>>40389

And I'm sure the sub will definitely not have had a black box or something like it. They were really playing silly buggers with the design, if the whole thing was actually maneuvred by a game console controller and the parts were held together with hardware store bolts and screws, like somebody said in an interview.

>>40388
>Surely they were all recording on phones, and that

Almost certainly - but the violence of a catastrophic implosion and the after effects of the water pressure at that depth once it had happened will make finding them intact very difficult.

if the phones have NFC or wireless charging, they'll have resonant coils that you should be able to hunt down over multiple meters, maybe tens.
Sure, if they're mulched, no deal, but phones are pretty robust, and it's not as if they have to work or have intact screens.
It's possible that the phones' security makes it tricky to read the data though.

Want to hear the most foolhardy words ever spoken by man? Courtesy of The Guardian liveblog: https://twitter.com/stonking/status/1671945151961333784?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Probably good reason to be a bit conservative with the dos and don'ts of deep sea exploration when you're taking multiple other persons down there with you. Tradition has it's place in society and that place is four kilometres beneath the sea, where the best case scenario in an emergency is anything but dying in the blink of an eye. And whilst I've made light of this situation I really do feel for that poor fucking 19 year old lad.

I'm probably being dim, but carbon fibre wrapped pressure vessels are usually used under internal presssure, so the carbon's under tension, where it excels. Under compression, like it would be wrapped around a vessel under external pressure, it's far less strong. Bit of an odd choice really.

>>40393

See, and that's what's so mind boggling. Here was somebody with an aerospace engineering degree from Princeton and who at least for a while did engineering work for the Air Force. This was somebody who had a concept of pressurisation and how to keep something from exploding - or imploding. Granted, on an airplane, the trick is to keep pressure from getting out and in the deep sea you want to keep pressure from getting in, but I don't see where his skillset wasn't transferable to building submarines instead of planes.

>>40395
It was the pressure that must've got to him.

What if the shock of the implosion made me do a fart? Would it float away or would it be crushed too? Would it turn into a tiny poo? And if so, would that count as me shitting myself when I died? I think we need to keep sending billionaires down there until we have answers to these important questions.

>>40397
I think you go from zero to ragu just like they used to make in the old country in an instant, so you really don't have the time for any of that.

>>40395
It's odd, for sure, because he obviously wasn't a fly-by-night chancer. He presumably would have been counting money in Dubai or Bali if he was, not onboard for a one way ticket to becoming fish food. Perhaps you get useless idiots at that level, even in those fields, like you can in any job? Maybe he was wildly overconfident and really thought he could Scrapheap Challenge his way to the Titanic? Or perhaps naming his submersible the Titan was one too many thumbings of the nose in the face of Poseidon and measures had to be taken?

>>40396
Audible mirth; like they used to say in the old country.

>>40394

If it's properly engineered, the loading is all tension. The simplest example is a bicycle wheel - you can easily bend a loose bicycle spoke with your fingers, but the design of the wheel pre-tensions all of the spokes so that compressive loads just reduce the amount of tension. The problem with CFRP is that it tends to fail suddenly and catastrophically, as anyone who follows Formula 1 will recognise. Once a few fibres start to break, they increase the strain on the remaining fibres, leading to a cascading failure in a matter of milliseconds.

>>40375
>people the presuming Orca's are our friends are vile
Nice try shipm8.

Orcas are probably the most unsettling animals on the planet, after humans.

A shark might attack you but that's pure animal instinct. An orca would fuck around with you in a cold and calculating way. They're like the cats of the ocean world.

>>40399

>The problem with CFRP is that it tends to fail suddenly and catastrophically, as anyone who follows Formula 1 will recognise.

The way the submarine was designed was also a big departure from established design principles beyond the kind of material they used. Most submarines consist of a pressurised sphere, not an oblong cylinder like the Titan. The reason being that a sphere is a much better shape to withstand the pressure that acts on a submarine from all sides. A sphere has the smallest surface area in relation to its volume, and because pressure is measured in units of weight over units of surface area, it means that less total pressure acts on it altogether.

