[HN Gopher] Scripps Institution of Oceanography's FLIP vessel de...
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Scripps Institution of Oceanography's FLIP vessel decommissioned
after 60 years
Author : _Microft
Score : 204 points
Date : 2023-08-10 06:21 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maritime-executive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maritime-executive.com)
| _Microft wrote:
| Here's a quick link to its Wikipedia entry for some additional
| information:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The gallery has an excellent video of an R/P FLIP... flip.
| Complete with suitable ONR/SIO music.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FLIP_turns_50.ogv
| djmips wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| runlevel1 wrote:
| I worked at SIO for 5 years around the mid 2000s, but not on
| FLIP. Many of the folks there were remarkable people. One such
| person was one of the people who got FLIP started, Walter
| Munk.[^1]
|
| He was an interesting guy. He left Austria during the Anschluss
| and started working on his doctorate at SIO. When the US entered
| the war he put his PhD on pause to enlist in the US Army Ski
| Corps. As a native German speaker and former ski instructor, he
| thought it was a good fit.
|
| A little over a year later, the Department of War found out from
| Roger Revelle and Harald Sverdrup that they had a talented
| oceanographer deployed to the front lines. So they pulled him out
| to help with submarine warfare and the planning of some upcoming
| amphibious landings in Africa, and later, Normandy.
|
| He was still working at SIO into his 90s. And, as was the case
| with all the scientists and staff at SIO, he was an all-around
| nice person.
|
| SIO was a chill place to work. A good portion of the folks kept
| surfboards in their offices so they could surf before work. You
| weren't going to get rich working there, but the people and the
| location were hard to beat.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Munk
| [deleted]
| julian_t wrote:
| I visited SIO briefly in the late 80s, and my most vivid memory
| is of a long haired dude in a Hawaiian shirt bursting into our
| meeting to announce "surf's up!", at which point everything
| stopped and everyone left. Back then it all seemed impossibly
| exotic to a PhD student from London.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| As someone who recently started surfing, I understand the
| cultural timing a lot more now.
|
| Good surfing requires pretty particular types of waves. Which
| in turn requires particular wind. Even at good locations,
| these are transient conditions that can appear and disappear
| at the whim of nature (even over the course of an hour).
|
| Ergo, surf's up = drop things that don't need to be done ASAP
|
| They'll be there later. Good waves probably won't.
| defrost wrote:
| It's a mixed blessing hitting peak wave:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFA6jUdJMb8
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Oof, those are some gnarly waves. Wave structure as a
| surfed experience is my favorite part so far: there are
| so many wave nuances I never noticed before.
| defrost wrote:
| Australian slabs - the big ones out of the polar south
| tend to have waves within waves and can even "triple
| curve" over; I'm in the west _The Right_ (last of the
| three) was my local for a few years.
| aportnoy wrote:
| I used to surf near Scripps Pier while in college and I
| remember there were always a couple people sitting outside in
| beach chairs working on their laptops.
|
| Salk Institute is an even more surreal place.
| krylon wrote:
| I remember seeing pictures of this in a book as a child and
| thinking how cool that must be. Farewell!
| Animats wrote:
| Too bad.
|
| It's one of those things that dates from a period in the 1960s
| when the oceans were seen as worthy of exploration as the Moon.
| People talked about undersea cities. But only a few very tiny
| undersea research habitats were ever built. There just wasn't a
| use case.
| defrost wrote:
| More specifically it dates from that Cold War period where
| submarine related activity was disguised as "Ocean Research"
| and slathered with pictures of dolphins.
|
| FLIP was all about those undersea sound waves, thermal
| gradients and sloping ocean bottoms.
|
| Less underseas cities, more total atomic warfare.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Things funding for atomic warfare has given us:
| - Nuclear power - Access to Earth orbit - GPS
| - Mapping of the world's oceans - Miniaturized
| circuits - The Internet - Interstate road
| systems - Hubble Space Telescope - Earth
| observation satellites
|
| For such a horrible technology, humanity seems to have made
| out okay.
