REPOST: FFS: SDB Floats
In reply to #7866 GEN,VDES:Sub-Oceanic SDB Concealment. by Les Howie
A slain message, trying to return from the dead.... Les Howie [email removed] writes: >How do you submerge an SDB to hide under the world's oceans? [. . .] >The TNE 400 Ton SDB has a volume of 5600 m^3, and a laden mass of 4886.17 >tonnes, for a specific gravity at 1G of .86. It Floats! Oh yuck. The MT 400 d-ton SDB had a specific gravity of about 2.0 laden, so it wasn't a problem before. You could give up some of the hydrogen fuel storage and flood those fuel tanks with water, er, "unrefined fuel". It would take 29 G-turns worth to bring the SDB's specific gravity to just over 1.0. That would add about 725 tonnes of mass to the ship. Since the SDB has 112 G-turns, I suppose you could pay the price. Seems to me that you'd be better served adding armor to the hull and getting some added value out of the mass -- besides, superdense armor is more compact. But maybe there'd be some value in "crash surfacing" with this design. Steve Bonneville [email removed]