If the pressure chamber of your sub is more cylindrical, then suddenly you have far greater total pressure acting on it as you have more surface area over volume. Which again makes it less rigid. With a cylinder shape, you have a lot of straight surface, which the water pressure has a much easier time bending inward.

And with the Titan, added to that you had one whole end of the cylinder opening away as the vessel's door. That means you will not have the same rigidity of the pressure cylinder as most similar submersibles, where the cylinder is pretty much one piece and they have a smallish entry hatch at the top that's just big enough for a person to climb through. With the Titan's large door, you're introducing a considerable potential point of failure if it's not bolted shut with absolute accuracy. You can't really make out in photos of it how exactly it was bolted on, you would think that they would have used quite substantial bolts, but you can't see them.

>>40401

Sharks are fish and haven't changed much in the last 70 to 100 million years. Their brain structure is much more rudimentary compared to cetaceans, which evolved from land animals whose brains were highly advanced because they were the result of far greater evolutionary pressures. Sharks were always apex predators, and as a voracious eating machine that has no natural enemies, you're good enough at what you do so that you don't need to develop a more complex brain.

The byproduct of that is that dolphins and orcas are some of the smartest animals on the planet and are capable of fucking around with you like that in a premeditated way, where a shark will just be like, alright, there's food, I'll chomp on that.

I reckon orcas would agree to a ceasefire if we released their bros from captivity. I'd be pretty pissed too if another species imprisoned humans in tiny cages for its own amusement.

>>40404

The Japanese are ready to finish the job.

>>40402
>You can't really make out in photos of it how exactly it was bolted on, you would think that they would have used quite substantial bolts, but you can't see them.
Allegedly they were in the habit of leaving the topmost bolt out completely, because it was hard to reach.

The manufacturers of the front porthole also apparently only certified it to 1300m. An engineer at Oceangate was fired for trying to raise this as an issue.

>>40406

>The manufacturers of the front porthole also apparently only certified it to 1300m

They often do that for liability. You'll probably be ok taking it to 1500 or 2000 metres. They'll have tested it for much deeper depths. They put in a wide safety margin so that it's very unlikely one of them will actually crack at 1301 metres.

There was an expert on TV earlier who said that making a pressure hull out of wound carbon fibre is a really terrible idea, because at the kind of pressures that it'll be exposed to on a deep dive, there will be fatigue very quickly, which will build up the more often you go down. Carbon fibre has been the wonder material in aviation in the last 20 years because of its strength and elasticity and its light weight which saves plenty of fuel. Maybe that's also where the creator of the Titan got his inspiration. But it's just not the right kind of material for a 4000-metre dive.

>>40407
compression is very different beast to tame. Think of that trick where people stand on top of a box of eggs without breaking them, but a sharp tap in the right place will crush them. A pressure vessel under the sea is the same, a perfectly round structure can withstand a very high pressure without breaking, but a tiny defect or out-of-roundness will drastically reduce the breaking pressure. Carbon fibre is very problematic in this regard, there's loads of opportunities to create microscopic defects during manufacturing, and the point where they glue the carbon fibre tube to the metal end-caps is likely to be a major weak point

>>40407
>They put in a wide safety margin so that it's very unlikely one of them will actually crack at 1301 metres.
True but the MOT limit for tread depth on your tyres is a safety margin and oceangate is down to the wire.

>>40407

The porthole issue is emblematic of broader engineering problems at Oceangate. It's rated for 1300m because the manufacturer is absolutely confident that it's safe to use at that depth. That's how you're supposed to design life-critical systems - you test everything exhaustively and apply conservative factors of safety wherever possible. I don't know what factor of safety was used in the design of that porthole, but there can't be much left when it's being used at 3x the rated depth. When you start eyeballing things, when you start thinking things like "it's worked so far, so it must be fine", then someone is going to die sooner or later.

