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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3212 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 18, 2023

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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.

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