heh
They should take it to the yanks they'll go for any crazy idea on the off chance it'll work, no point wasting your time with the MoD.
An upstart startup founded by BAE Systems engineers, let go following a corporate reorganisation, says that it has won a large oil-industry deal for its underwater ring-wing robot swarm technology. GO Science, in its own words, was formed in 2002 by engineers who "left BAE Systems at Filton with many years of successful …
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.