Another big issue with the construction is this, the monitors in there were literally just screwed into the hull, with regular wood screws.
I can't express how colossally deranged this should be to anyone with a basic understanding of carbon fibre composites and pressure vessel engineering. Even if they've used super short stubby screws to penetrate a minimum thickness of the hull, they've gone and drilled through the fibres, driven a screw in which puts all the fibres in it into tension with a nice sharp pointed tip to act as a stress concentrator. I'd put money on this being the starting point of the failure.

>>40413

I've read that the wall was five inches thick. But you're not doing yourself any favours by drilling right into it, you're right. I'm assuming they did the same with the overhead lights.

>>40413

I've read that the wall was five inches thick. But you're not doing yourself any favours by drilling right into it, you're right. I'm assuming they did the same with the overhead lights.

>>40413
Surely that's an internal thermal cladding, not the pressure vessel?
I mean, there were retarded things going on, but no bugger is ever going to drill holes in (expensive) CFRP. Also, surely the CFRP was on the outside of the titanium? Other winding and bonding would be quite tricky.

>>40416
Yeah actually you're right. there's a 1/4" thick coil of aluminium or something lining the inside at least.

>>40413
HE WAS INNOVATING! Stockton Rush was a disruptor, he was a boundary pusher. Just because your TINY mind is only happy when it's being coddled by government regulation and sitting on the sofa, doesn't mean explorers like Rush should be beholden to your lowly standards.

Obviously I'm taking the piss, but it's only a slightly more hystrionic form of the argument the late Mr Rush and his OceanGate co-founder, Guillermo Söhnlein, made and continue to make. To paraphrase James Cameron we more or less nailed deep sea submersibles with the Trieste. That's the one that visited the challenger deep (which is two-and-a-half times deeper than the Titanic wreck iirc), suffered minor damage and still came back up with it's two crewmen alive and well. What these idiots did was build a motorbike with cardboard breakpads and call it a revolution and I don't understand how you become that... app-brained? Is that a good name for it? Do we have a collective noun for people who think things like "web 3.0" or the gig economy are anything more than a shitier version of what we previously had? Well, whatever that word is, this is probably the most transparently disastrous example of it.

>>40416
>Also, surely the CFRP was on the outside of the titanium? Other winding and bonding would be quite tricky.
I could be mistaken, but my understanding is that either end of the Titan was titanium with the middle section being carbon fibre.

>>40418
>I could be mistaken, but my understanding is that either end of the Titan was titanium with the middle section being carbon fibre.

Yes thats right. There was a carbon fibre tube, at each end a titanium dome with a socket that the carbon fibre tube was glued into.
Here's a clip showing the process
https://youtu.be/4dka29FSZac?t=262

>>40418
It's a symptom of them believing their own hype, isn't it? Same reason their super-rich peers trust them enough to go in the death-trap. He's successful and rich therefore if he disregards basic safety and physics, it's because he knows better and all the little people who aren't billionaires, the engineers and mechanics and scientists, they're not billionaires so it doesn't matter what they think. These are the same class of disruptors who reinvent buses every few months, it doesn't occur to them that the little people might have thought of these things first.

>>40418

It's that whole Silicon Valley think. You fail fast and learn fast.

Not a big problem when you design an app and roll it out as a beta and let your customers deal with the bugs and report them. But with a submersible that goes into the most unforgiving environment on Earth, it just doesn't work that way. Even the smallest misaligned bolt or washer can spell death. That's why you don't use off the shelf parts from Homebase but only certified components.

This isn't limited to submarines. All the wiring and electronics in your car are certified to have certain properties that make them safe to use. Wiring needs to be able to withstand extreme freezing temperatures same as high heat. Your plugs and connectors need to have safety brackets so they won't come loose from vibration. The coating of your wires also has to be flame retardant. Electronic control mudules in your car are designed to be rugged, to tolerate knocks and vibration, to shield interference and to prevent short circuits. Everything is certified to work in a car without fault for years. Normally, anyway, unless your car is a complete shitbox.

So then if you bosh together a submersible with no regard for that kind of safety, because "safety kills innovation", then just go ahead and see how long you have until your design kills you.

