Jawohl Herr Ka-Leun

kept on reading "right-wing sub".

Mine's the black leather 1940s cut one with the epaulettes, thank you. Auf wiedersehen .

Sod the size of the car!

That's one heck of a pond he's got in his back garden......

i wonder

if this could eventually develop into something like this...

http://cnc.wikia.com/wiki/RA2:Sea_Wing

Hulahoops

I for one welcome our autonomous tasty potato based snack overlords

*can't work out why they don't go soggy in the water though*, Think I will have little lie down

Ring wings finally actually used

Since first investigate IIR by NACA (no that's not a mis spelling of NASA) in the 1950s.

But ours can swim in molten NaK alloy!

James Pickett:

Possibly they are thinking of space exploration, on one of the Jovian or Saturnian moons that appears to have an ocean. If you spend zillions of dollars getting the thing there, 33% more mission endurance after it arrives is well worth it.

Or, they could be thinking of the robots that inspect the interior of pipelines. (Much cheaper if you don't have to empty the pipe first.)

But most likely, it is just typical engineer / scientist thoroughness: in their models, the liquid is just a set of density and viscosity parameters, and the model can optimise the design for any such set of parameters. It doesn't interest them that most parameter sets represent liquids of no practical importance.