/sci/ - Science & Math

>>3930967

>So, they can only be guided by wire from the launching platform.

...Unless they are piloted. Deploy under electric thrust from carrier, surprise attack, scatter in various directions using supercav, then go to electric thrust and rendesvous with carrier. They will have to choose one of you to follow, and you'll be long gone by the time the reach the spot where the noise stopped.

>>3333499

>>Why send people down there? Absolutely retarded. Just use ROVs like they are used in deep see oil drilling operations, no problem to get to 5000m whith those and they work just as well as if someone was actually down there. Pump the shit up and process it. BAM.

You don't send people down there to mine. You send them down there to disrupt the mining operations. And you use people instead of ROVs because a piloted craft doesn't need a tether.

>>3279840

>>I think we're good on the whole defense thing.

How about supercavitating fighter subs? Pic related.

>>3034403

>>Space: Cool laser battles
>>Sea: Nah bro

Sea: Supercavitating one man fighter subs imploding enemy colonies with focused accoustic beams

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercavitation

"In 2005, DARPA announced the 'Underwater Express program', a research and evaluation bid to establish the potential of supercavitation. The program's ultimate goal is a new class of underwater craft for littoral missions that can transport small groups of Navy personnel or specialized military cargo at speeds up to 100 knots. The contracts were awarded to Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics Electric Boat in late 2006. In 2009, DARPA announced progress via a new class of submarine.

The submarine's designer, Electric Boat, is working on a one-quarter scale model for sea trials off the coast of Rhode Island. If the trials are successful, Electric Boat will begin production on a full scale 100-foot submarine. Currently, the Navy's fastest submarine can only travel at 25 to 30 knots while submerged. But if everything goes according to plan, the Underwater Express will speed along at 100 knots, allowing the delivery of men and material faster than ever."

tl;dr it's possible to travel at speeds up to 300mph in the water by creating a gas envelope around your vessel and propelling it with a rocket engine.

And our Navy is developing tactical rocketsubs.

>>2092295

>>Mechanochemically synthesized diamond submarines.

Reading that gave me a halfie.

>>As a global culture, we are effected by a malaise, a certain apathy brought on by our discontent with one another and with the content of our little puddles like our shallow social pools.

Oh, but you're better than all that, right?

>>Nothing stops us from both exploring the entire ocean and leaping out to our solar system in a century other than the anchoring populations like those who control congress, those who tell us we need a job, need money, need these fictitious human things to matter. They tell us and our children this because they are afraid of us. They are afraid of what we might do, what we might become.

Those are very real concerns. People need to eat, they need potable water, and these things are more important than your privileged out of shape white nerd fantasies. The reason exploration and exploitation of the sea comes before meaningful expansion into space is because that's where the resources necessary to do so will come from. The final push we need, materially, to establish ourselves beyond LEO. After that point we can start thinking about the long, ardruous process of building mining, smelting, refining and magnetic acceleration equipment on the larger asteroids rich for instance in rare earth metals, the sort of shit actually worth mining asteroids for in the first place. But the machinery will be prebuilt, delivered most likely by chemical rocket and take most of a decade to be made operational. This isn't Civilization. It's not a tech tree upgrade we can start to use immediately. This is real fuckin' life, and human beings mining asteroids for precious metals is not an easy proposition no matter how simple it seems in your head. It's a fucking engineering marvel that is presently beyond us, but it's the next rung on the ladder we're reaching for at the moment.

>>1957899

>>the fact that we do not hope to replicate abiogenesis in the near future should have made that obvious

And we won't be sending men anywhere beyond low Earth orbit until 2015 at the soonest, with the Mars mission now scheduled to begin by 2030.

Exploration of the ocean offers all the same benefits of space exploration and to a greater extent, except for the promise of alien life. And Space exploration hasn't delivered on it yet.

We can go to the ocean *today*, and do the kinds of things there that we won't be able to do in space for centuries.

It makes it possible to travel underwater at speeds of up to 230 miles per hour, based on what we know of Russian supercavitating torpedos.

But what about a supercavitating fighter sub? Like a fighter jet but underwater, obviously. If launched from a specialized carrier sub they could revolutionize sub to sub combat, intercept missile launches from sunken batteries, strike at Chinese manganese mining operations and be gone before reinforcements arrive....and we'd have uncontested ownership of the massive methane hydrate deposits under the North Pole, which Russia recently laid claim to.

What say you, gentlemen?