Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Thursday 18 October 2018

The strange tale of the sailing submarine

Go home, submarine, you're drunk.

And it did.

Gallemore came up with an unusual idea: turn the submarine into a sailboat. They could rig masts and arms to the superstructure of the boat, and make sails out of the crews’ hammocks. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it wouldn’t be fast, but it would get them going again.

Lt. Douglas gave the go-ahead to the unconventional idea, and all hands got to work. Some sewed hammocks together to make sails, other found whatever they could to rig them. The torpedo loading crane was brought on deck and assembled; it would serve as a mast for a foresail made of twelve hammocks. Bunk frames were disassembled to make the yards, and the motley assembly was unfurled. The sail caught the wind, and they started slowing making way.

The crew continued putting on sail. Six blankets were stitched together to make a mainsail that was rigged to the apparently useless radio antenna mast on the conning tower. That added another 0.5 knot (0.9 km/h) to their speed, but Lt. Gallemore wasn’t finished yet. He ordered a third sail rigged, this time of eight blankets and rigged to a third mast by the stern. With a foresail, a mainsail, and now a mizzen, the R-14 was a three-masted square-rigged sailing vessel, the first and only submarine to be so rigged.

http://hackaday.com/2018/10/17/hacking-when-it-counts-setting-sail-in-a-submarine/

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