- the exact kind of goods that we will use the machine for

- certify that we will not use it in any nuclear explosive activity, or unsafeguarded nuclear fuel-cycle activity, or the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons

- that we won't transfer the manufactured goods or the machine outside of specific countries without the consent of some kind of swiss economic affairs office.

I got the same kind of vibes.

Reminds me of the intro to The Expanse, where they wire up some celestial bodies as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y4wuVfV5G4

The song also gives me the chills.

I still maintain it could have been anyone with about $300k. Work class ROVs capable of planting the explosives at that depth are commonplace in underwater construction and maintenance.

https://twitter.com/toughsf/status/1024083748407713792?lang=...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302920496_Numerical...

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31708/veteran-sonarman...

https://www.globecomposite.com/blog/x-factor-columbia-class-...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209267821...

They're ducted propulsors, a direct evolution of the classic submarine prop that integrates a pressure-increasing shroud and stator vane assembly. A "pump jet" classically involves some sort of centrifugal pump element or at least a vectoring mechanism.

You typically wouldn't call a ducted fan (ex, on the X-22 [1]) a jet, but I guess in the water we do.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_X-22

Which is why old timey diesel electric submarines still sometimes have the edge over modern subs. No plant noises at all if they are running silent.

This leads to some hilarity in joint naval exercises every now and then. e.g. when HNLMS Walrus managed to "sink" among others the USS Theodore Roosevelt before getting away, to great consternation of the Americans.

Yep; a fanatical obsession with reducing plant noise is why US subs were so quiet compared to everyone else. The author knows fuck-all about what he's talking about going on about cavitation.

It's also why diesel hybrid subs from Sweden are nearly undetectable. There's virtually no plant noise - probably just a coolant pump or two - while running on battery. They are sometimes 'hired' by other navies for exercises because they're so incredibly quiet.

He's spouting pure bullshit about the Navy retroactively going back over their 'tapes'. He first explains that for decades the Navy has run computerized classification systems, but then we're supposed to believe that a highly sensitive listening array did not detect the extremely energetic implosion that would sound like nothing else?

Cameron said that buddies in the navy told him very quickly that they'd heard the implosion, but they were confirming what he already knew when he heard that telemetry was lost at the same time as comms; telemetry came from a completely separate external pressure vessel. It going silent means it was destroyed, and the only way that could have happened was the sub imploding.

The bit about it being unrecognizable as an implosion because of its unique construction is complete supposition.

This is what happens when you have an article about submarines written by a guy who checks is a github engineer who likes 80's and 90's phone technology.

Would like to hear more about this! Assuming the reaction itself is silent (?) what kinds of sounds is the reactor making and what are the challenges in quieting them?

MH370 could be in a significantly wider area of the ocean so it's going to be much harder to find it. Although prices of it have already been found [1] and used to determine a crash location (35.6°S 92.8°E).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#M...

https://youtu.be/kd2KEHvK-q8?t=435

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=MH370%20acoustic

Now the first paragraph must contain an emotional human-interest style “hook” to rope in the reader, then bury the lede in some random spot in the remainder of the text, in an attempt to keep the reader searching for it, like a slot machine.

As soon as I realize that’s how something is written, I take that as signal it lacks the quality to stand alone and I discard it and move on.

Many aspects of IUSS are still classified, and for example we can assume that the actual data will never be released because of sensitivity of the collection system. But the news that the Navy detected the implosion is nothing new, it would probably be more surprising if the Navy didn't (I don't know that the sound levels associated with a vessel of this type imploding are well known, maybe it could be explained away as the implosion having somehow produced almost no acoustic signature). We know that in the '60s the Navy detected submarine implosions (admittedly of larger submarines) further afield, and we also know that IUSS has seen major upgrades including new sensor arrays since then.

But they confirmed it 4 days later - which would be admitting to its capabilities. The entire talk track of: "they kept it secret because of conspiracy theory X" makes no sense when they didn't actually keep it secret, they simply didn't make it public until AFTER the team was there to search - for the fairly obvious reasons the author stated. Mainly it creates unnecessary publicity that is hurtful to the relatives of the folks that are at the bottom of the ocean, and political pressure to "not spend money on the search" which was already coming from some circles even without the Navy's information.

What could also be possible is that US has improved its sensory technology, and while its known that the US is capable of listening to the sea, they may have some new edge they want to keep obscured from the likes of russia.