Safety doesn't kill innovation. It ensures that you'll come back to innovate another day.

>>40421

Stockton Rush wasn't a self-made millionaire or billionaire though. If you read about his life, he was descended from a long line of New England old money. Two of his ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence. He was born into great wealth. Not that that doesn't give you its own feeling of ivincibility. At that level of society, your failures don't normally have consequences. If you drop out of college you'll still land a job through your connections where you'll make ten times more than somebody with a degree who came from poverty. Even if you run a multi-million dollar company into the ground, it'll probably be nothing compared to your family's remaining wealth. You are in a class of your own. I'm really speculating here, but maybe that also gives you a sense that you can't fail if you build a slipshod submersible. Yes, you'll give people a waiver to sign that they could die on a trip to the Titanic with your sub, but going by what he kept telling other people and the press, I don't think it really occurred to him that that was a real possibility. Because, again, at his level, failure doesn't have consequences.

>>40423

Well, exactly. He belongs to a class who think they're better at any given task simply by virtue of who they are. Safety measures made by common people are irrelevant because common people obviously haven't got the same expertise. They can invent buses because obviously nobody else has been smart enough to think of one of their ideas before them.

>>40423
>Stockton Rush wasn't a self-made millionaire or billionaire though

Are any? Just about all the ones I can think of, barring sports stars, came from wealthy families where they were in a position to take risks because they had a massive safety net to fall back on.

>>40425

You're not wrong. If you're first-generation wealth, then you're probably too busy generating your wealth, so you don't really fall into that group of rich people doing daft things because they can.

>>40425

Jeff Bezos was the son of teenage parents and had quite a troubled childhood. It sounds like I'm making this up, but his biological father was an alcoholic unicyclist and his stepdad was a first-generation Cuban immigrant. Sergey Brin's parents were academics in the Soviet Union who came to America with nothing. Larry Ellison was adopted as a baby; his adoptive father was a property developer who was bankrupted in the Great Depression.

It certainly helps to come from a relatively prosperous background, but billionaires are more usually raised in upper-middle-class households than proper wealth. The safety net of having a rich dad is often a trap that produces spoiled and lazy kids.

>>40431
Didn't Bezos' parents give him $250,000 to start Amazon? Probably comes to about double that in today's money.

>>40433

Amazon was already established when they invested. Bezos started the company at the age of 30, after a successful early career in finance. His parents put their entire life savings into the company, which was a hugely risky decision but turned out very well. $250k is obviously a lot of money, but it isn't a ridiculously vast pension pot for a professional couple in their late forties/early fifties. The initial fundraising round in 1995 took investment from 20 other people, all of whom are now fantastically wealthy.

Another detail that's emerging from OceanGate is that Stockton Rush apparently didn't like hiring "old white men" as his engineering staff. He wanted to be surrounded by young, innovative minds. While you could say that diversity hiring isn't necessarily a bad thing, it looks like he did it because those old white men, usually seasoned engineers with decades of experience, were all telling him that what he was doing would lead to disaster.

If you hire engineers a few years out of uni, maybe they'll come with a fresh way of looking at something, but they'll probably also be afraid to contradict you and tell you you're wrong, because they'll be happy to have a job at all and don't want to commit career suicide. And they may just lack practical experience. But if there's nobody there with the courage to offer a contrasting opinion, then you can slip into a kind of emperor complex where you're increasingly blind to the fact that you're just plain wrong. Which pretty likely happened here, going by Stockton Rush's press statements in the last few years, or the fact that he took it as a "personal insult" when that one employee who later got fired told him about serious technical problems that he saw.

>>40437

>the fact that he took it as a "personal insult" when that one employee who later got fired told him about serious technical problems that he saw.

It wasn't even an employee, it was an independent expert who contacted him in 2018 to warn him of design defects.

Some of the relatives of the dead have been calling for an inquiry into what went wrong, but everyone in the industry knows what went wrong and had been warning about it for years. Some people just don't listen to reason.

