How are you deriving a sense of scale from the illustration? I am got no grip on the intended size based on that image - it could be the side of rhode island - or small enough to fit in a coffee mug.
> A self-driving hydrogen-powered submarine is among the winners in a UK government competition to tackle emissions from shipping.
> But what kind of cargo will the submarine be carrying?
"That's what we're going to figure out over the next few months," he told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme.
> The creators say it will also collect micro-plastic from the water column and feed the data to researchers.
I think it's an interesting concept but selling it as a fix for emissions for shipping seems like greenwashing to me.
Additionally, unless I'm missing something, we don't actually have the economics at scale to produce "green hydrogen" right now - it's definitely cleaner than oil, but it's still rather environmentally expensive to produce.
It's not evironmentally expensive, but it is currently money expensive due to a combination of implicit subsidies of the fossil fuel industry and small scale of production.
It's a complicated area but the key difference is to only use it for things that can't be otherwise electrified, which are mostly chemical input tasks, but cargo shipping on (or under) water is probably one of the sensible uses.
Unless the sub has a snorkel to the surface or some ability to extract dissolved O2 from seawater, the sub will also need an onboard supply of O2.. presumably compressed O2.. or they use hydrogen peroxide like in torpedoes?
Yes fuel cell powered submarines always carry an onboard oxygen supply, either compressed gas or liquid. It's not practical to extract that much dissolved O2 from seawater.
It not that crazy concept for an actually functional drone delivery system. Ocean based wind farms that generate green hydrogen has been suggested as a possible future method to solve the grid stability issue in a future without fossil fuels (especially in the camp that would rather use fossil fuels than nuclear). If you are already producing the hydrogen in the ocean, having a delivery system of drones that operate on hydrogen and can travel independently to those wind farms to refuel seems like a good match.
This assuming that the cost of building the green hydrogen producing wind farm near the ports, the cost of the drones, the control systems and loading/offloading can be competitive to simply using very large ships that burn cheap fossil fuel.
> But what kind of cargo will the submarine be carrying? "That's what we're going to figure out over the next few months," he told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme.
Having something extending above the surface would help with visibility for small ships as well - cargo vessels will track this automatically and most modestly sized sailboats do either have a built in unit for tracking nearby ships or folks just use their smartphones - but for really small water craft (like rowboats/dingies and personal sail-craft (sunfishes)) I'm concerned that collisions would be extremely easy.
This is an intriguing concept, but given that the submarine is small and suitable for mostly high-value cargo (whisky is the example cargo given in the article) I'm not sure how it'll offer significant advantages over other forms of transportation in practice.
Although submarines are more effective navigating through storms, one could simply wait for the storm to pass when shipping non-time-sensitive cargo, then use a regular surface cargo ship (which could be automated if desired just like the submarine). Surface ships also have the advantage of compatibility with our already-established shipbuilding and maintenance infrastructure, while a submarine would require the proliferation of new skills and tools to support it.
For time-critical cargo (where one can't wait for a hypothetical storm to pass), it's likely aircraft would be a better option for most shipments - certainly in severe storms aircraft can't operate either, but in that case the very act of loading and unloading the submarine would be hazardous as well.
_Modern cargo submarines: Born out of, and into, criminality._
I agree and would love to see some capers like that. Even if tongue in cheek, like an Ocean's 12-style billionaire who lives in a customized one because they suffer from severe OCD and introversion or something. Everybody on the squad rolls their eyes and the audience rolls the eyes right along with them, because nope, we're not sensitive billionaire techie weirdos here! Just good ol' fashioned types.
(Meanwhile, Wolfram is probably literally trying out one for off-site workplace-hacking IRL, or something stranger than fiction...)
A clandestine means of transporting cargo without relying on humans who can steal or be traced back to the owner. I wonder if they'll accept cryptocurrency.
Deep water subs require serious fixed reinforcement (like gigantic periodic rings) to prevent being crushed at low depths that would stop you from easily exposing the interior for unloading - but given that they're only going 50m deep I'm sure you could have some mechanism to pop the sub in half and get all the access you need. I feel like turbulence is sort of a solved problem by way of pallet packing - but that actually raises a larger concern of mine - the sub they display is pretty tube-shaped which means it's either not going to use pre-packed pallets (definitely the case if the image shown is to scale) or it's not going to use pre-packed pallets efficiently. Habours leverage pallets to minimize the manual labour needed for loading/unloading so while the ship might open like a sardine can it's not going to see a lot of use if someone needs to lift boxes out of it one at a time.
