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Originally Posted by sparksandtabs
wow as i was read that I had an awesome propulsion idea, if you have something shaped like a fish but simpler like an ellipsoid or a extruded ellipse it would make it fast(hopefully). You would just have like a pneumatic cylinder that would move back and forth, but on the cylinder you would have a fin type thing that would hing only like 90 degrees. Now when the pneumatic cylinder pushes forward it would go along the body and be flat(no drag) but when it pulls it would hing out from the water an hopefully pull the fish.
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It'll work, but it won't be particularly fast compared to other methods. It would be the water-propulsion equivalent of walking, where a flapping tail is more like roller skates. For efficient speed, you actually want to apply motion
sideways to the direction of motion, using something like a wing or propeller, rather than simply pulling the water past. That's why fish propel themselves using a back-and-forth motion of their tail.
The other option is the equivalent of jet propulsion, which is used by squids.