[PSUBS-MAILIST] New Join

Wed May 17 10:08:50 EDT 2023

 Welcome aboard John.  Always good to have a new Psub enthusiast. 
I agree with my friend Alec's comments and suggestions on how to move forward with your Psub.  Having designed and built and R300 and now having designed the R400 and having her under construction, I can offer a few additional suggestions.
1) You need to come to one of our PSub events and dive in the one of our boats before you commit to a design path.  My suggestion would be to dive in my R300 and in Alec's Shackleton and Dave Columbo's VAST K-250.  This would give you a feel for the range of boat designs.
2) Regardless of whether you design your own boat or work from plans to build a boat or acquire a boat and customize, you need to become master of sub design concepts and calculations such as surface and submerged displacement, purpose of Main Ballast Tanks (MBT) and Variable Ballast Tanks (VBT) or floats and the split between center of gravity and center of buoyancy CG-CB at different states such as transitioning between fully blow MBT and fully flooded MBT.  The sub design philosophy has a lot to do with CG-CB, i.e., flyer design vs. stable observation platform design.  As you note, reading and digesting Busby is a great starting point. I would also recommend "Concepts in Submarine Design" by Roy Burcher and Louis Rydill as well as "Fundamentals of Construction and Stability of Naval Ships" by Thomas Gillmer, chapters 7, 8 and 9.
3) Reach out to Dave Columbo. Dave is an architect by training and has two boats as his psub hobby, the first is a two-person flyer that he has designed and has under construction and a more recent acquisition, a K-250.  He lives in California.  It would be worth your time to go by his place and spend some time talking Psubs.  If you are up for a trip to Texas, I can put you up for the night and we can talk psubs.
4) You also need some face-to-face time with Jon Wallace as well.  Jon as founder of Psubs and is a walking encyclopedia of psubs  He currently has a K-600 refurbishment project underway.
5) My experience is that Psubbers generally fall into one of two categories.  The first are those that enjoy the design-build journey and oh, by the way, have a nice toy at the end of the project and those that want to explore the deep and need a psub for which the build is just a means to an end.  You need to self-critique yourself to see which of these two categories you fall.  This will impact on your psub direction.
Good luck on your journey.
Best 
Cliff

    On Tuesday, May 16, 2023 at 11:12:10 PM CDT, John Bussard via Personal_Submersibles <personal_submersibles at psubs.org> wrote:  

 Hi all,

Saying hi and introducing myself as a new poster on the list here.  I live in CA, have zero engineering background, but have gotten hooked looking at all of these projects.  I don’t have the time or space to start a project in the next couple years, which gives me some time to figure out if I can develop the skills to make a go of this, as I’m not much of a project guy at the moment.  

In thinking about how to proceed, I wanted to gain an understanding of how folks go about their respective designs: I’d like to come up with something “of my own” but understand that to have some calculation/measurement skills that are foreign to me.  Is it enough to do some focused reading in Busby to get the ball rolling?  Criteria I think I’m interested in
1) Multi-person (realistically that means 2 I think…)
2) Less interested in depth as opposed to ability to (if possible) be maneuverable, some endurance.  I’m most caught by the R300 as a concept, to frame the discussion.

Those are my thoughts, if there’s anyone near San Diego who has time to talk about their project I’d love to meet y’all, either way I look forward to talking with folks here.

In closing, the first message that came through for me was regarding the death of Phil Nuytten: Sad to learn of it and my thoughts are with friends and family here and throughout- I know what it’s like to lose special group members, and it’s never easy.

Thanks to all,
John Bussard
San Diego, CA
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