• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Iterative development like that isn’t uncommon in engineering as a whole. Simulation can get you a long way but there’s a hard limit to that. You don’t think spacex designed a starship to use without running extensive simulations to try and figure it out before hand right?

    Sometimes you need to test in the field just to find out what bits you missed. Structural engineers will simulate and calculate extensively but they’ll still build scale models and test pieces because it’s the most reliable and effective way to ensure you’re covering as many bases as possible.

    Its not an either/or situation here. They’re doing the testing and simulation and applying it IRL to find out where things break.


  • Not at all! Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective. They’re also really useful in situations where renewables just aren’t an option such as large scale shipping. Obviously we haven’t seen any nuclear container ships yet but that’s mostly around startup and infrastructure costs as well as outdated regulations.

    With small nuclear reactors becoming commonplace I wouldn’t be supprised if we start to see nuclear shipping becoming a thing in industry in the next 20-50 years.

    Its already been proven as a reliable, safe, and effective power source in a naval context. The main hangup people seem to have is with accidents at sea, however again, the militaries of the world have already proven nuclear reactors safe in a number of accidents where a nuclear vessel has been lost and the reactors shut down safely and did not cause release of nuclear material.


















  • Many containers will just sink along with the boat, either because of tie downs or they’re just too dense to float.

    Others however can and will float, generally very low in the water which can cause pretty major hazards to navigation. For this reason, many containers will be fitted with salt plugs that will eventually dissolve and allow water to fill the container which will usually be enough to sink it.

    However, if the container was sufficiently full of buoyant material, or the salt plug fails, they can float around for a very long time. Sometimes these containers will be salvaged, left to float, or sometimes militarys will use them as target practice with the stated aim of trying to sink them.

    As for Lifeboats, generally you want an empty lifeboat to go down with the ship as a bunch of empty lifeboats floating around could draw resources away from the ones with people in them. Plus, most survival craft are pretty securely tied down so that they don’t accidentally release during normal passage or storms.

    Most ships are still fitted with self-release life rafts which are fitted with hydrostatic lines that, if the boat was to sink, the raft would be able to break free, inflate, and rocket to the surface if the ship sinks below a certain depth. These are very common on pleasure craft where the boat can sink quickly and may sink before the crew has a change to prepare the raft.