I am not sure how thick the reinforcement actually need to be in order to comfortable cover the minimum 6 atmospheres of pressure at 50m. My intuition with diving gear tells me its should not be that bad, but I don't know how much things scale with volume.
Missile subs have large vertical tubes that can quickly be unloaded and loaded with a crane. If a sub can have big missiles you can pack it with pallets of bottles
If there are no people on board, couldn't the air pressure be boosted to match the external water pressure?
If the pressure is balanced, removing the need for a pressure hull, the sub could have a more rectangular cross section, allowing it to be packed full of regular shipping containers.
Surely a GPS mast shouldn't be a problem? And an IMU may be more expensive than a GPS receiver, but compared to the cost of the whole vessel, it's probably negligible.
>Communication and navigation are more difficult because GPS and satellite comms don't work underwater.
That's a really good point, how do you get a signal to a submerged unmanned submarine under all that conductive saltwater? Military submarines use VLF radio waves that can penetrate saltwater fairly deep, but those long wavelengths require enormous aerials and powerful transmitters that are one thing if you're the navy of a nuclear power, quite another if you're a shipping line looking to make a profit.
One of the reasons to use quantum gyroscopes is that will be accurate to within 1m or so after a day long underwater traverse of 1000 km or more. Communication while fully under still sucks though.
Powerful lasers, as used by laser depth sounders, will penetrate water to an 80m depth [1]. Might be possible to do a laser link directly to an overhead UAV or satellite? If they are following regular shipping lanes, it might be possible to have communication buoys (or nodes on the seafloor connected by fibre/cable) at regular intervals along the route, with laser or sonar communications to passing submarines. It would be a bit like "sections" of track in railways, with vehicles checking in as they enter/leave each section.
I like the idea, but as a mariner who has ran into mysterious things in the sea i'm more ambiguous.
one of the major advantages of (most) ocean-going vessels, aside from usually having a crew aboard to negotiate with over VHF as to who goes where when trying to navigate around them , is that the above-water visibility aids in navigation and avoidance.
a future where trade channels are filled with AI-driven low-depth submarines that have no real crew aboard to communicate with sort of worries me, but all I can do is hope that the people who put them together and control them get it right -- otherwise it could turn a lot of trips dangerous.
for those that are in the business : is there an established method by which these unmanned ships that I keep reading about deal with VHF traffic of those around them? Perhaps the ship is receiving and sending back to some proxy site somewhere for a crew to communicate to nearby ships offsite?
I think they'd need some serious lane marking around wherever they're going to come to surface (unless they somehow intend for these to surface vertically within a reception depot). I can imagine how "fun" it'd be to be in a teensy sailboat (like a sunfish) and have this thing surface under you - possibly chucking you into the sub's engine when you're thrown from the boat.
They knew, it was a joke. It was a military research institute in a Chinese lake at 2000m altitude in the Himalayas. The lake is very deep so useful for submarine testing.
The article is not clearly written, but they say these things:
1. it will run at 50m depth in trade routes
2. it can work in shallow waters where container ship can not
So I think the idea is that it does not need deep-water port infrastructure, but will get deep and out of the way when it's out of port. So a big ship would never see it.
Worst case it surfaces without power and another vessel runs into it. Hitting a lost shipping container is bad enough. Hitting a submarine is likely to be worse since they're structurally much stronger.
Getting a tow line onto that thing is going to be hazardous in any kind of rough weather. As often happens in the Irish Sea.
I suspect the GP used 'run into' in the literal sense i.e. hiring submerged objects. There's a surprising amount of crap floating around out there from small logs right up to lost shipping containers. If you sail enough then it's an occupational hazard (and an extremely dangerous one if you're in a smaller boat).
There is a whole industry ready to throw money at a vehicle which does not need humans to operate, can evade detection, can be cheap enough to be discarded after transporting a highly valuable cargo.
> Some express concerns such vessels could potentially be used for purposes other than smuggling.
Wouldn't it be awful if someone used a narco sub for recreational boating without crossing any national borders? Or what if they used one to transport goods or people across borders and stopped at customs/immigration as required?
