Spring RTS Engine

With soccer worldcup underway it is not so big in media anymore but it is still quite lolz. Actually not really. But the live streams from the underwater ROVs are. Its more interessting then the pinguin webcam I used to observe (because there is night now)

To follow them easier i made the best designed webpage ever:
http://knorke.net23.net/oil/3spalten.html <- this works ok for 1600x1200
http://knorke.net23.net/oil/2spalten.html <- good for 1024x768

Usually only in one or two streams something interessting is happening but you can doubleclick them for fullscreen or play with winamp, vlc etc.

At the moment it seems they are trying to secure some nuts by putting anti-nut-turn-things on them:

(or maybe its explosives to blow the whole thing up)
That seems to work quite well.
Most of the time it takes several tries to grab something but the current pilot is quite skilled and uses the shoulderbuttons to look around.

But usually there is so much fail it makes you wonder...

My favorite picture.


I think that was from cutting the top riser thing. I have never seen saws get stuck so often. Ocean is 1250 meters deep there but come on. Moon landing? Spirit and Oportunity still driving around on Mars after 7 years?

A flight over the area, you can see the ships where they operate the ROVs from and other stuff:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6v1DotdsAY

Oh now they bring some can with lots of tape around it. I will watch what that is good for


Maybe its really explosives
Or sensors to messure tilt/stress?

knorke wrote:To follow them easier i made the best designed webpage ever:
http://knorke.net23.net/oil/3spalten.html <- this works ok for 1600x1200
http://knorke.net23.net/oil/3spalten.html <- good for 1024x76

What's the difference?

copy&paste fail. second link is http://knorke.net23.net/oil/2spalten.html
grid layout is different so no horizontal scrolling on smaller resolutions.

its probally instruments to meassure vibrations or tilt because they also removed the paint in this area.

knorke can you explain to me what actually happened with this oil spill?

cant they just seal the pipe? :S

Have you ever tried to plug a hose? Like, with your finger?
Now, imagine trying to do that with a fire hose.
Now imagine the jet of water coming out of the fire hose was hundreds of times more powerful.
Now, imagine that the hose was made of metal and several feet wide.
Now, imagine trying to do all this thousands of feet underwater, where the water pressure would instantly kill most living beings and destroy most machinery.
Now, also imagine that you couldn't see anything because of the thousands of gallons of crude oil flowing all around you.

Sealing the pipe would be pretty difficult.

And that is why this has been ejecting that much fucking oil for this long now.

Hm obviously i only know what i have read on the internet etc but I looked up quite a lot so i might just share it.
No idea of I understood everything correct.
How it got destroyed:
-The drilling plattform sunk because a giant bubble of gas rushed up from the sea ground ("blowout")
-oil rigs have a "blowout preventer" (BOP) on the sea ground that is supposed to close the pipe in such a case. It can close the pipe in different ways like with normal valves, some rubberdonut or it can also can cut the pipe with giant hydraulic blades. (the blades then also close the pipe)
The BOP did not work at all.
-supposly because someone accidently a joystick (really) and 50 meters of pipe were pulled upwards through the closed device. There is some rubber thing like a donut in the BOP that can close the pipe but the pipe was pulled through this when it was closed and that damaged the rubber.
-The blade thing is not strong enough to cut through the pipe in the spot where 2 pipes are joined.
-The rig sinks from the explosion of the gas etc and the pipe that goes 1500m from the seafloor to the top falls over of course. So there comes oil at least 2 locations: At the BOP that sits on the seafloor and 1500m further away where the pipe end now rests on the ground.

What they tried:
-Activate the BOP by pushing buttons with the ROVs, did not work.
-Top kill: Pump mud into the well so that it is clogged. The mud is some very expensive superspecial "drilling mud" that must have just the right density etc. but on land that works. Here it did not work.
-Junk shot: Put lots of trash (golfballs etc) into the pipe to clog it -> didnt work.
-Put giant doms over the BOP to catch the oil and pump it to the top: Methan that also comes out of the well froze and that clogged the pipe so that the oil just came out at the side or something.
-Cut the fallen over raiser pipleline: That increased oil flow at first but now they could put some smaller dom/cup over it. Works okish it seems. While cutting the saw always got stuck so they brought a giant claw to finish the cut. That was fail because the claw made no clean cut and so the dom does not work so good as it could.
-More drilling:Asap after the sinking they started to drill into the well to relieve pressure but that will take at least 3 months.
-Install some device on the well that sprays chemical stuff into the oil to make it into clumps and stay in the deep instead of floating to the shores. Sadly this stuff is also toxic for sea life.

Why they can not "just seal the pipe":
-The water is reaaaaaaally deep. No divers go so deep, hardly experience of operating at this depth. (Look at bobthedinosaurs image)
-The oil/gas comes out of the well at unbelievable pressure.
-The ROVs are clumsy, they do not work as good as R2D2 when repairing Luke's spaceship.
-The well is not just a hole in the ground: There is a pipe and the walls are supposeldy made from beton that is pumped down. Now these piping might be damaged so if they pumped the mud down it could just disappear into the walls. Also if they closed the leakage the pressure in the well might rise and the oil just finds a way through the walls and then comes out of the seafloor everywhere -> then its really fucked.
-The oil is not nice WD-40 type oil but a mix of crude oil, gas, sand, mud etc. It is not easy to pump.
-The BOP does not stand on the seafloor but instead rests on the thousands of meters long pipe that is in the ground. It seems that this pipe is tilting and so is the BOP.
-It seems there is no connection from the well to the top. Or if there was it sunk with the original pipe. So everytime they want to read some value from a sensor/instrument they have to use a ROV to look at the gauge with a camera.
-For example sometimes you can see how they look at some water-level ruler on top the BOP. Its round, looks like a 1 meter dartboard and has a airbubble that sits in the middle when it is upright. Sadly the streams are too low res to see where the airbubble is.

