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There was a program about a potential vacuum train tunnel from London to New York, I think it was on Mega-Structures...

It just seems really expensive and open to damage far too easily.

Wouldnt decreasing the density of the water also be reducing the buoyancy of the sub at the same time you're trying to make the sub much larger and heavier to carry more? Not to mention how giant the air pumps would have to be to pump air to the bottom and half way across the ocean. The entire idea is just stupidly wasteful.

This idea would be horrendously expensive for very little benefit. There is nothing here that cannot already be done using today's technology which means that it HASN'T already been done because it's just not viable.

Kickstarter to put a base on the MOON

 Deadshot wrote:
Why not just make a massive tunnel? And put a Mag Train on it that can go like 300mph? Surely that would be the answer?

Seen the new Total Recall movie... eh?

 whembly wrote:

 Deadshot wrote:
Why not just make a massive tunnel? And put a Mag Train on it that can go like 300mph? Surely that would be the answer?

Seen the new Total Recall movie... eh?

Oh yeah! Completely forgot about that! Well I think it'd be ok as long as we Brits just kill any "Rebellion" instead of mindwipe them. That was our first mistake

We only have a good 30% of the Ocean mapped out; I don't think making a tunnel on the floor is actually viable.

SimsAlaBim wrote:

 Sigvatr wrote:
How is this superior to regular transport per ship for airplane? Not to mention that this is extremely easy to attack for all sorts of terrorists and can cause far more severe damage than attacking a regular road.

Would you say an infant compares to a mature elephant?

O_o ?

Air; has speed, but lacks in fuel consumption and amount to carry. Normal freight ships; lacks speed, but has amount and (to an extent) fuel consumption in its bag. This idea could; ad greater speed while reducing fuel consumption. If terrorists stops you pioneering... they win!

I still don't see any benefit. The cost for such a project would be absolutely insane. Like, really, really insane. At the point where people will laugh at your face. And the benefit seems to be so small. For personal transportation, this would be totally useless as you will always be faster by going via plane. And for trading, it' so unsafe it's not even funny.

While we're at it, I propose we build an underwater city and call it Rapture.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
While we're at it, I propose we build an underwater city and call it Rapture.

And lets have a gene mod party.

Fizzy Atlantic seas roads.

What's wrong with them.

1. The Arthur C Clarke quote. Used as an excuse for every hair brained scheme to give it a false sense of credibility.

2. Submarines. Yes submarines are efficient vessels in some regards but they cannot see, require specially trained crews and have a very poor percentage of carge devoted to payload.

3. Undersea railroads. Slightly more plausible but suffering from the same flaws below.

4. Breakdown cover. Maintenance is a bitch. Imagine a bus, or a ship or an aircraft that has engine trouble. It can pull over/have another verssel pull aside/land. A submarine cant do any of these things, its in the worst environment imaginable.

5. Crushing depths. There are only a tiny fraction of submersible able to cope with oceaning floor depths, they are all tiny. You would needcan exhorbitant percentage of mass devoted to shielding it would be like using a safe as standard packaging on postal service.

6. Constructing the undersea railway/ fizzy road. So far we can dop relatively little on the sea floor, remember the Macondo well plugging attempts. Now a large scale construction project on the oceanic plain is too much.

7. Powering the fizzy road. To make the road fizz and provide the benefit desired you would need to have a colossal pumping system, operating under ridiculous pressures to get enough gas along the entire length. This will add to the mass of the system, add to cost and energy consumption that you would be far better off just using ships.

8. Pumping valves. These would also need to be colossal to make sure there is only the required trickle of gas from the pipes carry enough gas from the entire system.

9. Water pumping vales. All vales leak, valves at the bottom of the ocean leak a tad more, you will need to get the water out.

10. Salt water corrodes and barnacles accumulate . Finally the real clincher, anything placed in the sea is given an acid bath, this restricts materials you can use and demands maintenance. The single most expensive outlay in a modern navy is not missilews ships or even pay, it's rust treatment. This is for navies with there added ability to get to shore and work from a friendly environment, not the crushing depths of the abyssal plain.
As for barnacles, who is going to scrape them off?

11. The ocean is not flat. There are mountain ranges to burrow through or cross, there are trenches leading down to the hadal zone, where the pressures are even more extreme, and your pipe must be tempered to pass through that with the pressure along rthe entire pipe determined by is deepest point reached.


This idea is as hair-brained as attempts to render parachutes obsolete by developing breaking thruster packs instead. Technically they could work, but its a thin technicality at best, lab conditions only.