/sci/ - Science & Math

>>4647643
>why travel underwater long distances when you can just take a plane?

You'll be shot down. Remember, this is military tech, it's not being proposed as a method of moving civilians around. Fast underwater travel is useful for SEALS as a method of quick extraction following a mission on land. Pic related, their current solution, soon to be replaced.

Today

A hypothetical base on Mars as simulated by MDRS is, when broken down to it's constituent parts, a pressure vessel accessible by airlocks powered by a nuclear reactor, and which extracts oxygen by chemical refinement process from Martian regolith. This same configuration exists in analog today, in the form of a nuclear submarine. The modern SSGN is accessible by diver lockout, the undersea equivalent of an airlock. The compact naval reactor onboard provides the raw power needed for undersea in-situ resource utilization, specifically the extraction of oxygen directly out of seawater, as well as desalination (by way of reverse osmosis) and of course heat, light, dehumidification and the other basics of maintaining a comfortable shirtsleeves environment.

Additionally just as Robert Zubrin hopes to produce fuel from elements in the Martian atmosphere and soil, hydrogen is a byproduct of the process used aboard submarines to make oxygen, and a small number of new submarines now use hydrogen fuel cells. They could of course not make a surplus of fuel or even replace what they use for very obvious reasons but it does permit them to reclaim some of the energy lost in the oxygen extraction process and put it back towards propulsion and electricity generation.

Here's the old Navy Seal sub, coming in to dock in it's own external, airlock style hangar. You will notice it is not enclosed, riders wear scuba gear and as such it is limited to the depth at which scuba can be used. It is employed wherever Seal teams need to be sent from a nuclear sub to shore and back.

The development of an enclosed 1atm sub with torpedo tubes suggests that it is intended for some other purpose, in much deeper water.

>>4219267
>>DEEP-SEA EXPLOITING, OUR TIME IS NEAR SEA-BROS

Did you hear about this?

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-12-29/news/30005676_1_deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-drilling

>"The plan is to construct 'cities’ more than 2,000 metres under water, containing machines, giant pieces of equipment and robots that could inspect the systems being used to extract millions of barrels of oil. Many operations would be fully automated while others would be controlled by humans at a distance."