meh. "your government bureaucrats" at work...struggling to justify their paychecks. What's the risk of not having the inflators in the car?
My understanding is there may be a market for air bags like there is for catalytic converters. Not something I'm terribly interested in. Bob Wilson
The inflators—at least the hybrid kind, containing both a pre-compressed gas and a chemical gas source—can also have another application: launch torpedoes better. For geeks who like to quantify things, that same source tells that a typical hybrid gas generator of that kind is good for "about twenty-five kilojoules".
Back in the day we used HP air or just let things swim away. Tactically speaking, opening the outer doors and flooding down the tube "can" be done quietly, but if you're close enough to a worthy opponent to shoot them with a 48, they're going to hear the leaves crunching on the forest floor and KNOW they're being stalked. Either way.....no submarine is going to push, squirt, pop, or shoot something that weighs more than a Prius out of a torpedo tube without generating a transient (sound) that even our sensory deprived media would be able to detect! After that, lots of things start happening VERY quickly. Counter fire. Own ship hauling tail in the AWAY direction. etc...etc... All of this, of course, is PRE-UUV! Soon, the idea of launching torpedoes might be as quaint as a bunch of sweaty dudes pulling on oars - or maybe not. Planes still drop bombs.... My sweet spouse blames torpedo tubes (or more specifically, rapid pressure differentials) for my moderate tinnitus, and this is not a completely baseless assumption. However (comma!!!) I also used a lot of inadequately muffled lawn equipment as a child and grew up listening to overamplified rock music. SO..... My beloved home state of Indiana is the namesake of a fairly new submarine - SSN798, recently featured in the Youtubes. If you skip ahead to 17:00 you will get a pretty good....um...'shot' of one of their tubes. No airbags inflators to replace here....
Youtube finally gets me the tour my dad wanted to get me when I was, like, 9, but the commandant said no.
