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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   33049 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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The Titan submersible suddenly became very hot culture war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_incident

The wikipedia link is quite thorough.

TLDR as of 2023-06-22 000000z seems to be:

5 people are trapped on a submersible that has lost contact with the outside world.

It was trying to visit the wreck of The Titanic.

Major effort rescue is on under way.

They are running out of air in the next couple of hours.

The name of the vessel is Titan (come on, no one can be that brazen, you are tempting fate)

The people are couple of billionaires, explorer, and the CEO of the company

The vessel can be opened only from outside.

The vessel used some off the shelf parts (like a logitech controller) and somewhat exotic materials.

Now comes the culture war

  1. Somewhat lack of empathy for the people there because of their status in the crazier places of the internet.

  2. The way the vessel was built and operated embodied the SV ethos. There are reports that it was not certified or audited by anyone, that the hull testing procedures were not adequate, that the company moved fast and broke things. So right now said ethos is having torn a new one.

  3. Surfaced a recording of the CEO bragging how they don't want to hire 50 years old white guys because they are not inspiring.

To me actually 2 is the most interesting one out there - 1 is just internet being the internet, 3 - if a small error could lead to death - hire the most safety oriented, pedantic and boring people there are to design your product.

But with silicon valley moving more and more prone to overtaking the meatspace - their physical products kinda suck. From smart thermostats to fridges to whatever we actually have degradation of the experience. So I think we are in a rough ride. And the more products they make smarter or move fast - the more human lives will be at stakes.

The way the vessel was built and operated embodied the SV ethos. There are reports that it was not certified or audited by anyone, that the hull testing procedures were not adequate, that the company moved fast and broke things. So right now said ethos is having torn a new one.

there have probably been thousands of dives since the 80s. something like this was inevitable given the inherent risks. the problem with engineering are the unknown unknowns. Maybe some corrosion or weakness in a wire caused the sub to fail--something that hardly anyone considers and seemingly mundane...like a piece of foam hitting a tile at takeoff, a piece of metal on a runway, a rubber seal leaking due to unforeseen cold, etc.. Had this occurred 20+ years ago, it would have gotten a lot of media coverage but not like we are seeing now. twitter as always showing its power to create news cycles in and of itself.

Yeah, but from their own website, there's a lot of "exciting new tech!" they're boasting about, which seems to turn out to be "so we made it lighter by using carbon fibre but heh heh nobody's tested if carbon fibre can handle those depths but we're not gonna wait around for someone to do that as it could take years, trust us you won't die (unless you do, please sign this waiver)".

there have probably been thousands of dives since the 80s

An order of magnitude less, in my estimation. A dive expedition is extremely expensive, and there were none at all between 2005 and 2019.

If you read the history of the vessel - I am sure it was the known knowns. So was the challenger - they knew it was too cold for launch. They knew about the o ring erosion that shouldn't be happening. And in the foam case - they knew there were debris. I have been trying to explain for a long time to people I work with - if it works and you don't know why or in a way you haven't anticipated - that it is just trouble waiting to happen. Even the 737 max was quite easily predictable, and on the A440 that crashed over the Atlantic was from known issue.

In the deep you have completely different envelope - mostly your weight is virtually unlimited compared to aerospace. Which can get a lot more leeway to design first the oh-shit modes and then the normal ones. Proper real time communication with the mothership, more supplies, hatch opening from inside, spare logitech controller. I know that all of sudden all internet virologists and trans/gender scientists right now took a fast phd in submarine design - but this project specifically seems to have had a lot of bad ideas and practices from the start.

mostly your weight is virtually unlimited compared to aerospace

Your weight is virtually unlimited, but your density can be an issue. I'm reading that a major reason they went with a carbon fiber section in the hull was that they could maintain significantly more buoyancy that way, whereas if they'd used titanium everywhere they'd have needed to add separate syntactic foam floats too.

Proper real time communication with the mothership

It's supposed to have this, isn't it? The history of "communication was lost, at least briefly, every single time" is another one of those normalization-of-deviance red flags that's come up.

I can't seem to find any details on the communication system, though, other than a debunking of the "Starlink broke!!1!one!" idiots. Cameron had voice contact at the bottom of the Mariana Trench via acoustic modems, so it's not impossible, but what did Oceangate actually choose?

I'm reading that a major reason they went with a carbon fiber section in the hull was that they could maintain significantly more buoyancy that way, whereas if they'd used titanium everywhere they'd have needed to add separate syntactic foam floats too.

Apparently pressure-capable syntactic foam is expensive, but another traditional solution for deep sea exploration is to use gasoline tanks, which are slightly bouyant and not compressible. See the original Trieste, which reached Challenger Deep in 1960, and also managed to surface automatically in the event of electrical failure.

Or maybe they could have used the carbon fiber tanks as floats, and if they shatter, you make sure you have enough excess buoyancy to still surface if one of them goes, because you'll be unlikely to lose more than one at a time.

Proper real time communication with the mothership

This would require a cable connection which gets tricky for 4000 meter deep dives. Radio communication rather famously doesn't work underwater. You can only get ground to sub data transmission at a few bits per second and even that requires tens of kilometer long antennas with megawatts of transmission power.

If the ship was directly above, I don't see why a few kilometres of cable wouldn't work.

Alternatively, acoustic communication.

Bouys that maintain their depth are not an option? It's not like the sub needs completely freedom of movement if they're just exploring a wrecked ship.

You still need a cable all the way to the surface, whether that's a single long one or multiple shorter ones (much more likely to break). There's a reason deep sea dives have traditionally had the support ship right above the sub.

Somehow it feels counterintuitive that you can't use buoyancy for support.

I saw some tweets saying that a cable would buckle under its own weight, but some quick math shows that not to be much of a problem. Amazon shows 100ft coax cables are about 2.5 pounds. A 4km version would be roughly 330 pounds. And that's in water, where bouyant force is going to reduce the apparent weight by quite a lot, especially if you jacket the cable with something not so dense.

And that's in water, where bouyant force is going to reduce the apparent weight by quite a lot, especially if you jacket the cable with something not so dense.

That's exactly the principle that seems to be in question. Whether you rest the cable on a bouy, or jacket it in something buoyant, the result should be the same. Though I can't tell you whether that means it's going to work or not.

spare logitech controller

I refuse to believe that they only brought one.

… I forgot to charge the back up…

This really does seem plausible given this company and what is coming out regarding it.

There are spare controllers kept onboard, but is not clear whether the submersible also had manual controls or other redundancies.

It was tongue in cheek ... on the other hand whether they were tested before every mission is anyone's guess. So is whether there is Bluetooth redundancy on the receiver. It will be combed over by the authorities.

It would be insane if they did. Game controllers break all the time.

Especially those shitty logitech ones.

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