Thats a BOP:

blade thing at top, rubber donut device at bottom.

Thats a ROV:

Not sure if thats the excact type but sometimes you see them when two of them work togeher and they look very familiar.

in 1979 a different oil rig sunk: Ixtoc I
That was in only 50 meters deep water and it took 10 months to get it under controll.

The yellow things with the black cans might actually be vibration sensorik or something, the paint got removed in that area which would make sense.
Hey cool iam like Argh

wow... thanks a lot for the info!

Cheers! Though couldnt they place boats in a circle around the spill and connect them with sheets of plastic that go into the water and that might contain the oil?

Sucky_Lord wrote:Cheers! Though couldnt they place boats in a circle around the spill and connect them with sheets of plastic that go into the water and that might contain the oil?

there's 2 problems with that:
first, crude oil contains all sort of materials:
some are lighter than water and tend to surface
some have similar specific weight, so basically "stay where they are"
some are heavier than water, therefore sits on the ocean floor
the plastic sheets would contain only the first type ( altho one could argue better than nothing I guess )
but then, there's additional problems:
since the spill is at the bottom of the sea, and the ships would have to sit at the surface, there's 1400m of water between, the oil wouldn't surface vertically, it would surface up dispersed like a cloud on a huge area, requiring to make a huge circle to make an effective container, leading to insane technical problems ( for instance, over an huge area, you can have contrasting currents that could rip the barriers apart by pulling in opposite directions )

knorke wrote: Hey cool iam like Argh

You still lack some of the Arghangels qualitys, that certain "Anything you candoicandobetta"attitude, this sort of shiny aura, that makes your gf and mother in law at the same time point towards him, stating "if you were moar determinated, not so halfassed, applyied yourself seriously, you could have arghieved something by now, but you are just you..why cant you be like ARGH?"

So you need to work on that. There can only be one ARGH, its at the very nature of these things. :)

PicassoCT wrote:

knorke wrote: Hey cool iam like Argh

You still lack some of the Arghangels qualitys, that certain "Anything you candoicandobetta"attitude, this sort of shiny aura, that makes your gf and mother in law at the same time point towards him, stating "if you were moar determinated, not so halfassed, applyied yourself seriously, you could have arghieved something by now, but you are just you..why cant you be like ARGH?"

So you need to work on that. There can only be one ARGH, its at the very nature of these things. :)

Also he's not spouting nearly enough made-up nonsense and then declaring it truth.

Lets stop bashing argh now....

Anything newish happen with the oil spill? What is the current plan they're trying to implement? I heard the leader of some part of the project got fired recently...

how high was his bonus? 15, 25 mil $?

I heard they intent to plant seacucumbas and make a giant salad with the oil, but this could /b/ rumours.

Read something interesting about it today i a newspaper, saying that this leaking oil marks just the dead end of the oilindustry itself and the desperate attempt to fill the hole with technical means are just selfdenial on the fact that western civilsation is stuck in a dead end. SumedUp: Philosophers (not living in florida) advice to let the juices flow.

@hoijui: He was allowed to take as much oil from the spil as he can carry away :)

They installed a display that scrolls some numbers it is sometimes visible in Ocean Intervention III - 2:

It reads x.xx R+ / x.xx P-
I wish there was a site where people with knowledge would interpret in detail what they are doing?


That tube is new I think.

Skandi 2 overlay reads "Junk Shot Ops"

So maybe they try this again? (shoting in stuff to clog it)
But that text is displayed very often it might be a left over. (they misspelled inclinometer before too)

Intervention III - 1 operating some control panel:


They have had this cup that collects the oil from the well partly for some time now but it is hard to find in reports how much % it gets.

This german article http://www.tagesspiegel.de/weltspiegel/ ... 65556.html reads that the US have a ÔÇ×Jones ActÔÇ£ from 1920 that says all ships operating in US waters must do so under the US flag and with a american crew. That prevents some foreign oil cleaning ships from operating. After hurricane Katrina it was overriden so they might now do this again.

New giant oil cleaning ship:
http://topnews.us/content/223357-giant- ... sts-begins / http://justpiper.com/2010/06/largest-oi ... te-report/
At least looks better than the small fishing boats refitted for oil skimming.

news site: http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/

wikipedia lists two other ongoing oil spills that are hardly heard about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
Also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Shen_Neng_1
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64O0JE20100525
http://www.gregpalast.com/smart-pig-bps ... this-week/

Cheers! Though couldnt they place boats in a circle around the spill and connect them with sheets of plastic that go into the water and that might contain the oil?

What Brain Damage said and I think what is usually done is putting barriers around islands or in front of shores. Video/speech about that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UFNjJzHuX0 Strong language but the procedure is explained quite well I think. Also agree with the idea that media does not know how to tell apart good from bad actions in the oil spill: For other fields (stock market, politics, soccer) there are many experts and skilled reporters but on technical subjects not so much.

For a humorous summary of what happened yet watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AAa0gd7 ... re=related

Lol at the google ad next to the video... "BP Spill - Blame Obama? Vote here now."

...

Last I heard(yesterday) is that they are going to drill down 2.5 miles into the main pipe from different directions, then pump it full of concrete from there.

The reason they have not done this yet is because if they tried to plug it with concrete from the sea floor, the low integrity of the pipe below the surface would leak oil into the ground, so in order to avoid that they have to go down 2.5 miles where the pipe is still in good condition.


I'm not sure if that is up-to-date though.

what really kills me with this whole thing

the exact same thing has been going on, but worse, for years over in the shell oil fields on the niger delta. the only reason this is getting consideration is because its next to the USA, not some 3rd world country where it can easily be swept under the rug.