£380,000 seems like... a drop in the ocean for a project like that. Surely they will need multiple millions just to have a chance at commercial success.
In general that isn't much in submarine business... Even used reasonably sized tourist submarines cost more. And those have very limited dive times ranges.
There are "underwater gliders" that propel themselves by ascending/descending via changing their buoyancy and using fins to direct this forwards. They have low speed but are much more efficient than most subs. Would be interesting to see such a glider take on freight, though it would probably need thrusters for navigation in harbor.
Some current gliders already have a propulsion system for fine adjustments that is also used for manouvering in port. I believe they would be too slow for any practical use in the merchant navy.
As I recall from my class work in a hydrospace vehicles course I took decades ago, submarines have the interesting property of being more efficient that surface vehicle because they leave no wake. A wake is a set of propagating waves that require energy to generate and this, naturally, is felt as drag by conventional ships.
The question of course arises, why aren’t submarines used for shipping? We were taught that the problem was buoyancy control. The weight of a ship carrying freight can vary greatly on a round trip.
That's surprising to me... is it because handling the variance in buoyancy would require massive ballast tanks? I was thinking the primary blocker would be the sheer complexity and cost of the technology required to go under the water rather than on it for a long period of time.
> submarines have the interesting property of being more efficient that surface vehicle because they leave no wake. A wake is a set of propagating waves that require energy to generate and this, naturally, is felt as drag by conventional ships.
This sounds off. Conventional ships experience drag when they try to go forward and there's a bunch of water in the way. When they shove that water out of the way, it has to go somewhere else, and meanwhile some other water has to flow into the space where the ship used to be. That motion of the water generates the wake.
But all of that applies just as well to submarines moving below the surface of the sea, or cars driving around within the atmosphere. If a car passes by you, you'll feel wind blowing after it. That is the car's wake. And when a submarine tries to move underwater, it runs into exactly the same problem as the surface ship -- there's a bunch of water in the way. How can it possibly move without generating a wake?
Sorry, it's true that a passing submarine does not disturb the water it passes through?
I'm not challenging the idea that a submarine might require less energy to move one knot than a surface ship does. I'm challenging the idea that a submarine leaves no wake.
In the photo heading the article you link, a wake is visible behind the submarine.
Wake can mean two things. I think you're confusing disturbance of the water that it passed through with travelling waves that appear as ripples on the water surface in the case of boats. Submarines don't generate the latter type of wake. Of course they do consume some energy. They're not perpetual motion machines. That some energy goes into the former type of wake.
The surface of the water allows a unique mode of energy transfer (surface waves) which doesn't exist without a surface. Underwater, energy can still be transmitted by sound, but that's not the same mechanism as surface waves.
I'm skeptical that picture is a photo since it doesn't have blueing and darkening with distance. Maybe it's been doctored or is a small scale or something unnatural.
That's the former type. Maybe my sentence was too messy to clearly distinguish them. Ships generate a V-shaped surface wave and (deep enough) submarines don't.
> Wake can mean two things. I think you're confusing disturbance of the water that it passed through with travelling waves that appear as ripples on the water surface in the case of boats.
In what sense are these different things? How could you have one without the other?
They're distinctly different physical phenomena. Surface waves are like spring-mass systems where gravity acts as the spring (hence they're also called gravity waves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_wave). They can't exist in a homogenous medium, like underwater approximately is. Since they're travelling waves, they carry energy when they travel away from the boat, so it's a source of energy loss.
I wonder if there is some scaling factor here. That is in certain range submarines are more efficient. But then if you get big enough normal cargo ships do better. I would think that surface area plays big part, with big ships only certain area is under water, for submarines it's the whole thing. And for cargo ships it start to be big.
The future of shipping will be autonomous. It will end the horrible labor abuses, and quite possibly halt piracy. However it would require trust. An autonomous ship could just has easily be a Trojan horse!
I doubt the most abusive shippers will switch to autonomous shipping anytime soon. Rather, reductions in labor will attract the more responsible, better paying shippers that some global communities (e.g. in the Philippines) heavily rely upon for income. Because being responsible is expensive; automation replaces employees, not slaves.
Correct, and the submarine could even include explosives designed to destroy the cargo and puncture the hull if it was opened without authorisation or lost GPS and radio signal for longer than a pre-determined length of time.
