In general, the progress shown in applying glass to submarine hull 

 construction has been encouraging and has been steadily progressing from 

 the feasibility study stage to the model study stage. Still, a consider- 

 able amount of design, engineering and production experience will have 

 to be accumulated before glass and ceramic submarine hulls can be con- 

 sidered predictably reliable and safe structures. This experience can 

 be accumulated readily if the designer of glass submarines draws heavily 

 upon extensive work being done in the glass and ceramic oceanographic 

 instrumentation capsule and ASW weapon hull fields. 



OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTRUMENTATION CAPSULES AND ASW WEAPON HULLS 



The Morphology of Design 



The area of research concerning itself with free-diving oceano- 

 graphic instrumentation capsules and ASW weapon hulls is an interesting 

 one because it is located midway between the buoys, on the one hand, and 

 submarine research, on the other hand, as far as the scope of its endea- 

 vors is concerned. The' design and fabrication of a free-diving oceano- 

 graphic instrumentation capsule and of ASW weapon hulls require more 

 engineering and fabrication knowledge of glass and ceramics than is 

 necessary for the design and fabrication of buoys, but less than is 

 required for submarines. Furthermore, design and engineering advances 

 in the free-diving capsule field are directly applicable to the submarine 

 design if parameters of size and weight are properly taken into consider- 

 ation. 



The fact that free-diving instrumentation capsules and ASW weapon 

 hulls are generally smaller, less costly, and unmanned are further reasons 

 why experimentation with these structures has been so prolific. The small 

 size of the various free-diving capsules places them definitely in the 

 present state of the fabrication art so that many relatively inexpensive 

 units can be built and experimented with for the same cost that would be ■ 

 involved in building even one manned submarine hull, while the fact that 

 they are unmanned imposes less requirements on the reliability of the 

 experimental design or fabrication method. Because of this, free-diving 

 instrumentation capsules can be designed and fabricated on a much more 

 limited basis of knowledge and experience. However, once such a capsule 

 design has been built and found safe for a given set of operational 

 parameters, it immediately becomes a scale model of a large manned free- 

 diving buoy or submarine with similar operational parameters. In addition, 

 with few dimensional changes the hull of a free-diving instrumentation 

 capsule becomes the hull of a deep submergence propelled or unpropelled 

 ASW weapon. If one looks at the free-diving glass and ceramic oceano- 

 graphic instrumentation capsule field from the above-mentioned vantage 



262 