| Jalad wrote:
| The flipside of course being, that in a rather not uncommon
| set of circumstances we get:
|
| - Destruction of the current human civilization
|
| Although I agree that it is nice that we scrapped some
| benefits out of it along the way
| drybjed wrote:
| This ship was the inspiration for the MS Curie vessel in SOMA.
|
| https://soma.fandom.com/wiki/MS_CURIE
| thrillgore wrote:
| I honestly thought that the CURIE was such a ridiculous idea in
| game I was shocked to find the FLIP really existed.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I'm sure this is a stupid question but why was it
| stable/impervious to waves when flipped?
| mkl wrote:
| From Wikipedia [1]: "When flipped, most of the ballast for the
| platform is provided by water at depths below the influence of
| surface waves, hence FLIP is stable and mostly immune to wave
| action similar to a spar buoy." Its mass wasn't sitting on the
| moving surface, but largely surrounded by water that wasn't
| moving much.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Neat thank you. That makes sense.
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| A more modern approach using that principle would be SWATH
| vessels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-waterplane-
| area_twin_hul...)
| thom wrote:
| Hadn't really thought about this before, but I suppose this
| is a fairly obvious result of Archimedes' principle.
| [deleted]
| robryk wrote:
| I think that the reason is that waves only move water close to
| the surface, and FLIP's drag is centered way below it. It's
| clear to me how this should reduce rolling and lolling, but am
| less certain how it should affect bobbing.
| jabl wrote:
| You can see on the pictures that the ship is very narrow in
| the middle (that becomes the stairwell/elevator shaft for
| going down into the undersea researchy areas), so when it
| stands on end, the waves cause relatively small changes in
| the buoyancy. The big forepeak that provides reserve buoyancy
| so the thing doesn't sink outright if a big wave hits it,
| sits well above the water surface.
| [deleted]
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| I admired the sheer audacity of this ship. I hope there is a
| replacement in the works.
| thrillgore wrote:
| The FLIP was a novelty, and there's really not a need to switch
| orientation now that ROVs are common. It lived and died as an
| outlier. Rest in peace, RP FLIP.
| dtkav wrote:
| Polar POD [0] is a spiritual successor to FLIP but is designed
| to work in the southern ocean.
|
| [0] https://www.polarpod.fr/en/polar-pod
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Zero emission vessel by design using wind generators and
| solar panels with battery storage to power things. So much
| has changed over the years. It really is a great time to be a
| researcher since all your computing gear fits in a much
| smaller space and can be powered by options that don't force
| you to breathe diesel smoke.
|
| In contrast, FLIP used 3 diesel generators. I watched the 27+
| minute video from 1969 linked by someone else and was struck
| by how much it reminded me of offshore O&G platforms and
| drilling rigs with steel walls and diesel generators
| screaming. The guys in the video wore no hearing protection
| in the generator room. It was loud on the video and from
| wandering thru a generator room on land I know it had to be
| deafening. I have tinnitus from all the loud machinery that I
| worked around and it does impact your quality of life. As a
| service company hand you always got the bunks in the cabins
| closest to the noise sources so there was no way to escape.
|
| When you combine the generator noise with the noise from
| those dot matrix printers you get a nice wide-band noise
| source. Since the FLIP was studying acoustic signals they
| must've overcome the constant noise from the platform by
| filtering. I know from some ocean bottom receivers that I
| worked with that you can hear individual boats entering and
| leaving a recording area through a water column that is
| thousands of feet thick. Since the generators ran 24 hours a
| day they likely needed some signal processing to mitigate the
| constant noise.
|
| And back in 1969 what OS would they be using? CP/M? The rack
| they loaded in the FLIP video looked a lot like an old DEC
| Vax rack-mounted computer that we scrapped back in the
| 1980's.
|
| Another thing I noticed about FLIP is that many of the
| ladders used to access the different levels appear to be
| hardware store aluminum ladders as opposed to built to
| purpose ladders. I think the POD will have the benefit of
| experience gained with the FLIP to hone their design so that
| access issues are streamlined and efficient. In their ePOD
| course (very cool stuff there) about the living quarters you
| can see that ladders are fixed in position.
