
A ship that flips 90 degrees for precise scientific measurements - sohkamyung
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/flip-ocean-research-platform-scripps
======
J-dawg
I thought the photo of the two basins at 90 degrees to each other was a nice
example that it sometimes makes sense to violate the DRY principle.

Someone must have looked at installing a gimballed basin, realised how
complicated the custom-made gimbal and plumbing would have to be, and thought
"screw it, let's just order a second basin".

Also, someone really needs to put a lid on that soap container!

~~~
dsfyu404ed
You're over thinking it. It only needs to move +/-45 in one plane. Weld a
hinge to the wall above the sink. Suspend the sink from the hinge. The radius
can be determined by how much flex hose you want to purchase for the drain and
supply lines.

The same should work for toilets and showers.

Run all your drain piping toward the corner of the ship that's always under
water.

Install these on your showers.

[http://d2ydh70d4b5xgv.cloudfront.net/images/2/7/shower-
head-...](http://d2ydh70d4b5xgv.cloudfront.net/images/2/7/shower-head-caddy-
bath-room-tub-organizer-shelf-steel-shampoo-rack-soap-
holder-3d2be0c62103f46a8ec5c51f04717659.jpg)

You might want to let things move more than +/-45 or install pins to lock
stuff. Taking a crap in rough seas could get weird when you and the toilet can
stay level as the ship moves but only in one direction.

It all comes down to weight vs tolerance for squeaks and rattles. Maintenance
should be in the same ballpark. Greasing hinges and more flexible
plumbing/wiring/infrastructure to worry about is probably not much worse than
twice as much everything.

~~~
jdmichal
Honestly, I would have just towed it out empty, flipped it vertical, _then_
loaded people on. That way, only one orientation needs to be supported at all.

~~~
fcbrooklyn
I imagine it might be quite dangerous to transfer people from one ship to the
other in heavy seas, and in the article they were talking about seas of 30
feet.

~~~
cr1895
It can be dangerous. If you want to see something cool search for Ampelmann
and Billy Pugh. I haven't been on an Ampelmann but I have transferred with the
crane-lifted basket and it's really fun.

But they sure as hell are not moving between ships in nasty, dangerous sea
conditions. At least not if they can help it.

------
ChuckMcM
I have always enjoyed articles on this research platform. I imagined at one
time that it would make for an interesting tourist site if you could put an
observation "dome" at what would become the bottom and viewing galleries along
the length. Then tow your tour out somewhere, flip, and let people move up and
down looking at various levels of sea life.

At the time, an older engineer pointed out that if you didn't fill the bottom
with sea water it didn't flip. So really the tourists would all have to wear
scuba gear anyway :-). Which crushed my young dreams of a Captain Nemo style
encounter in the tidewaters of the great barrier reef.

~~~
pavel_lishin
You don't have to fill the entire bottom with sea water - you could leave a
(presumably pressurized, which is a bummer) empty bubble at the bottom.

------
gerbilly
>As research budgets shrink, and fewer people go into oceanographic research,
it’s hard to say what is on the horizon for FLIP.

Why is it that budgets everywhere from businesses public/private to government
to scientific research are always shrinking?

It's like it's the invariant of our age: well you know, budgets are
shrinking...

~~~
nashashmi
Because budgets elsewhere are expanding. Interest in science has waned and
research in tech has increased.

My own field of civil engineering has seen much better days in terms of
research and innovation. The field is now seen as ancient and specs are top
heavy. Well, the brighter minds have turned to other areas and our field has
flatlined.

~~~
panic
It's not necessarily about interest. US policy for the past few decades has
been to reduce taxes (in 1945 we took 94% from the highest income tax
bracket!) and let the private sector decide how to allocate money. Since
people spend a lot of money on tech, that's where the money ends up.

~~~
mseebach
Regardless of tax policy having been reformed several times, tax revenue
relative to GDP has steadily increased. The problem is that the money is spent
on other things, not that it's not being collected.

[http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/revenue_history](http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/revenue_history)

~~~
panic
The increase is due to social security revenue, which goes into a trust fund
and can't be invested directly into research. If you leave out social
security, the graphs on that site show the remaining federal revenue steadily
decreasing relative to GDP.

------
sandworm101
Similar approach, but private sector and far bigger. 911 operators get calls
whenever these ships operate in view of the public.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-
filter/virals/10583550/Ho...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-
filter/virals/10583550/How-a-timber-barge-unloads-its-cargo.html)

~~~
troisx
I saw the FLIP when I was sailing one time. If I hadn't previously read about
it I probably would have called the coast guard because it looked like a ship
going down.

~~~
sandworm101
Also the sea king helos. When they do water landings everyone panics.

------
kartan
The name of the ship is FLIP: FLoating Instrument Platform. Nice acronym work
is done there.

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amingilani
The article didn't address it so I'll just ask: why?

Why do you need to build a flipping (no pun intended) ship?

Couldn't they have just as easily built a tall floating rig that could be
dragged by the same tugboat? Why do they even need to change to boat form?
Can't they tug it when it's vertical?

Drilling platforms are stable floating structures aren't they? They consist of
a stable floating upper platform.

~~~
ryanmarsh
Because the oil industry was already having these built. It was probably just
easier and cheaper to buy one "off the shelf" so to speak rather than have a
custom ship designed for this purpose.

