Operation
The MSC's usual method of operations was ‘porpoising’ in quick rises to the surface to check bearings, then shallow diving. Porpoising is when the pilot puts the bow of the Sleeping Beauty to the water's surface and watches the reflection of it underneath the surface, and just when the bow was about to meet with its reflected image the Sleeping Beauty is put in a dive so that the pilot's head would come out of the water and he was able to see his direction.
The pilot could leave the Sleeping Beauty to swim and plant limpet mines on enemy ships, rather than piloting the MSC to the target directly.
Read more about this topic: Motorised Submersible Canoe
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)