I’m just some guy, but it struck me as a possible way for the US to flex on the russians, especially right now when Putin is threatening to use nukes, and the US, by the book wouldnt want to because the US may not know where all of russias nuclear subs are supposed to be. It was a great opportunity for the US military apparatus to turn on a sort of fog of war machine… for all we know intelligence may have told the likes of James Cameron and Rob Ballard to say they got early news from their navy friends.

There's a more interesting answer if you want one, although this is decidedly a conspiracy theory with, I would say, "medium" credibility within the realm of conspiracy theories. Some believe that both K-129 and Scorpion were sunk by enemy action, K-129 having been sunk by an accidental collision with the Swordfish and Scorpion having then been torpedoed in retaliation. The story goes that the admiralty of both countries, agreeing this situation could rapidly escalate into an undesirable war, agreed to suppress information on the cause of both incidents. The Soviet search for K-129 and American search for Scorpion could both have been cover operations.

Yeah, it doesn't make total sense, and the evidence supporting this theory is a combination of circumstantial and recollections of people in their 80s. Besides, in the later sinking of the Kursk, Russian leadership immediately blamed a collision with a US submarine. But obviously the Russian political climate of 2000 was very different from 1968. It's a fun conspiracy theory.

A more interesting conspiracy theory is that K-129 was on a rogue mission to launch nuclear weapons on the US and was torpedoed by the US (once again perhaps by Swordfish, it was in the right place at the time) to prevent this after being tipped off by by the USSR. If that sounds a bit like the plot of The Hunt for Red October, well, it does. The evidence for this story is not nonexistent but it's pretty limited, and no one takes it very seriously.

Still, it gets at one of the oddities of K-129: the Soviet Union searched for it in its assigned patrol area, but the wreck was ultimately found far away from its assigned patrol area. I don't think anyone has a really good explanation for this. It was not at all typical for Soviet submarines to go off on their own, Moscow kept very tight control of them. So it seems that either Moscow didn't know where K-129 was (perhaps suggesting some kind of plot, whether of defection or rogue attack who knows), or they knew where it was and searched elsewhere to avoid showing their hand (suggesting K-129 was on some sort of very secret mission). I tend to suspect the latter is more likely, K-129 may have been ordered to leave its patrol area and approach the US as a show of force (this happened at other points in the Cold War) and when it was lost the search was conducted in the normal patrol area to avoid revealing that had happened. All indications are that SOSUS was successfully kept secret from the USSR for quite some time, although certainly not all the way until 1991.

Tom Clancy seems to have based The Hunt for Red October at least in part on rumors about K-129. Yeah, I watched too many submarine movies and read too many submarine books as a kid. What can I say, I had a middle-aged father.

My experience is only in wildfire and structure fire, but everything I've heard is that the situation is much the same in SAR and I can only imagine the issues with needing to having resources prepared in advanced are only more significant at sea where integration is very complex.

I didn't really get into this in the article but there's a phenomenon called SOFAR (I think this does stand for something but the acronym is sort of a joke). It's basically a specific static water pressure (and thus depth) in which sound "ducts" sort of like how HF radio can duct in the ionosphere. As I understand it, it's not at all unreasonable for a sound in the SOFAR channel to go clear around the world. I know there are cases where hydrophones have recorded a particularly loud sound multiple times because of it coming "the long way around" as well as echo effects. Some of these sounds have been things like "perhaps the loudest sound ever produced" and are attributed to seismic phenomenon, but there are a lot of strange things going on in the ocean and hydrophones continue to provide plenty of questions for marine researchers to answer. And, of course, at least some of the IUSS sensors are very intentionally placed within the SOFAR channel to capitalize on this effect.

In a typical attack sumbarine, a substantial amount of the ship's volume is dedicated to acoustic sensors: https://media.defenceindustrydaily.com/images/SHIP_SSN_Virgi...

This arms race is very old, and the state of the art even 20 years ago is pretty impressive.

As I understand it most of the original SOSUS arrays are still in operation, but I think they're more useful for scientific research than submarine surveillance at this point just because the newer arrays are much more sensitive. The locations of the original SOSUS arrays aren't totally public but you can put together some pretty good inferences about a lot of them, for example based on the NAVFACs that had similar cover stories and then closed at around the same time. Each one would have been the landing station and control point for a '60s array.

Marconi was working on developing microwave transmission at the time of his death. Microwave antenna are small but are only good for line of sight transmission.

1: His first claimed transatlantic transmissions were definitely MF.

> begrudgingly generated by the use of software

read the top of https://computer.rip/

It would have been a lot worse if they'd announced that they heard noises that were consistent with an implosion but it turned out that wasn't what had happened.