Hard hitting journalism from the BBC when even simple school science doesn't cut it.
That's the end.
But even if it was fuelled correctly it would be a shipping hazard. No human safeties and invisible below the water.
Very hard to navigate and inefficient.
This would cost 10's of millions to develop.
Obviously an autonomous boat could do everything and follow the laws of physics, and be safer and have GPS and existing frameworks of navigation and safety (like GPS and Navigation lights) and not take enormous amounts of fuel to go underwater for reason unknown.
There's even a meme how narco subs are really low-profile vessels and even drug money can't make them autonomous (which is about security not replacing cheap labour)
Good on this company for ripping money from the government I guess to virtual signal 'tackle emissions from shipping', good hustle on hustlers on a brain dead public. Very HN
If you really cared about emissions you look at efficiencies in current shipping, like harden and increase capacity on the Suez canal. But the public doesn't actual care about that. They like self-flagellation and it's important for the people controlling them to keep them in a state of confusion. Hydrogen powered submarines collecting mico-plastics will keep them distracted while a billion people live on less than a $1.90 a day.
89 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadBased on the model sitting on a wooden table, none.
> But what kind of cargo will the submarine be carrying? "That's what we're going to figure out over the next few months," he told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme.
> The creators say it will also collect micro-plastic from the water column and feed the data to researchers.
I think it's an interesting concept but selling it as a fix for emissions for shipping seems like greenwashing to me.
Here's an article with a handy chart:
https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/liebreich-oil...
This assuming that the cost of building the green hydrogen producing wind farm near the ports, the cost of the drones, the control systems and loading/offloading can be competitive to simply using very large ships that burn cheap fossil fuel.
Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
And what would be more impressive than a huge tractor kite? A huge tractor kite on a tether that dives 50m beneath the surface.
Although submarines are more effective navigating through storms, one could simply wait for the storm to pass when shipping non-time-sensitive cargo, then use a regular surface cargo ship (which could be automated if desired just like the submarine). Surface ships also have the advantage of compatibility with our already-established shipbuilding and maintenance infrastructure, while a submarine would require the proliferation of new skills and tools to support it.
For time-critical cargo (where one can't wait for a hypothetical storm to pass), it's likely aircraft would be a better option for most shipments - certainly in severe storms aircraft can't operate either, but in that case the very act of loading and unloading the submarine would be hazardous as well.
I agree and would love to see some capers like that. Even if tongue in cheek, like an Ocean's 12-style billionaire who lives in a customized one because they suffer from severe OCD and introversion or something. Everybody on the squad rolls their eyes and the audience rolls the eyes right along with them, because nope, we're not sensitive billionaire techie weirdos here! Just good ol' fashioned types.
(Meanwhile, Wolfram is probably literally trying out one for off-site workplace-hacking IRL, or something stranger than fiction...)
Subs require significantly more thrust per cubic metre of cargo.
Communication and navigation are more difficult because GPS and satellite comms don't work underwater.
Loading and unloading in comparable times to a standard container vessel.
If subs are designed for cargo then unload/loading operations can be optimized.
If the pressure is balanced, removing the need for a pressure hull, the sub could have a more rectangular cross section, allowing it to be packed full of regular shipping containers.
Nothing insurmountable, but it's not as simple as running under everyone which is what the article implied (to me atleast).
That's a really good point, how do you get a signal to a submerged unmanned submarine under all that conductive saltwater? Military submarines use VLF radio waves that can penetrate saltwater fairly deep, but those long wavelengths require enormous aerials and powerful transmitters that are one thing if you're the navy of a nuclear power, quite another if you're a shipping line looking to make a profit.
[1] https://www.navy.gov.au/ran-aviation-history/laser-airborne-...
one of the major advantages of (most) ocean-going vessels, aside from usually having a crew aboard to negotiate with over VHF as to who goes where when trying to navigate around them , is that the above-water visibility aids in navigation and avoidance.
a future where trade channels are filled with AI-driven low-depth submarines that have no real crew aboard to communicate with sort of worries me, but all I can do is hope that the people who put them together and control them get it right -- otherwise it could turn a lot of trips dangerous.
for those that are in the business : is there an established method by which these unmanned ships that I keep reading about deal with VHF traffic of those around them? Perhaps the ship is receiving and sending back to some proxy site somewhere for a crew to communicate to nearby ships offsite?
