>>40302
Can't stop thinking about this story.

What an awful way to go.

>>40303
But definitely worth the $250k.

If the billionaire snuffs it they should give us all 15-30 quid.

>>40303

>What an awful way to go.

It depends on what actually happened. If there was a catastrophic failure and water got inside the sub, then it's a relatively quick death if you're at a few thousand metres depth.

But if you're just sitting inside for 96 hours waiting to suffocate, then that must be pretty horrific.

>>40306
If you killed the other people would the oxygen last longer?

>>40307

The air system will be equipped with a CO2 scrubber, which consists mainly of a cartridge containing soda lime or other similar substances which chemically bind the CO2 from the air. The scrubber will be spent at some point as there will be no more free soda that can react with the CO2. If they're expecting it to last 96 hours for five people, then naturally it'll last longer the fewer people you've got breathing on board.

We now know who was on-board.
- Owner of a private jet company
- One of the richest people in laplanderstan and son
- A director at the owner of the wreck site
- The guy who runs the company that operates the sub

So in short, everyone aboard fits into one of two categories:
- People who can afford to just casually drop $250k on a boat trip
- People who will take $250k a head for a boat trip

$250k is a lot of money for what has become a shit Titanic tribute act.

Were there emergency controls in case the 15 year old MadCatz controller stopped working?

In contrast, about 500 immigrants drowned last Wednesday and it's getting nothing like as much coverage and none of the discussion.

>>40311
If you're on about the one near Greece there's been shitloads about it. This isn't Twitter, ladm8.

>>40312
Twitter tends to show you things you've demonstrated an interest in so I think you just don't understand how that works. More to the point, it's not on here or the BBC home page, although there is an article at the top of the latter about a man throwing his phone at someone over the weekend.

>>40309
>$250k is a lot of money for what has become a shit Titanic tribute act.

Also, from what you can find about the sub's layout inside, you didn't even get proper seats for your quarter mill. They had you sitting on a hard floor with nothing to lean on besides the sub's curved walls. And it doesn't seem like there was a lot of hull insulation, so that the walls must have been ice cold to the touch at 4,000 metres below the surface, where the seawater temperature is often just a degree or two above freezing. There are probably less dignified ways of pissing $250K up the wall, but it wasn't exacly luxury accomodation. With the kind of figures we're talking about here, it wouldn't have hurt them to install a few Recaro seats.


Also, this is what the BBC web site put on the sidebar of one of the articles about the submarine:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-65951188

>Global network of sadistic monkey torture exposed by BBC

Not to be callous, but migrants die at sea all the time, while a bunch of rich cunts dying in a submarine by the Titanic is unusual. Yes it is sad,that We Live In A Society where the deaths of 500 are less "important" than the deaths of 4.

>>40313
>More to the point, it's not on here or the BBC home page

It's not on the BBC home page now because it happened a week ago.

It's not on here because you lot get a bit funny about migrants and the mods get hypersensitive.

>>40314
Feel like the answer to this not being "none, they're soup now" is journalistic malpractice.

>>40311
I quite agree regarding the media coverage. I suppose the difference is that's a unyielding tragedy while this is more of a modern freakshow. It's not like people are going to Lands End (or near to it so they don't have to pay) and leaving wreaths in the water in memorial to these guys; mostly they're laughing at the idea of going four kilometres below the ocean with nought but a wireless gamepad to guide you.

>>40316
>It's not on the BBC home page now because it happened a week ago.
That's why I mentioned the phone throwing that also happened some time ago. We'll have to add reading to the list of things you don't understand.

I know you have to ride a wave as far as it'll take you these days as a news site, but it's a bit overblown that the Guardian now has a live coverage section for the incident.

I'm not saying the world shouldn't care about five people missing in one of the most forbidding and inhosptiable environments on Earth, several kilometres below the sea. But nobody twisted their arm to be down there. They didn't go on a journey to the Titanic in hope of a better life and to escape war and poverty in their home country. Why do five rich cunts get this kind of coverage, when refugees in the Med routinely die on their boat journey to Europe almost every day.

It's not me who's being cynical here.

>>40319
Well there's plenty of others to choose from if that doesn't take your fancy.

>>40320

One as irrelevant as the next. Maybe with the exception of that mortgage thing.

Not saying there isn't some sort of news event to cover. But I've gotten more excitement out of watching a turd drop into my toilet bowl than I do following any of those "live" stories.

>>40319 Why do five rich cunts get this kind of coverage, when refugees in the Med routinely die on their boat journey to Europe almost every day.

Huh? News tends to report the unusual. Same old shit happening might rate a graph every now and then. 'Shit stops happening' might rate a few inches.

>>40321
Oh, I was well aware that was a liveblog OD. They aren't quite pointless, but I was pretty suprised to Biden's naughty son top of the agenda.

>>40322
>Why do five rich cunts get this kind of coverage
.. because it's a novelty?

I really do hope the idiots who built that deep sea coffin, who didn't already entomb themselves within it, suffer some legal consequences for this.

