blinks
On open circuit then?
I can’t even…
Edit after retrieving jaw from floor.
I mean, top marks for keeping it mechanically simple, but how the hell does he manage to get through doors with cojones that size?
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About 5609.2 fortnights. But arguing about it will just get you a bushel of grief. Give these metric types an inch and they’ll take 0.621 miles. They have no scruples.
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My thoughts too, o2 sensors on the loop and automated tri-mix is how I think most deep dives go. Not to mention the massive waste by going open circuit, which explains the gas supply shop on his back.
(edit)I once was looking at a closed circuit(rebreather) which copied the Apollo PLSS(maybe same company) but added N2 or He dilutant, I could never justify the cost so I rebuilt an East German rebreather for vehicle crews who got stuck in a river, only good down to 10M before O2 toxicity becomes an issue but if approached as better than a snorkel it is really great for camped out mountain lake diving on one small tank.
Also, an interesting use of hydrogen as a breathing gas. Used in simulated dives to about 2300 feet.
There’s plenty of room for more records.
Thought to push it further: gene-modded divers…
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Maybe start crossbreeding divers with Sperm Whales.
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Tis more extreme than space exploration in a sense yet less expensive and definitely within the realm of current DIY.
Space also has plenty of room for DIY, for example this:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/moose.htm
But there is still the pretty durably price floored cost of expending enough fuel to overcome atmosphere and reach orbital velocity with a passenger using chemically generated Newtonian thrust.
True that. Double so when we don’t send humans Down There but just unmanned submersive craft. A back-of-the-envelope calculation said that a pressure washer, cheap off-the-shelf supermarket kind, with disabled flow cutoff switch, will provide pressure equal to a kilometer depth. Good enough for hydrostatic tests of enclosures. (Also perfect for hydrostatic tests of e.g. model steam engine boilers and other things that you do not want to test with compressible fluids.) And you don’t even need rigid pressure-bottle style enclosures, just fill the thing with oil or gelled oil or some other nonconductive incompressible fluid. And you can tune buoyancy to be just slightly positive, so in case of a failure the thing floats back up. (Unless too weighted with the remains of the severed tether. But an explosive cutter, actuated on sustained loss of power/comm, can handle that too.)
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I agree. The first thing I had to do was cross-reference that in metres. One of the reasons I buy New Scientist over Scientific American is the latter’s use of Feet and Fahrenheit. In a bloody scientific publication!
It baffles me that people actually care enough about other countries’ units to make a fuss.
It’s a quirk that the US shares with Burma and Liberia. And Burma announced full metrification in 2013. Will Liberia be next?
It can be. Modern rebreathers do in fact automatically deliver a constant partial pressure of oxygen (PPO2) in the breathing gas using multiple O2 sensors and automatic valves. It’s still important to pay attention, and to be able to take over manual control if necessary. With surface supplied diving, the gas is managed topside, so from the diver’s point of view it’s automatic. But doing this with tanks requires a batch of mixes for different depths and being very clear which is which. At much less than half this depth it’s tightrope walking without a net.
The optimal PPO2 targeted by divers is much higher than the .21 ATM at the surface- typically 1.0 to 1.4 ATM. Nitrogen presents a bigger problem both for narcosis and gas absorption into tissues (requiring decompression), higher partial pressures of He- or O2, with limits- are less problematic. But too much exposure to O2 at any sort of elevated pressure can cause CNS problems, even if one avoids acute oxygen toxicity.
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