Comment by londons_explore
2 days ago
The bend radius doesn't actually matter - one can fairly trivially adjust the factory ship to make bends at specific places if desired. Including, if necessary, to fit the contour of the seafloor.
The critical thing is the length of the longest unsupported span - and that's 64 meters, but surface hardening could possibly dramatically extend this, but it seems beyond available literature.
That seems wrong. If you have a cable with a literally infinite bend radius and lay it on a perfectly smooth sea floor, it will be supported in the middle and nowhere else, because the Earth is round. If you lay it on a real sea floor, the length of the longest unsupported span will depend on the shape that the installed cable takes, and whether the cable breaks in that shape will depend on the bend radius it tolerates.