>>40325

To be clear, the submarine was "uncertified". Apparently, a civilian submarine doesn't have to undergo safety testing to be put into commercial service. You can have independent auditors certifying your submarine, but it's not required. This sub did a "validation dive" after its construction, which is just a fancy way of saying they put it down to 4,000 metres once and it didn't implode.

It's a bit like building your own car and not being required to get MOT for it, because, hey, you've had it up to 90 mph a few times and the car didn't kill you.

It's a bit amazing that they used a slightly outdated game console controller to maneuvre it, but that already sums it up. What do you do when a microswitch inside it fails because it's gunked up and suddenly you can't tell the submarine to go up anymore. A game controller is designed to win you a few rounds of FIFA or Mario Kart, but not to withstand becoming a potential critical point of failure in a submarine carrying passengers into the deep sea. Did they use an Arduino with dodgy Github libraries too?

>>40324
also, it's ongoing. Your migrant boat - well,it's happened. It's shite, but apart from the counting and the recriminations, it's all done.
The sunken coffin thing is absolute bait for rolling news. Will they, won't they, should they have, shouldn't they. Participants with easily discovered back stories a bit longer than 'brown migrant we know almost nothing about'.
note to self - add experimental submarines to homebuilt helicopters and French fairground rides as things I will not partake of.

>>40327
The migrant crisis is ongoing, not finished, moreover there are 500 people still missing, 100 of whom are children and the Greek authorities pretending the boat was fine for hours is a new thing. You're scrambling to find justification but none of it stands up.

I agree with, to some extent, the argument some of you are making about the media coverage here vs the Boat People and that. In moral principle it's a shame, but in reality, which story has more legs? This one.

However it's not just the media attention I questioned first, and I think it's kind of telling that the media coverage is the aspect you lads were drawn to first and foremost. What gets me is how there's a big search and rescue operation for these cunts, who we all know are pretty much definitely fucking dead. If it was Boat People we'd all just shrug and accept "Yep, they're dead Dave."

It's like with Madeline McCann or that alkie teacher who fell in the river earlier this year. They're dead, if it's been more than few days, just accept it, they're dead. But just as long as you're an international billionaire white male, or an ordinary middle class white female, you earn the privelege of people pretending you might not be for another two weeks.

It's the same as the Chilean miners or those kids stuck in a cave in Thailand. People love a rescue mission. Banging on about drowned migrants is performative the shipping forecast by the worst kind of bleeding-heart hand-wringing do-gooders.

>>40328
So what would you like to happen?
If you're just angry and ranting about the unfairness of it, fine, I feel you.

>>40330

That you think the five people two miles under water are more likely to be rescued than some of the 500 people who were on a sinking ship, that really just underlines why you wrote the rest of that post.

>>40332
The migrants aren't trapped though. It wouldn't have made a very interesting episode of Thunderbirds.

>>40330
>Banging on about drowned migrants is performative the shipping forecast by the worst kind of bleeding-heart hand-wringing do-gooders.
This what social media does to the brains of some poor cunts. Look at this man and learn from his mistakes, lads.

>>40331
I suppose I "want" there to be more public pressure on the people responwible to ensure it doesn't happen again. So I'm just keeping it in the conversation, because that's all I realistically can do.

They are now saying there have been "banging noises" picked up by sonar buoys in the area.

I don't know if a quick death from an imploding vessel is really worse than being locked inside a steel coffin for days a few kilometres deep, with the constant fear of running out of air before you are found and can be brought back up.

They don't even know if the banging noises came from the ocean floor or from the surface.

One major design flaw of the submarine appears to be that you cannot open the exit hatch from the inside. You're pretty much bolted in from the outside by surface crew and then sent on your way down. So it's entirely possible they could have deployed one of the inflatable balloons on the side of it and floated to the surface but can't get out.

The sub is also not equipped with a GPS beacon to help locate it once it has floated to the surface. With the often strong sea currents in the area, it's possible they could be several hundred miles out of the current search area, which is already 100 square miles in size.

Who designed this vessel in the first place. It's more and more starting to look like your dad's weekend shed project.

An industry body wasn't 100% impressed.
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/marine-technology-society-committee-2018-letter-to-ocean-gate/eddb63615a7b3764/full.pdf

>>40337

It'll probably lead to mandatory external audits and regular safety inspections for submarines and submersibles. A bit like they do in the aviation industry. Which will cost everybody more money, and that's probably why they warned OceanGate not to spoil the party.

>>40334

He's right though. And them lot what do do that wouldn't bother if it weren't for social media, in order to get the virtual back pats and right ons. Oh, and your type are always keen on this, so I'll just say you're also doing a whataboutism, aren't you, so there.

Personally I'm more interested in this story because migrants dying is sad and there's nothingwe can do, so it makes me feels bad; but billionaires drowning themselves in a dodgy DIY submersible coffin is hilarious and makes me smile.

>>40336
If they were close to the surface then wouldn't someone just be able to use their phone?

400 miles from land? Maybe a spiffy satphone if anyone took one and it works through the porthole.
Not strapping an inmarsat (or other) terminal to the top seems daft, but the whole enterprise seems daft. I get that you don't want excessive breaches through the pressure hull for cables and stuff, but this one seems like it might have been worth some effort.