1. it will run at 50m depth in trade routes
2. it can work in shallow waters where container ship can not
So I think the idea is that it does not need deep-water port infrastructure, but will get deep and out of the way when it's out of port. So a big ship would never see it.
And it can potentially go under the polar ice.
Getting a tow line onto that thing is going to be hazardous in any kind of rough weather. As often happens in the Irish Sea.
But how will they be out of the way of each other?
Solvable problem, but not without some complexity.
Reminds me of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Is_Lost
You realize that submarines can travel at different depths depending on the direction (bearing), just like planes do?
When you move in 3 dimension it's very easy to avoid collisions.
To distract the public from the various shitshows currently going on with absolutely daft crap, like this and the "return of imperial measurements"..
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine?wprov=sfla1
> Some express concerns such vessels could potentially be used for purposes other than smuggling.
I guess "but what if it facilitates the drug trade?" just wasn't available as an objection here.
Wouldn't it be awful if someone used a narco sub for recreational boating without crossing any national borders? Or what if they used one to transport goods or people across borders and stopped at customs/immigration as required?
That would be concerning indeed!
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/fe...
Perhaps the harbor can have small tugboats that simply hook the freighters and push it into the harbor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_glider
The question of course arises, why aren’t submarines used for shipping? We were taught that the problem was buoyancy control. The weight of a ship carrying freight can vary greatly on a round trip.
This sounds off. Conventional ships experience drag when they try to go forward and there's a bunch of water in the way. When they shove that water out of the way, it has to go somewhere else, and meanwhile some other water has to flow into the space where the ship used to be. That motion of the water generates the wake.
But all of that applies just as well to submarines moving below the surface of the sea, or cars driving around within the atmosphere. If a car passes by you, you'll feel wind blowing after it. That is the car's wake. And when a submarine tries to move underwater, it runs into exactly the same problem as the surface ship -- there's a bunch of water in the way. How can it possibly move without generating a wake?
That’s why the bow of modern submarines looks more like the nosecone of a rocket than like the bow of a surface vessel.
See https://navalpost.com/submarine-cavitation-drag-underwater-s...)
I'm not challenging the idea that a submarine might require less energy to move one knot than a surface ship does. I'm challenging the idea that a submarine leaves no wake.
In the photo heading the article you link, a wake is visible behind the submarine.
The surface of the water allows a unique mode of energy transfer (surface waves) which doesn't exist without a surface. Underwater, energy can still be transmitted by sound, but that's not the same mechanism as surface waves.
I'm skeptical that picture is a photo since it doesn't have blueing and darkening with distance. Maybe it's been doctored or is a small scale or something unnatural.
They do, and it's detectable through the bioluminescence it generates
In what sense are these different things? How could you have one without the other?
?!? Anything you could do to keep an unmanned ship from being robbed, you could do to a manned ship too.
> autonomous ship could just has easily be a Trojan horse!
?!? A manned ship could be a Trojan Horse too, in much the same way that the actual horse in the legend was.
Hard hitting journalism from the BBC when even simple school science doesn't cut it.
That's the end.
But even if it was fuelled correctly it would be a shipping hazard. No human safeties and invisible below the water.
Very hard to navigate and inefficient.
This would cost 10's of millions to develop.
Obviously an autonomous boat could do everything and follow the laws of physics, and be safer and have GPS and existing frameworks of navigation and safety (like GPS and Navigation lights) and not take enormous amounts of fuel to go underwater for reason unknown.
There's even a meme how narco subs are really low-profile vessels and even drug money can't make them autonomous (which is about security not replacing cheap labour)
Good on this company for ripping money from the government I guess to virtual signal 'tackle emissions from shipping', good hustle on hustlers on a brain dead public. Very HN
If you really cared about emissions you look at efficiencies in current shipping, like harden and increase capacity on the Suez canal. But the public doesn't actual care about that. They like self-flagellation and it's important for the people controlling them to keep them in a state of confusion. Hydrogen powered submarines collecting mico-plastics will keep them distracted while a billion people live on less than a $1.90 a day.
This would be the most hi tech rum-runner (er whisky?) ever...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Pig
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine