The Chinese are now building a vehicle that will break the sound barrier, underwater.

Local reports from China has recently revealed the country’s plans to develop a new type of submarine, one that is capable of traversing beneath the oceans many times the speed of current conventional deep-sea vessels.

The technology for the submarine is currently under development by a team of researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology’s Complex Flow and Heat Transfer Lab. It uses a principle that is well known as supercavitation, or the creation of air cavities underwater to considerably reduce water drag on a submerged vehicle. Whereas a fictional starship in Star Trek could go faster than light by encasing itself inside a warp bubble, underwater projectiles and vehicles could also significantly go faster by being wrapped inside a bubble of air. The idea was conceptualized as early as the latter half of the 20th century, when Soviet Russia started conducting experiments on torpedos that can use air bubbles to propel faster.

Just how much boost can supercavitation do? The VA-111 Schkval, which was first officially used by the Russians during the late 1970s, was capable of cruising underwater at a top speed of about 400 km/h, almost two times faster than any other torpedo at its time. The numbers can even go higher for a fully-sized submarine, as it could even potentially break the sound barrier, though the technology is limited only to torpedoes due to its high initial speed requirement and control/steering issues.

For China’s planned supercavitated submarine, the researchers claim that they could circumvent the technology’s inherent speed problem by using a special liquid membrane. This membrane would constantly be sprinkled onto the entire submarine to accelerate it to the required speed that will stabilize the bubble it will ride into. This way it could achieve supercavitation, while still keeping a good amount of control, by using the membrane to manipulate fiction levels on certain parts of the submarine.

The research team admits that there are still lots of other issues to deal with, such as extending the submarine’s effective travel range. However, they are determined to develop the technology not only for military applications, but also for more standard uses, such as developing a swimsuit that could reduce water friction with the use of tiny air bubbles.