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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3149 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 18, 2023

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Forgive me if somebody else has already posted about this. What’s going on with that submarine that tried to tour the titanic wreckage?

Is it a stupid idea in the first place? Is there any chance they’ll be rescued?

I’ve been fascinated by the fact that even the richest among us are only surviving because Mother Earth decided not to crush them today. Seems like these people just had their luck run out, and maybe made a really stupid decision?

I’ve been fascinated by the fact that even the richest among us are only surviving because Mother Earth decided not to crush them today. Seems like these people just had their luck run out, and maybe made a really stupid decision?

Honestly having hung out with a bunch of HNW individuals in Startup & Trading spheres, having low impulse control and the urge to go all-in on hare-brained schemes is one of the chief paths to being outlier rich... though obviously leads to a bunch of collapses along the wayside that nobody particularly cares for.

The more I read about it, the more idiotic it seems.

First, using the Titanic site as a tourist destination seems a little tacky. It's a gravesite, after all. But hey, Modern Times, make money out of dead men's bones, why not?

Then the details of "billionaire paid to go on trip" and the cost, and the details that they used a repurposed game controller to drive the thing.

Now, maybe that's actually feasible, but somehow it doesn't give me a good impression of the entire operation.

I hope the people are rescued, I don't want any deaths, but I also hope this stops this kind of ghoulish monetisation.

a repurposed game controller

This was an excellent decision. Using the two millionth product of some mass-manufactured part, under shirtsleeve conditions like those where the part has already been heavily used, is almost always going to be more reliable than using the first or second product of some custom design.

it doesn't give me a good impression of the entire operation.

The stories from David Lochridge and David Pogue, on the other hand, suggest many other much, much less excellent decisions. Normalization-of-deviance is a slippery slope.

I’ve never understood that logic of game controllers in such high stakes situations. A device like a wired in console made specific to controlling a ship seems the better option as they’d be more likely to have failsafes built it than something designed for a game where failure is more an annoyance than a life threatening situation.

If the controllers are 99.9% reliable, just bring a couple of backups. The chance of losing all three of them is 1 in 1,000,000,000. That's one of the benefits of standardization and mass production.

I dunno, were I in a tin can going to crush depth, I think I'd prefer if they steered the death trap with something a bit more advanced than "Oh crap, the wifi's dropped out, gimme a sec" (not even a tin can, they were using carbon fibre or something?)

Aside from all that, the stepson of the British billionaire (queried) is reaching Hunter Biden levels of "dude, what the hell?" He has no right to be surprised when the will is read and he is cut off with a shilling, since he can't even bring himself to pretend to care about what is going on. Instead of being at home with his mother, sister and half-brothers in some kind of show of family unity, he's heading off to concerts and messaging Only Fans and the like.

It's /r/Drama but honestly, this is indeed tabloid territory and the best place for it. How stupid is this guy? Has he no self-awareness? "Oh, (Step)Dad is probably dying horribly right this minute, I guess Mom and my brothers will be really upset about that - well, time for me to head out and have fun! All in the name of self-care!"

I think I'd prefer if they steered the death trap with something a bit more advanced than "Oh crap, the wifi's dropped out, gimme a sec" (not even a tin can, they were using carbon fibre or something?)

You're still thinking about it backwards. Wifi and carbon fibre are "advanced", when my life is on the line I'd much rather have something primitive.

my life is on the line I'd much rather have something primitive.

Agreed. Good old fashioned steering wheel bolted on. But the problem is that this company seemed to want to push the envelope with advanced tech (that also let them do things on the cheaper end) and that does not seem to have worked out. I have no idea how they're financed, but I'm getting the impression that they needed to hire out their submersibles to rich guys wanting a thrill-seeking jaunt as well as filming for movies/research etc. in order to get money in order to do the research on their new materials etc. They couldn't wait, they couldn't do testing, it was "we'll find out as we go".

And now, God help them, they have found out.

not even a tin can, they were using carbon fibre or something?

Titanium end-caps, carbon-fibre cylinder. Carbon fibre can be much stronger than steel, much less tin, and they'd successfully made several dives that deep already ... but composites are harder to engineer with than metals, and the short history of composites for these ultra-deep dives is worrying. Compare:

"The design of the Cyclops 2 hull, says Spencer, is based in large part on the strategy applied to Fossett’s DeepFlight Challenger" (Spencer Composites was OceanGate's original choice for the hull manufacture, though they say it wasn't their hull in this dive, I can't seem to find what later manufacturer was chosen)

to:

"Based on testing at high pressure, the DeepFlight Challenger was determined to be suitable only for a single dive, not the repeated uses that had been planned ..."