|
| Thanks for this link. For those that watched the video of
| FLIP I recommend walking through the courses in the ePOD part
| of this POD link.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| In 1969, CP/M (and the 8080) didn't exist, and the first
| PDP-11 was released in 1970. I'd think they would have
| started out with something like a PDP-8 (or the LINC-8
| variant). I'd hope that computing hardware has been updated
| multiple times over the lifetime of the ship.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| If they can't find $8M to extend this ones life for 10 years
| then I highly doubt they are going to get a new one.
| Unfortunately.
| yreg wrote:
| It apparently cost 600k to build[0] (6M in 2023 USD), much
| less than I would expect.
|
| [0] https://scripps.ucsd.edu/ships/flip/history
| spoonjim wrote:
| It would cost $600m minimum today
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| A sad commentary no doubt. But, it is always tough to get
| donors to cough up sustainment funds. The glamor is in the
| new. Might be easier to get more if the naming rights are
| offered up. Newer isn't always better but one can hope the
| same foresight and build quality can be brought to a future
| design.
| phire wrote:
| I suspect there is very little justification for a manned
| platform anymore.
|
| It requires are crew of five (not including the up-to 11
| scientists). Much of the science would probably be better off
| without noise introduced by crew and the generators.
|
| Scientists might be better off with an unmanned battery
| powered platform. Or unmanned ROVs.
|
| And if you do need a manned platform, the deep sea oil
| industry now operates hundreds of them. It might be cheaper
| for scientists to simply piggy-back on those.
| Certified wrote:
| >And if you do need a manned platform, the deep sea oil
| industry now operates hundreds of them. It might be cheaper
| for scientists to simply piggy-back on those.
|
| Not that much cheaper. At least in the US based oil
| companies I have worked with, the cost of sending even one
| person to an offshore platform can easily exceed 20k USD.
| Everyone on the platform has to have extensive safety
| training. Only a few training facilities are setup to do
| things like Helicopter Underwater Escape Training [1] so
| the cost is pretty high.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHTk3JNtMlw
| zirgs wrote:
| 20k sounds like peanuts compared to the cost of
| maintaining their own platform.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Given how much money is thrown around by rich people, I find
| it so hard to believe that $8M for something like this is
| nowhere to be found.
| kjs3 wrote:
| Doesn't generate enough clicks.
| gedy wrote:
| or maybe California or the federal government's budget?
| hgomersall wrote:
| The free market in action! As everyone knows, if nobody is
| willing to pay, then nobody values it.
| blamazon wrote:
| More like the free market inaction.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think there are probably dozens of things like this(not
| exactly but random things) that could use also millions.
| Like that observatory. And there is only so much
| willingness to spend money.
| gregoriol wrote:
| Is it only about money or could it also be about its
| usefulness? I have no information on this, but like when
| Arecibo collapsed, there were discussions about how much it
| would cost to fix it and how useful it could be. Maybe it has
| made a lot of research, and some new research directions
| would better make use of another kind of tool?
| gorgoiler wrote:
| The spirit of FLIP is inspiring to me -- it emphasises the
| importance of doing things and gathering data.
|
| In our field of technology, ideas, performance, growth, and
| debugging there's only so much value talking and so much more
| value in measuring. Data and experiments have driven my projects
| forward so many more times than ideas and meetings.
|
| You don't know what you don't know.
| mkl wrote:
| A more informative official article:
| https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/storied-research-platform-reti...
| shellfishgene wrote:
| Here's a video of someone walking all around the ship. With the
| number of ladders to climb it seems like everyday was leg day for
| the scientists aboard.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shPATcV9Dzw
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| If the catwalk doesn't make you sick, the narrow hatches and
| the confined spaces will.
| m2fkxy wrote:
| I find it amusing how prudish the article is about its purpose,
| ie. support "U.S. Navy [ocean modeling] research objectives".
| that pretty much means submarine and acoustic warfare.
| localplume wrote:
| some nice extra info and an amusing story from reddit:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/15mrqoc/us_nav...
| ctenb wrote:
| I had to read the title 5 times to understand what it says :)
| ctenb wrote:
| (Not anymore, title has been changed)
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(page generated 2023-08-10 23:02 UTC)