51–60 of 94 posts
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Swords and armour are heavy.
As soon as you breathed in the air from the skin, you would lose the buoyancy form it and sink to the bottom.
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Why have an inflatable goatskin that you're inhaling from for swimming on the surface? Considering the fish next to him it seems more likely the artist left out the boring aspects of holding rocks or whatever to reduce buoyancy.
Did you also consider the horse depicted below the fish?
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As soon as you breathed in the air from the skin, you would lose the buoyancy form it and sink to the bottom.
Umm, what do you think happens to the air in that skin when you breathe it? It goes into your body, and continues to provide buoyancy.
Floats: A Study in Primitive Water-Transport: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2844455
Animal Skin Floats : https://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~vaucher/History/Prehistoric_Cr...
Roman military pontoons made from inflated animal skins: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291033772_Roman_mil...
Sheepskin rafts are known in China since the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.)
The Assyrians did use inflated animal skin for their rafts. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323672056_The_Refle...
By the way, the tech may save your life: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/how-to-turn-your-pan...
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Not regularly and only very shallow so my recall of the details isn’t great. But I do recall asking about even slower breathing and the response was it extracted more oxygen but wasn’t recommended due to the risks of disorientation. I think the 2x was in relation to failing to do slow deep breathing though. As a sanity check 6l of air per minute x 5minutes is 30l which is about the size of your torso. Assuming that b…
> The volume would decrease rapidly with depth but the available oxygen per breath would increase to compensate. > Unless you have something specific to correct? Firstly, how would you bring the highly buoyant bubble of air underwater, in a controller manner? But let's say, for the sake of argument, that you could. Even though the volume of the bubble would indeed decrease with depth (e.g. it would halve at 10m), the…
As to available oxygen, removal of CO2 is major limitation in the long term and that’s limited by partial pressures so having more available oxygen doesn’t help in the long term. However, the world record for holding your breath is 22 minutes on pure oxygen so if we are talking a 7 minute vs 12 minute dive CO2 is going to be irrelevant.
You cannot dive with an inflated goatskin, unless you carry extra weight, like stones.
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I would too. Unfortunately, the last Assyrian historians died nearly 3000 years ago.
There are still Assyrians today, they are a persecuted Christian minority in the lands currently disputed between Shia and Sunni factions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_continuity
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As soon as you breathed in the air from the skin, you would lose the buoyancy form it and sink to the bottom.
Umm, what do you think happens to the air in that skin when you breathe it? It goes into your body, and continues to provide buoyancy.
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That's about the size of my torso, but I'm fat as hell. I suspect the average ancient swimming warrior was in better shape.
Unless your short your estimate seems odd. The torso is about 1/2 the volume of the average adult and people are close to the density of water of 1kg/l or 2.2lb/l. So 30l would be the expected torso volume of someone weighing ~60kg or ~130 lb. Edit: “47% trunk and neck” so 40% torso would be 75kg and 165lb seems reasonable as a smaller person would also need less air.
Sorry it took a while to respond; I got rate-limited this morning.