And in 2020 the Titan "had to be completely rebuilt after tests showed signs of ‘cyclic fatigue’" ... just from testing? They've had successful trips since, but not nearly enough that I'd be confident they've figured out fatigue.

I've probably watched too many episodes of "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" where getting to crush depth is something you don't want to happen, and that high-tech super-sub was not made out of carbon fibre composites.

God rest the dead, but this all does seem like an avoidable tragedy.

"Crush depth" is pretty much defined as "the depth where it's something you don't want to happen". "Design depth", still well below "operating depth", is where you planned for crush depth to be, and most of the time it's not quite as deep, because surely you built your design with tolerances all on the safe side rather than the quick+cheap side ... but based on everything reported up to and including the debris discovery, that doesn't seem to have been the case this time. RIP. At least they went instantly.

Yeah, my jaw dropped when I went to the website and it was cheerily "our prototype predecessor model went to 500m. This time we're heading for 4,000m."

I mean that is some scaling-up without intermediate steps in between! But God rest them all, they paid the price. Including the CEO, so it's whoever is left behind in the firm is going to be carrying the can for this one.

As I recall James Cameron's (steel) sub was designed to shrink a few inches when it got to the bottom of the Mariana Trench -- granted this is something like three times deeper than the Titanic wreckage, but it sounds like a really bad environment for carbon fibre fatigue.

The only thing inaccurate about the scene in Down Periscope where the guy stretches a string across the engine room, and it sags as they dive? He states that you wouldn't see it on a nuclear sub, which is wrong. I'm pretty sure every submarine is designed to compress under water pressure, and combat subs don't dive nearly as deep as exploratory subs.

Yeah -- CF is bad in compression generally and (in my non-materials engineer opinion) probably especially bad when it's evenly compressed around the whole surface. (and then decompressed whenever it surfaces, of course)

I could imagine ways to overcome this (laying up the fibre under pressure?) but it seems very process dependent -- "Trust in Steel" OTOH is time-honoured.

Is there even any downside to using a giant steel ball for a submarine pressure hull? You're not paying to shoot it into space, you literally just want it to sink. I know the Soviets used titanium, but they did a lot of crazy stuff.

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As long as you have backups and appropriate procedures for them, the use of commercial game controllers is not by itself a problem. There are several good reasons that serious (indoors) military hardware is starting to do this and even better reasons for any organization smaller than that to, vs trying to develop their own hardware which can be much more stupid and dangerous. It's similar to the reason why billionaires, princes and presidents all use the exact same iPhone you can buy at the drug store.

Potential problems around it are:

  1. Bluetooth. Insane.

  2. Passing it around in that insanely cramped space, both because it could be dropped (especially with those huge stick extensions), and in apparently giving control over to passengers (depends on particulars of their culture around this, but no clues are public that it was very good)

  3. No alternate backup control system. Uncertain that this is the case but looks likely. The problem here would not be not having something "more advanced", but rather not having something that's much simpler.

  4. ... okay maybe there could conceivably be some issues about its functioning in weird atmospheric conditions, it really depends on the specifics which I don't know, maybe it's just perfectly normal surface temperature/pressure/humidity/composition and fine. But the problem wouldn't be that they used the controller, it would be whether and how they tested it.

Perhaps the most telling indication about any of this is the story of how they didn't discover some thrusters were installed in the wrong orientation until they were already down at the Titanic. With a culture like that, it’s possible that their fatal error was something more mundane than anyone is imagining.

(but it was probably just the hull)

First, using the Titanic site as a tourist destination seems a little tacky. It's a gravesite, after all. But hey, Modern Times, make money out of dead men's bones, why not?

Thus has it ever been.

MUMMY, n. An ancient Egyptian, formerly in universal use among modern civilized nations as medicine, and now engaged in supplying art with an excellent pigment. He is handy, too, in museums in gratifying the vulgar curiosity that serves to distinguish man from the lower animals.

By means of the Mummy, mankind, it is said,

Attests to the gods its respect for the dead.

We plunder his tomb, be he sinner or saint,

Distil him for physic and grind him for paint,

Exhibit for money his poor, shrunken frame,

And with levity flock to the scene of the shame.

O, tell me, ye gods, for the use of my rhyme:

For respecting the dead what's the limit of time?

