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Those picts are great I m sad it was decomissioned ;-;
I mean 60y of service ain’t too shabby for an ocean vessel that submersrs like 80% of itself.
It is sad that the ONR and Scripps didn’t have the 8-10mill to keep it functional.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic and reduced funding, the decision was taken to scrap the platform. In August 2023, Rob Sparrock, the program officer overseeing ONR’s research vessel program noted that it “… would cost about $8 million to make FLIP useable for another five or 10 years, but that funding could be better used elsewhere.”
Clearly an agent of the secret cabal of Good-Time-Ruiners.
So freaking cool, I hadn’t ever heard of it thank you.
Ngl I’ve always hated spaceships with those swivel designs.
To me they would be incredibly difficult to pilot since you have to maintain awareness of its position at all times which is already hard enough in a 3d dogfight.
And all that extra difficulty for what? I don’t see any real advantages to the design.
This concludes my rant about something that doesn’t actually exist. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Me too. It’s adding extra complexity and points of failure.
Looks cool though.
Holy shit. There’s a video on the wiki of it flipping, that’s really insane
That must have been terrifying the first time they had to transform that. And maybe every time after that
That s a big toothbrush
Whales teeths are huge
Who said marine biology wasn’t fun.
What could possibly be gained from this that you couldn’t do much easier faster with a little submersible?
Maybe stability for tests during certain current/weather conditions?
Based on reading the wikipedia page movement in a submersible was exactly that problem they (successfully) solved with this testing platform.
It’s giving controlled titanic disaster but with less death and destruction.
No, actually. Please tell me this technology is some kind of “accidental discovery” relating to the titanic, cause this diagram is very reminiscent of the play-by-play diagrams explaining how it happened.
I had no idea the ship level from SOMA was based on a real vessel.
When I was a kid there was a cartoon that featured one of these in an episode. I think it was from a transformers cartoon? I have spent ages trying to find it and have never been able to