Does anyone remember that bloke who tried to launch himself in a home-made rocket to prove that the earth was flat?

>>40441
It looked pretty flat where he landed tbf.

>>40444


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV5hSxIgyxI

They've found some human goulash remains among the wreckage.

>>40462
I'm glad they've found it now. If this was all the original Titanic - someone discovered mashed remnants of machinery and now they've examined the wreckage and found human remains inside it, crushed beyond recognition - that would make a great start to a horror film but an awful start to something we were actually going to open. As ominous starts go, it's up there with "let's hide in this cave with the unexplained green light coming out" and "I wonder who's singing that nursery rhyme over in the abandoned playground?"

I look forward to a lot of very detailed analyses of what went wrong, when they have an official verdict. I mean obviously it was shit and it imploded, but what exactly caused it?

What's your money on, the un-rated viewport? Or undiscovered micro-stress in the carbon fibre?

I think I'm leaning toward the second option myself. In the aviation industry they take a plane out of flight every few thousand flights and strip it all down totally to examine the structure for micro-fractures. Under the amount of pressure this thing was at the bottom of the sea, they want to have been doing that every journey, but as far as the evidence seems to suggest, it simply did not occur to them that the structure would weaken over time, and that doing any consecutive dives at all without full inspection and maintenance was pushing their luck.

>>40463

There'll probably be somebody who'll make the whole thing into a movie.

James Cameron would be an obvious choice as director, but I'm not sure he'd be eager to take it on. And it'd probably turn into one big public service announcement about not using carbon fibre on your submersible. Big Carbon Fibre would be livid.

I've always wondered why every disaster needs its own movie anyway. Are people really so unimaginative that they need Hollywood to fluff it up, and often beyond recognition. Even the Titanic movie takes a great amount of licence.

>>40464

>What's your money on, the un-rated viewport?

They did loop the crane rope through the porthole when they lifted it from the ship. I doubt somebody said, how are we going to lift this part, oh I know, I'll break out the porthole window. On the other hand, the pressure wave from the implosion alone probably would have been enough to shatter it.

I'll put my money on the hull. Most engineers on TV and youtube are saying that virtually all submarines and submersibles consist of a contiguous metal sphere that's in other words one piece. And even when you weld sheets of metal together for a submersible sphere, your welding seams must be 100 percent perfect so that they will be able to withstand the intended operating environment.

The problem probably really was that the Titan was made of a still not fully understood composite material, and then glued together with other parts at both ends. That alone probably opened up a whole host of potential failure points, which definitely weren't getting better with each dive. If you watch the videos, the glue was applied by hand with an auto and body filler spreader. When something goes 4000 metres under water, even the slightest air bubble or speck of dust in your glue can introduce a failure point. Or maybe you end up applying not enough glue in a small area somewhere. Maybe your submersible will then still be ok for the first ten dives, but it'll definitely be a weak point for material fatigue.

>>40466

Also, what kind of glue was it? What was it rated for? Were there ever any tests how it performed in salt water, and at high ambient pressure, no less? Salt water is an entirely different beast than freshwater. It can be far more chemically aggressive. Just look at how ships rust in salt water compared to freshwater.

Probably there were no tests. They boshed it together and then took it 3.8 kilometres down and from the fact that it didn't go kaboom right away, they deduced that the glue was adequate.

>>40464
Mine is also on the carbon fiber hull. There are videos of the fibre sheet being rolled around the structure. There are plenty of materials that show carbon structures being made - many of us have handled epoxy resin or glues, a single tiny bubble anywhere in the structure would cause it to fail, regardless of how much vacuum was pulled over the structure or how they baked it.

Any tiny bubble of air in the epoxy resin would cause a failure similar to a freeze-thaw process as happens with rocks and ice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaOVYkWgpcM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dka29FSZac

Posted without comment, all I could say has already been said.

Not the funniest joke you could've come up with, but far from the worst.


We all died in a homemade submarine, homemade submarine, homemade submarine.