Drilling platforms are large and not designed to regularly circumnavigate the
oceans. They float but they're shitty boats.

~~~
maxerickson
It's a one off designed to measure sound waves and bearing at the same time.

[https://scripps.ucsd.edu/ships/flip/history](https://scripps.ucsd.edu/ships/flip/history)

------
jacquesm
The stresses on that hull when it is at the 45 degree point during a flip must
be immense.

~~~
cr1895
Hmmm...I'm not so sure they are exceptional. The upper section is rather
light; no heavy machinery like an engine, no heavy tanks like fuel oil. They'd
likely only flip during favorable sea conditions so the accelerations are kept
to a minimum. And once the spar bit is submerged some meters the influence of
surface waves will be reduced.

Edit: the bending stresses when its being towed horizontally could be quite
large too...in long-wavelength swell you'd have either the center more bouyant
than the ends or the ends more buoyant than the center. Once you flip it it's
supported by bouyancy and filled ballast water.

~~~
maxerickson
I linked the Scripps website in a couple other comments, the technical
diagrams of the ship show "concrete ballast" in the upper section.

I would guess to reduce roll when it is horizontal.

------
ge96
Hmm

Makes me think like why would they design a hovering rocket crane to lower a
Rover autonomously on another planet. There is a reason/it worked, and with
this ship hmm, like is that the only solution?

You could have floating bouys that have either neumatic or electromagnetic
suspension stabilized... But then again the scale/weight of this thing... I
guess the design makes sense as far as being able to operate in shallow waters
then go out and do it's thing.

~~~
Gracana
They say this thing is stable in 30 foot seas. 300 feet of the ship is
underwater. I don't think you could match that with buoys.

~~~
maxerickson
In the vertical configuration it is described as a buoy:

[https://scripps.ucsd.edu/ships/flip](https://scripps.ucsd.edu/ships/flip)

~~~
b_emery
Technically it becomes a type of buoy known as a spar buoy:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spar_buoy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spar_buoy)

The surface wave motion decreases with depth, so having so much mass deep
under water makes for a very stable platform.

------
mLuby
FLIP is the most Kerbal ship we have right now.

------
SquareBalls
I wonder how many times someone called the coast guard when the ship starts
flipping.

------
amelius
Why can't they just use a probe of some kind? Or a small submarine released
from the ship?

~~~
cr1895
Because the instability of a submarine is precisely why this ship was
conceived in the first place. From the wiki:

"Development started in January 1960 after a conversation between MPL
researcher Frederick H. Fisher and MPL Director Fred N. Spiess regarding
stability problems that Fisher was encountering when using the submarine USS
Baya (SS-318) as a research platform."

I'm not clear however why a submarine was too unstable for the research they
were doing.

~~~
Declanomous
When I watch things floating in water, objects below the water seem to move
back and forth with the movement of the water, as if the object and the water
were the same, but things that are partially in the water, they seem to "ride"
the water and shift much more slowly.

Based on that, my guess is either surface tension, or the fact that an object
that floats on top of a medium is much less dense than one that floats within
it. It would probably be a pretty easy to quantify if you had several liquids
with known surface tension, so I'm guessing the information is out there
already.

~~~
cr1895
Here's a gif of water particle movement that's happening in an ocean wave (in
deep water; it gets weirder if it's shallow).

[http://funnel.sfsu.edu/courses/gm309/images/Owave.gif](http://funnel.sfsu.edu/courses/gm309/images/Owave.gif)

Essentially, motion starts with wind. Energy propagates downwards into the
water column resulting in the circular orbitals (you see this if you float in
the (deep) ocean and you bob up and down in a circle but you don't really go
anywhere). But at a certain point, no more energy propagates downward; so your
submarine if its deep enough (tens of meters) will not feel a thing from
what's happening on the surface.

This is also what the FLIP takes advantage of; the base of its deep spar hull
lies so far below the surface that it has nothing forcing it to move up and
down. This is why it's stable in big waves, and why I'm confused how a
submarine is too unstable.

~~~
jononor
I'd expect a stationary submarine to be much more suceptible to rolling? A
raised tower or other non-symmetrical features might also cause a bobbing
motion in the roll. I'd also expect the submarine to have to adjust its
ballast tanks in order to maintain a level buoyancy.

When a submarine is moving at cruise speed these things can easily be
compensated for by the fins and rudders, but the motors will neccesarily make
noise. Heck, even moving through the water (instead of floating with the
current) may create undesirable artifacts.

~~~
cr1895
Yeah could be prone to high roll motion depending on the heading relative to
the predominant waves. I'm guessing though that for whatever scientific
purposes it would be submerged and not rolling/pitching at all.

~~~
amelius
In that case wouldn't a set of gyroscopes and/or gimbal solve the problem in a
cheaper way?

~~~
cr1895
Solve what problem?

If you make something gimbaled on a ship (pool table, for instance) you can
prevent rotation, but not translation...at least not without some complicated
active motion compensation system.

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PanMan
Strange that they don't flip the small boat that's hanging to the side:
outboard engines (especially if they are 4 stroke) don't like being not
upright. Seems it would be fairly easy to hang it so it could swing?

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GrumpyNl
Every once in a while you see footage of technology that really amazes you,
this is one of them.

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JDT
I would have designed the crew quarters on a kind of gimbal so that they are
always upright. Make better use of the space and no need to put everything
away (thinking of the soap dispenser on the basin) when changing orientation.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Like the central bureaucracy in Futurama?

