Help for Novel

[Grenouille]

I have not read it no, but I'll definitely check it out, thank you.
As for the other thing, her learning does come from personal motivation, but once the man who will teach her has agreed to help her, I need the challenge to somehow come from him and his teaching, not from her anymore. From my current readings, it looks like he could very well demand that she improve her breathing skills, flexibility skills (to reach the valves of the suit etc), her strength so that she can put on the suit herself if there is an emergency... so I think there is material for that. I started researching this for the book but I might end up wanting to dive myself, this all sounds very fascinating, I understand why this is a passion for you guys!

 

[elmer fudd]

Any environment like you describe would have to be pressurized, (depressurized?), to make it liveable. Think of 1 atm military subs. The submariners live on those things for months at some serious depths, but they do it all at normal atmospheric pressure.

Another thing you could look into are saturation divers. Those guys basically live at depth under pressure and breathe a mixture of helium and oxygen. They also venture out in suits to do their work. They don't go anywhere near as deep as you are talking about though.

For depths of 1 mile you would need a pressurized environment and pressurized suits. Both do exist though.
JIM suit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As far as a decompression accident from that kind of depth goes, you might need to get creative. 1 mile deep is freakishly out of the range of normal diving. A diver at those depths would either be in a pressurized environment or he would be using some extremely exotic diving methods that would probably involve breathing liquids.

 

[Grenouille]

Hum, well like I said before, the 1 mile thing was an old idea, I'd forgotten we didn't need to do that anymore, so we can have a depth that's a little deeper than where most deep divers usually go, but nothing so deep that it becomes crazy. For the decompression accident, if I understand correctly she could get it if she tries to reach something in the water that's high and she ascents too fast? I read several sources saying that you can have a decompression incident like that and hardly notice it, then get back to safety and start feeling the symptoms, little by little, even permanent paralysis. I find that idea scary but really fascinating. Anyone having ever heard of that?

 

[Rich Keller]

One mile would be too deep, that is well below the snow line, that is the depth at which the pressure would crush calcified bone. The only bones that have been know to survive below that depth are whale inner ear bones and some sharks teeth. 200 meters should be enough, that is deep even by commercial standards but doable with todays technology. If your habitat and suits are all one atmosphere decompression and mixed gases should never need to come into play. You would need someplace for the divers to lock out so they can be pressurized to depth then walk out to go to work and a lock at the top of the habitat for a bell lowered from the surface to connect so people could transfer from one to the other at one atmosphere. The one atmosphere suits available today that could do that job are like a submarine that you wear so scuba training would not be of much use either. The training you would need to do would be for commercial diving not scuba. Should you story involve diving without a one atmosphere suit you would need about one day of decompression for every 100' down that you are diving.

 

[261311]

My apologies, yes with a suit. If we're talking about the non-scifi version, you or I going from living in a non-pressurized environment such as 600 feet down, and ascending with current equipment such as typical scuba gear would take a very long time most likely proportionate to how long you stayed under. I'm still working through a book about this myself. You'd need to have pressurized environment + pressurized suits so that the persons in question never actually experienced compression.

Yes, for a typical diver buoyancy is one of the most important things you can ever learn and is one of the first taught and last mastered. It changes every time you change your gear as well. You could design your suits to just mechanically move around however because assuming it is some sort of large scifi suit you're in there would probably be little room for the ability to move comfortably in ascent/ descent. I'd design it as something that kept neutral buoyancy through some sort of self regulating ambient pressure device, and the rest was controlled essentially. Simple switch being ->Up | Neutral | Down<-.

 

[Grenouille]

Yes that makes sense, I want the suits to be designed so that they don't go through any sort of compression. To be clear, because some of you seem to think there's some going up and down to the surface, the divers NEVER go to the surface, in fact I need that they can't, they never go vertically, only horizontally, as in walking on the sand, like I said earlier, like astronauts. So if according to richkeller the suits are like a submarine-suit (which is what we were picturing), what kind of training are we talking about then? Just how to use the equipment mostly, and being physically fit enough to move in it and be comfortable? You wouldn't need all the breathing exercises etc? That seems to work with your idea, 261311, where the suits do most of the work on their own. I do need the characters to go through some sort of tough training though, if the suits makes it too easy, anyone could do it. My problem with the suits is that they need to be designed in a way that makes it impossible for them to make their way back to the surface with them. Richkeller says 200m is enough, would a person in such a suit be able to do 200mn back up to the surface?

 

[261311]

Breathing exercises are more of a freediving thing (no equipment, just descent from surface on one breathe and ascent when you need to). When you have an air tank strapped to your back you're encouraged to breathe naturally and continuously. The only time you don't is say emergency ascent. The reduced breathing and ability to use less air just comes with practice. I'd say the training you'd probably need is obviously use of the suit, maintenance and repair (assuming no one can do this for them), not much else. As posted earlier, the Mark-10 is a pressurized suit that can ascend from a sub at a depth of 600ft (200m) that is pressurized so there's no compression and exhausts on the way up. I guess you could have the suit be able to do this but for some reason rupture (maybe some sort of evil marine life?). The pressure of that magnitude entering the vessel/ suit would probably leave someone pretty SOL in air alone let alone the crushing pressures. A suit that you'd take out on excursions such as described from the living quarters just seems to sound like they should be engineered with emergency escape in mind, with out it I'd personally be left scratching my head. Who puts themselves in such a dangerous situation that they can never have backups and redundancies for escape, right? How did they get down there, etc. I'm not sure honestly if you'd "need" a huge amount of training if they're not doing much in the water and not trying to get up to the surface. You're hitting a plot flaw at this point and I'd look at this as more psychological preparedness rather than any sort of physical training.

 

[Diver0001]

So if according to richkeller the suits are like a submarine-suit (which is what we were picturing), what kind of training are we talking about then?

Generally speaking with any kind of diver training there will be three main phases:

First a component of theory covering the familiarization with the topic at hand, planning, procedures, risk assessment, and responses to emergencies.

The second phase would be a practical phase including practicing in a "safe" environment like a swimming pool. In this phase skills are learned and drilled to whatever level of mastery is required given the nature of what is being learned.

The last phase would be to pull it all together and apply what has been learned in a real-world diving situation under some kind of supervision.

What I just said applies to *most*, but not all diver training. There can be variations and i think someone who trains commercial divers should probably give you a perspective too.

R..

 

[Grenouille]

Thanks for your replies, guys. 261311, you're mistaken about the plot flaw, the story is much more complex than I explained, like I said I don't really want to go into too many unnecessary details, but they've been put there for a reason and there's also a reason why they're not supposed to go back up. It's all explained at some point. It makes perfect sense in the plot that those suits aren't designed for the divers to go back to the surface with them. However I like the idea of psychological training. Again and as always, thank you all!

 

[driftwood]

One book I would read is Sphere by Micheal Crichton. Part of the book deals with living in a saturated atmosphere at depth.

Now if you want to take a long shot, look up Dr Sylvia Earl. Nice lady that I had the good fortune to meet. Dr Earl and her husband hold the depth record for diving. In addition, I think she was part of the Sealab experiment off Puerto Rico. Never hurts to ask, the worst that can happen is that she says no.