The most awesome amateur project I’ve ever seen
January 30th, 2010
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Skilled amateurs have built some pretty amazing things – things you might expect to beyond the capacity of a private citizen. These include things like particle accelerators, nuclear fusion reactors (Farnsworth Fusors), radio telescopes, weather radar systems, robots of various types and sizes, aircraft and almost anything else you can think of.
Of all the amateur science and technology projects, however, I think this takes the cake.
Yes, it’s a submarine. A fully functional submarine, complete with deisel engine, electric battery bank, life support systems and everything else a submarine should have. Obviously this is not the safest thing in the world to build, if you don’t know what you’re doing. However, Danish submarine Peter Madsen seems to know what he’s doing pretty well. He built one the world’s biggest and longest endurance home built submarine several years ago – the Kraka. There’s no doubt that the Kraka is an amazing piece of work for something somebody welded together in his garage, but it was relatively shallow diving and only had enough space to crawl around in. More recently he built an even larger and more capable submarine, the UC3 Nautilus, which is large enough to accommodate several people comfortably and has a galley, sleeping berths and everything else you’d find on a small yacht or pleasurecraft. If that isn’t enough, these submarines even have the ability to launch and retrieve scuba divers by an underside hatch and a system to equalize the pressure to that of the water at depth.
Clearly Peter Madsen has spent quite a lot of time and money on these amazing craft, but he did weld them together in his home workshop. Absolutely amazing. It just goes to show what you can do if you really set your mind to it. Now he just needs to build a nuclear reactor so he can construct a “real” submarine as opposed to a surface vessel that can hold its breath for a little bit. Still, even this amateur diesel-electric is cooler than anything I own.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Good Science, Misc, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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January 30th, 2010 at 11:57 pm
That’s a serious piece of kit, no question. But no one said ‘Dive!, Dive!, Dive!’ and it’s a rule when you make a submarine movie that someone has to say “Dive!, Dive!, Dive!”
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January 31st, 2010 at 9:05 am
DV82XL said:
Unfortunately, the correct phrasology (at least on American boats) is “Dive, Dive! AUOOOOGAH, AUOOOOGAH, Dive, Dive!” (the auoooogahs being provided by a klaxon.)
On German U-boats, of course it’s, “AAAALLLLAAARRRM!!!!”
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January 31st, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Hehe, not withstanding the lack of “Dive Dive” that is one awesome home built project. I think the guy actually made three submarines, each larger than the previous and so clearly he knows what he is doing. Also he seems to be pretty conservative with what depth he’ll take them to, so it seems perfectly safe to me.
I’d love to find out more about things like the underwater endurance and the life support systems. Like does it just flush the cabin with compressed air from tanks or does it actually have a CO2 scrubber and bleed oxygen and everything.
Either way, so awesome!
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February 1st, 2010 at 1:51 am
Oh god damn that is cool. I’d imagine though that the seas around Northern Europe probably don’t have all that much to see and may be too murky to see very far. Still, so so so cool. I love how he built it to look like a real military sub with the black paint and the conning tower and everything. Amazingly cool in so many ways!
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February 1st, 2010 at 4:19 am
The same guy and his team is now constructing a rocket to launch one man into suborbital flight (>100 km).
http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com
First launch this year, though probably with a crash test dummy.
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