Friday, August 30, 2024
Thursday, August 29, 2024
U.S. Coast Guard Has A Working Heavy Icebreaker Again
About time.
The U.S. Coast Guard’s heavy icebreaker USCGC Polar Star has returned to its home port of Seattle, Washington, after a major service life-extending overhaul – and not a moment too soon. The medium icebreaker USCGC Healy, the service’s only other icebreaker available for operations in the Arctic and Antarctica, also sailed back into Seattle earlier this month after suffering a fire that forced its crew to abandon a planned deployment to the High North.
While Polar Star continues to be the world's most powerful non-nuclear icebreaker, it is also the only on in service capable of operating year round in Arctic and Antarctic waters.
Heavy icebreakers like Polar Star are “defined as ships that have icebreaking capability of 6 feet of ice continuously at 3 knots, and can back and ram through at least 20 feet of ice,” according to a report from the National Research Council of the National Academies. The medium icebreaker “Healy is designed to break 4.5 feet of ice continuously at three knots.
Elect me president and I'll have them build four more - the biggest they can. We're the biggest economy in the world by far. There's no reason there shouldn't be money for this.
My website is "Elect CW President (joking here)"
A Watch Story: The Ressence Type 3 BB2
Benoît Mintiens, who founded the Ressence Watch Company in 2010, is an industrial designer who already had a portfolio of designs to his credit - high-speed trains, aircraft cabins, medical devices, leather goods and even hunting guns before he ever designed a watch.
Designed nowadays in Belgium, built in Fleurier, Switzerland, the company's latest product is an oil filled wrist watch.
Yeah, oil filled.
Looks like a giant bubble of water sitting on the watch face.
Inside, surrounding the black dial is 3.57ml of clear oil to improve readability from all angles. It looks almost like an OLED screen. The edges of the four biaxial satellites (or sub-dials) are practically invisible. These displays follow Benoît Mintiens’s minimalist design approach, with the indications on them kept to a bare minimum.
The power source for the Ressence Type 3 BB2 is the ETA 2824-2, a typically basic automatic movement found in many watches. In this case, though, it’s highly modified to power the Ressence Orbital Convex System (ROCS) display module. In between the movement and the ROCS, there’s a magnetic transmission to ensure the movement doesn’t come in contact with the oil inside the dial. The Type 3 BB2 also features bellows that extend and compress depending on the temperature and volume of the oil.
Huh? Very space age. Elon probably has one already.
A very cool and innovative device, all for a cool 38,200 Euros. A snap for Elon to afford, but maybe a stretch for the rest of us. Perhaps if I sell one of the Porsches (wait, I don't have a Porsche), or if the cryptocurrency speculations ever pay off, I can spend some "mad money" on one.
Still, as industrial design, it's a looker, and the technology is interesting. Magnetic transmission, oil temperature gauge, a bellows system? Quite unique. Maybe some day...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)