need to create X amount of lift. Ever push a balloon into water? It really pushes back. That's because air is lighter than water.. same reason why oil floats. Ever try to lift your girlfriend while swimming? She is tons lighter (well, hopefully not tons) that's because she has bouyancy & her body naturally wants to lift to the surface. Obviously the ship has less bouyancy than your watery girlfriend, but the concept is the same, we don't need to lift 50lbs while submerged. All we have to do is contain enough CO2 to create X amount of lift to (slightly) overtake the negative bouyancy of the ship & the ship will surface to decksawash status.
To contain enough CO2 to produce lift, you must displace water from somewhere. If you aren't displacing water from inside the boat, then the boat is not getting lighter. Make the boat lighter than the water surrounding it, and you get positive bouyancy. Inflating a balloon underwater, you are still fighting the pressure of the water outside the ship, because the water that the balloon displaces has to be pushed out of the way. All submarines that use ballast tanks have to deal with this, which is why the American and British subs use 4500psig air to blow their ballast tanks dry. It takes that much pressure to move the water out of them expediently.
The way I figure, every ship displaces X amount of water, equal to the volume of the ship below the waterline. So if you were to put an amount of foam equal to the volume of the ship's below-the-waterline area in the ship's upper hull, it could be shot full of holes, fill up with water, and sink until the foam (rather than the hull) displaces that amount of water. Add or subtract foam until the ship is capable of fully submerging, and then add a small inflatable balloon. Once the ship sinks, you inflate the balloon and voila: the ship floats back to the surface.
I did experiments with the balloon idea to float a warship. My small gun WWII Scharnhorst weights 31lbs dry on the bench. Sunk sitting on the bottom it required 2.5 to 3.0lbs lift the raise it to smoke stack tip out of the water. Measured this with a fish scale. One foot deep water. 3.0lbs lift is a volume about the size of our forearm and hand. A long skinny balloon inflated inside an english muffin plastic wrapper gave enough lift to float Scharn. To inflate a balloon of this size would take about a 1 inch long 3/4" copper tube accumulator charged to 140psi. Its a ratio of pressure to volume. Let the small high pressure transfer to a much larger low pressure balloon. Only need 1.5 psi to inflate a balloon. I never went any farther with the installation. No room inside Scharn to install this float accum and the as yet undefined magic control element to dispense the float charge at sunk. Also the first attempts to get the deflated bag/balloon to fit in the superstructure were unsuccessful. Now you have to worry about the superstructure dislodging at a slight bump. Bicycle and motor cycle inner tubes were too stiff and cumbersome.
