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• Retrospective 1: Where it all began

  Abomination named Alex • 10/11/2024 at 18:20 • 0 comments

  Like all good projects this started on the back of a napkin. Well not really, it was lined paper but you get the point.

  I think this is a good a place to start as any.

  As the project page says the first few of these logs will be retrospective, catching us all up to the current state of the project, giving me some ability to look back and see my growth and how the project has evolved get y'all up to speed at the same time. All this said, the retrospective logically should start here, at the napkin:

  and when I look back... YIKES. The good idea fairy was clocked in and fully caffeinated. Now to my credit I hadn't really done much research yet, and there really are some good ideas here, but there's a lot of bad to cut through too. lets start with the good:

  • I correctly identified a key constraint: the depth we're building for. Some of these lakes are a little more or less accessible than others. At the time I settled on a 100psi rating for parts, which would give me access to most lakes with a little margin. At the time i was unconcerned with margin, theres no one on board after all and I could always yank on the rope... right?
  • I had correctly identified a priority: the minimum number of connections through the watertight hull is critical. those will absolutely be the point of failure
  • lights? yeah sure I guess thats half marks.

  But.... I also had some pretty zany ideas as well. We'll be going into these in greater detail but elephants in the room:

  • Commercial ROV's do not look like this. At all. I think I was aiming to emulate torpedoes more than ROV's but that logic is obviously flawed. as the design evolves it quickly picks up on this
  • The whole idea of a single large vectored source of thrust is a complete non-starter and doesn't work in the use case of an ROV. Again, i think I had torpedoes on the brain
  • Hull penetrations on the curved face of a cylinder, even with a bulkhead fixture was probably a pretty awful idea, with no clear reason.
  • No thought had been given to how the things outside the pressure hull would be affixed

  Cool looking drawing though, nice use of perspective, good detail. 

  I don't want to be too harsh on myself, I hadn't done much, if any meaningful research yet. Obviously I had looked at some basic numbers, had a vague idea of how it would be controlled... It could have been worse! We'll see this has little in common with where we are, and will probably be further from the end result as i continue to create new interesting ways to mess up an ROV design.

  Coming out of this napkin phase I elected to start from a hull form and work forwards from that. A reasonable decision. Honestly I don't know if it was the correct one, but as good a place to start as anywhere. You can see I was already debating materials and sizes, but we'll leave that for another log :)

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