I admired the sheer audacity of this ship. I hope there is a replacement in the works.
In contrast, FLIP used 3 diesel generators. I watched the 27+ minute video from 1969 linked by someone else and was struck by how much it reminded me of offshore O&G platforms and drilling rigs with steel walls and diesel generators screaming. The guys in the video wore no hearing protection in the generator room. It was loud on the video and from wandering thru a generator room on land I know it had to be deafening. I have tinnitus from all the loud machinery that I worked around and it does impact your quality of life. As a service company hand you always got the bunks in the cabins closest to the noise sources so there was no way to escape.
When you combine the generator noise with the noise from those dot matrix printers you get a nice wide-band noise source. Since the FLIP was studying acoustic signals they must've overcome the constant noise from the platform by filtering. I know from some ocean bottom receivers that I worked with that you can hear individual boats entering and leaving a recording area through a water column that is thousands of feet thick. Since the generators ran 24 hours a day they likely needed some signal processing to mitigate the constant noise.
And back in 1969 what OS would they be using? CP/M? The rack they loaded in the FLIP video looked a lot like an old DEC Vax rack-mounted computer that we scrapped back in the 1980's.
Another thing I noticed about FLIP is that many of the ladders used to access the different levels appear to be hardware store aluminum ladders as opposed to built to purpose ladders. I think the POD will have the benefit of experience gained with the FLIP to hone their design so that access issues are streamlined and efficient. In their ePOD course (very cool stuff there) about the living quarters you can see that ladders are fixed in position.
Thanks for this link. For those that watched the video of FLIP I recommend walking through the courses in the ePOD part of this POD link.
It requires are crew of five (not including the up-to 11 scientists). Much of the science would probably be better off without noise introduced by crew and the generators.
Scientists might be better off with an unmanned battery powered platform. Or unmanned ROVs.
And if you do need a manned platform, the deep sea oil industry now operates hundreds of them. It might be cheaper for scientists to simply piggy-back on those.
Not that much cheaper. At least in the US based oil companies I have worked with, the cost of sending even one person to an offshore platform can easily exceed 20k USD. Everyone on the platform has to have extensive safety training. Only a few training facilities are setup to do things like Helicopter Underwater Escape Training [1] so the cost is pretty high.