> You actually want to drop ballast as you descend, to make up for the added seawater.
The ballast is dropped during the ascension, not the descent. This makes the ascension-step impossible to fail and requires no electricity [1]. Incidentally, I first came to know about the bathyscaphe while reading Peter Watts's Rifters trilogy (which is an amazing hard SF series set in the deep sea).
The ballast is dropped during the ascension, not the descent. This makes the ascension-step impossible to fail and requires no electricity [1]. Incidentally, I first came to know about the bathyscaphe while reading Peter Watts's Rifters trilogy (which is an amazing hard SF series set in the deep sea).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe#Mode_of_operation