User:Blargnaflargif/sandbox

History of Cable laying ships
The first practical cable laying ship was the CS Great Eastern a British iron hull steam ship. She was originally built in 1858 as an ocean liner, one of the largest British liners of her time, built to fairy passengers between England and Australia. She could hold 4,000 passengers on board and had four reciprocating steam engines that powered two water paddles and a single propeller for extra mobility. With 8000 estimated horsepower she could travel at a speed of 14 knots in her prime.

After 8 years of voyages across the Atlantic she was refitted to run a transatlantic telegraph cable from North America to England. Her first attempt at laying the cable failed as the cable snapped and was lost to the sea, but after being fit with another cable she completed the transatlantic connect laying over 2,000 miles of cable in a two week trip. Because of this the time to send a message from one continent to the other went from ten days to ten minutes. After her first cable laying expedition she laid another 30,000 miles of cable connecting the world via telegraph.

After the CS Great Eastern was decommissioned the first specific made cable ship the CS Hooper was built in 1873. The next ship too be built the Faraday was an attempt to correct the shortcomings of the other converted cable ships. She was fitted with twin screws verse the normal paddle wheel design of the time, also her deck was designed to give a clear space were the cable could run between the stern and forward sheaves.

The next step for the cable ship was the Lord Kelvin. This steam ship set the trend for bow based cable work, the reason for this being that the ship could then easily met the regular ship design and be easily refitted. With the introduction of the telephone in the 1920’s the cable laying business took off as miles and miles of telephone cable had to be laid. With this cable laying ships were improved with the introduction of linear engines, diesel engines and larger cable carrying capacities.

Modern Cable Ships
The modern line of cable ships differs greatly from their ancestors. There are two types of cable ships one is designated as a cable repair ship, the other is a cable laying ship. A cable repair is ship is capable of laying cable but that is not its primary job. A cable repair ship like the Japanese Tsugaru Mari is made to fix or replace broken lines of cable, so they tend to be smaller, but more precise. Also cable repair ships don’t carry the same amount of cable as a layer ship. A cable laying ship like the Long Lines is designed to lay new cables. These ships are bigger than the repair ships and less maneuverable, however; their cable storage drums are also larger and they are set in parallel so one drum can feed into another laying cable much faster. Also these ships are equipped with a liner cable engine (LCE) that helps them lay cable at an astonishing rate.

The newest design of ships though is the combined cable layer and repair ship. An example is the USNS Zeus the only U.S naval cable layer/repair ship. The Zeus or T-Arc 7 uses two diesel electric engines that produce 5000 horsepower each and can carry her up to 15 knots (about 25 miles per hour) and she can lay about 1000 miles of telecommunications cable to a depth of 9000 feet. The purpose of the Zeus was to have a cable ship that could do anything the job needed it to do, so the ship was built to be able to laying and retrieve cable from either the bow or the stern with ease. This design was similar to what the first cable ship the Great Eastern had and with it the Zeus is able to conduct her jobs with greater ease. Also the Zeus of built to be as maneuverable as possible so it can fulfill both roles as a cable layer and a cable repair ship.

Equipment of Cable ships
To ensure that Cable is laid and retrieved properly specialized designed equipment must be used. Different equipment is used on cable laying ships depending on what their job requires. In order to retrieve damaged or miss-laid cable a grapple system is need to gather the cable from the ocean floor. There are several types of grapples each with certain advantages or disadvantages. These grapples are attached to the vessel via a grapple rope, this originally was a mix of steel and manila lines. But now it is made from synthetic materials. This ensures that the line is strong yet can flex and strain under the strain of the cable, the line is pulled up by reversing the Liner Cable Engine used to lay the cable.

The most common laying engine in use is the Liner Cable Engine (LCE). The LCE is used to feed the cable down to the ocean floor this device can also be reversed and used to bring back up cable that needs to be repaired. These engines can feed 800 feet of cable a minute however the ship is limited to a speed of 8 knots while laying cable to ensure the cable lays on the sea floor properly and to compensate for any small adjustments in course that might affect the cables position, which must carefully mapped so it can be found again if it needs to be repaired. Liner Cable Engines are also equipped with a brake system that allows the flow of cable to be controlled or stopped if a problem arises. A common way of doing this is using a fleeting drum, a mechanical drum fitted with eoduldes (raise surfaces on the drum face) that help slow and guide the cable into the LCE. Cable ships also use “plows” that are suspended under the vessel. These plows use jets of high pressure water to bury the cable 3 feet under the sea floor, which prevent fishing vessels from snagging a cable as thrall their nets.

Sources 1.	 History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy – Great Eastern 2.	Wilson, Arthur. (1994). The Living Rock: The Story of Metals Since Earliest Times and Their Impact on Civilization. Woodhead Publishing. 3.	Frank, D. Messia; Jon, B. Machin; Jeffery, A.Hill. (2000). The Economic Advantages of Jet-Assisted Plowing.Source: Oceans Conference Record (IEEE), v 1, p 649-656, 2001; ISSN: 01977385;  DOI: 10.1109/OCEANS.2001.968800; Conference: Oceans 2001 MTS/IEEE - An Ocean Odyssey, November 5, 2001 - November 8, 2001; Sponsor: Marine Technology Society; IEEE; OES; Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. 4.	 Csenger, Michael. (Feb 9 1999). Atlantic crossing. ABI Information Complete. 5.	http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Machine-cable.jpg