Triton Submarines, the world’s leading manufacturer of deep-sea exploration submersibles for researchers and.. the super rich, unveiled a stunning 24-seat tourist submarine called DeepView 24, that’s just perfect to explore the breathtaking underwater world.
Last year, the Florida-based company also built an extraordinary “deep sea elevator” called DSV Limiting Factor, that could take people straight to the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trench, the Mariana trench, even several times a week.
Of course, this incredible-looking tourist submarine can’t possibly do that, but it can take 24 passengers, a pilot and a co-pilot underwater, down to 100-meter (328 ft) depths. And the best thing is that the DeepView 24 comes with massive 5.5-inch thick acrylic windows offering unrestricted, panoramic views of the aquatic world. With these colossal windows, the submarine looks like a giant transparent tube, slowly moving through the ocean’s depths.
Triton actually plans to make an entire range of DeepView tourist submarines, offered in different lengths and configurations, that will be able to accommodate between 12 and 66 passengers. Each additional section will have room for six seats, with the 24-seat version measuring 15.4 m in length and weighting 55 tons. You can probably imagine how big the 66-seater would be.
To control the sub’s rise and fall movement, Triton’s DeepView 24 uses nearly 1,800 kg of variable ballast, together with 4,000 kg of fixed main ballast. The propulsion and steering systems are all electric, using two 27 hp (20 kW) main thrusters and four 17 hp (12.6 kW) Vetran thrusters, that get their power from a big lead-acid battery, which stores 240 kWh of energy.
With this battery, Triton’s newest submarine can offer up to 14 hours of underwater exploration, with a decent 3-knot top speed (3.5 mph / 5.5 kmh). If things are getting darker when you’re slowly descending to the ocean’s depths, the DeepView 24 is also equipped with ten 20,000-lumen LEDs that will light up the water beautifully.
Inside the cabin everything looks very modern and comfortable. There are numerous screens, radios and interesting red switches, but the pilot will drive this thing with a small joystick and a touchscreen. Of course, there are also manual controls in case anything goes wrong, but this submarine has received all the safety certifications by DNV-GL.
Triton built their first DeepView tourist submarine for Vinpearl, a high-end hotel and resort chain in Vietnam that will soon offer underwater trips off the lovely Hon Tre island in Nha Thang.