—Scopas Brune

Unless there's government regulation, the deaths will if anything make the whole trip more popular in the future. Risky sports are cool because they are risky, they allow men who never face any required risk to show their mettle. Repeat deaths on Everest have not slowed climbing on the mountain.

Well there is a difference between "risky" and "this is certain death, please sign the waiver form that your family won't sue our asses off when you kick the bucket".

It's a horrible kind of karma that the CEO of the expedition company was on the submersible as well. I'm hoping they're okay but the realistic view is that they're dead by now.

How was it certain death? Hadn't they done quite a few prior dives with the same equipment that didn't result in catastrophe?

In retrospect we can all giggle, but it wasn't certain to fail in advance.

How many is "quite a few"? Vox says this is only their third tourist trip to the Titanic. Other sources say they did "more than 50 test dives" years ago, but of course there's a huge difference between "went underwater" and "went under 3700m of water", and I can't find out how many times they did the latter. They had to rebuild the hull already due to fatigue from testing, and I guess the bright side of that is it's proof they're pushing their tests to some significant depth...

A reddit user claims to have been involved in the project in an earlier stage, has been commenting frequently with novel information about it: https://old.reddit.com/user/cowpunk52

edit: another: https://old.reddit.com/user/vangro

I thought they might be ok, until the Washington Post explained that "Humans can’t survive without oxygen at the Titanic’s depth"

That made the situation sound much worse.

I have this question too because the press has this morbid countdown timer "until the air runs out", but the fact that the sub vanished from communications 2 hours into the dive surely suggests that the hull imploded and they've been dead since Sunday, right?

If it was merely the communications equipment that failed, the sub would have surfaced just fine. If it was sinking or had suffered some non-fatal flaw but still had communications equipment, they'd have sent a mayday or relayed some issues. Apparently they had many backup systems that should have surfaced the sub even in the event of an oxygen issue or all the crew being incapacitated.

The reasonable conclusion is that the sub imploded and they're all dead. Hope I'm wrong and they're rescued, but if they're not I hope I'm right, since spending four days in a tin can awaiting likely certain death sounds pretty awful.

the sub vanished from communications 2 hours into the dive

The only way the sub could have any communications while in actual dive would be with a long cable (at which point the almost exact location would have been known all the time). Radio doesn't penetrate deep in water without extreme measures (antennas tens of kilometers long with megawatts of transmission power - obviously limited to ground to sub transmissions only).

They have a sonic modem -- a crappy one apparently, but they are not completely retarded.

Cameron was able to communicate with his mission control from the bottom of the Mariana Trench @ six miles or whatever -- this particular problem is well solved.

Why did they send the mayday after supposedly losing contact with the sub 2 hours into an 8 hour dive, then?

Aren't submarine implosions loud enough to be picked up by hydrophones all the way across the ocean? Before the invention of waterproof distress beacons the navy experimented with giving pilots tin cans designed to sink and implode at SOFAR depth, which could be heard and triangulated by shore stations.

Maybe sound from a trench doesn't transmit as far, or maybe the US government isn't hurrying to inform a tourism company.

Apparently the Navy did pick it up, and probably informed the seach team despite it being protected tech, but you have to search anyway in case it was something else.

I don't think the Titanic is in a trench. Though I'd also kinda dimly thought it was, probably just Mandela-Effect-style confusion with the Mariana Trench. From either half-remembered childhood Deep Ocean Facts, or their more recent James Cameron connection.

Thanks for the correction. Ocean depths are unfathomable to me, so I struggle to keep them straight.

Nope. Flat oceanic plain.

It sounds like their communications failing was a semi-regular occurance (YIL that they've been doing this since last year, and took David Pogue down there at some point) -- to the point where they may not have aborted the mission 'just' for that.

The problem with surfacing later is that if their comms have failed, it's possible that they are bobbing somewhere in the North Atlantic and nobody can find them -- compounded by the fact that the sub is bolted closed from the outside, so they can't even open the hatch and set off a flare or whatnot.

It's faint hope; they are probably crushed -- but the fact that they've been going down there semi-routinely makes me think this is less likely than when I thought it was a maiden voyage or something.

The fact that they don't have backup comms or a way of signalling for rescue from the surface makes me think that they are even dumber than I'd thought yesterday though -- which raises the chance that some other dumb thing bit them in the ass.

Totally agree that it seems something catastrophic happened and there’s very little chance they’ll be rescued or even found. They’re probably already dead.

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