What's amusing is how you can't reaelly tell if it was stupidity, recklessness, or just plain cynical cheapness leading to this.

I don't know about you lads, but even while I can imagine being a penny-pinching billionaire who wants to cut corners and cheap out on every sensible, logical safety proceedure and back-up failsafe you can think of, I would still bloody well make sure there was something. Especially if I was ever going to get in it myself. But they seem to have totally diregarded that. Was it just the arrogance to assume they wouldn't get in trouble?

If I was them I would have at least attached the sub to a very, very, very long rope. That way, whatever happens, they can always reel us back in, and see what's left of our bodies after decompression.

They did seem to have a bunch of ballast dumping methods, at least one of which was completely automatic, so there was _some_ thought.
I'm not sure any if them have the lift to raise it if it's full of water (and a tiny pocket of stinky compressed air).
Fuck's sake.
Also the piss bucket.

>>40341
This is what I can't get my head around. Why on earth would you not have some emergency location buoy/beacon/telemetry system?

I'm going to put my money on them having resurfaced 5 mins after they dropped out of Comms, but then suffocating at the surface as they bobbed around aimlessly.

>>40342
I mean judging by the madcatz controler in >>40310 I'm going to blame cheapness
If they'd been willing to pay just £20 more for a genuine xbox controller everyone would be fine right now

>>40345
You'd never get this with a keyboard and mouse. PC master race wins again.

And to address the previous argument about coverage, the people on the submarine are celebrities. They might be celebrities none of us have heard of, but if your bank account has ten digits, you're a celebrity. The moist eskimos are not celebrities. We don't even know if they're refugees or immigrants. If there was a TV crew on that boat, say, or the Syrian Olympic high-jump team, then perhaps we would care about them too, because they'd be minor.celebrities, sure, but celebrities nonetheless.

>>40345

>If they'd been willing to pay just £20 more for a genuine xbox controller everyone would be fine right now


The problem is, it's not rated for that kind of environment. The buttons and switches in your xbox™ controller are rated, if that, and have been tested to perform normally for some time at room temperature in average humidity. Humidity is what kills switches and buttons more than anything, as contacts inside them corrode and no longer conduct electricity. Not to mention that the PCB in your xbox controller will also be susceptible to corrosion. Unless you have an air dehumidifier on board which keeps air humidity at constant dry levels, marine environments are always going to be very damp and the air inside will have close to 100 percent humidity all the time.

And even if your xbox controller fails after a month under normal conditions in your home, who cares, go and get another one for 40 quid. But you can't have that happening when you're in a submarine 4,000 metres down.

You can buy heavy duty switchgear off the shelf that's been tested for harsh marine environments. Where an xbox controller is £40, it'll probably cost you a few thousand quid for submarine-grade controls. But you're staking your life on a cheaply made mass produced xbox controller whose manufacturer never intended it to be used for this kind of purpose.

If they've scrimped on other technical parts as well, then that already goes a long way to explain why the submarine is now missing.

>>40347
Couldn't they have just filled it with potting compound or something?

>>40345
Press is describing it as a "modded Logitech controller". Unless they did some internal work we can't see, the only mod seems to be the long joysticks. They should have added RGB that might have helped.

>>40348

Just spend a few thousand quid on your submarine-grade parts and have peace of mind.

It's disturbing when you read that that Stockton Rush chap had such an illustrious past as an aerospace engineer with a Princeton degree. He was also a fully licenced commercial airline pilot and did loads of technical engineering work for the DOD and the Air Force.

How can somebody like that design such a piss poor submarine.

they keep calling it a submersible, not a submarine. I wonder if there's reasons for that.

It wouldn't have gone down like this if I'd been there, that's all I'm saying.

>>40350
The video where he's talking about how there's "only one button" and it "should be easy, like an elavator" are astonishing. The idea of not having any other controls beyond a go button and a LogiTech gamepad, connected via BlueTooth no less, is insane. Wouldn't you at least have a second one plugged in somewhere?

>>40349
>They should have added RGB that might have helped.
Seems like a good way to get bummed by sea monster going through the abyssal zone. Then again, we can't rule anything out at this stage.

>>40351

A submersible is a watercraft designed to operate underwater, usually supported by a nearby surface vessel, platform, shore team or sometimes a larger submarine. The term submersible is often used to differentiate from other underwater vessels known as submarines, which are fully self-sufficient craft, capable of independent cruising with its own power supply and air renewal system. In common usage by the general public, however, the word submarine may be used to describe a craft that by the technical definition is actually a submersible, and by the standard meaning of the word, all submarines are submersibles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submersible

>>40351
I imagine that's the exact same conversation that they're currently having to keep themselves sane at the bottom of the sea

It looks a bit like a minimalist gaming lair on the inside.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkytJa0ghc

Not sure I like the idea of the controller being wireless and bluetooth. It's convenient on a good day when it works. But you're introducing more possible failure points even if you have a few backup controllers on board.

>>40355
I don't think I've ever had a wireless device develop connectivity problems.

I've had many wires degrade and break.

>>40356

>I've had many wires degrade and break.

It probably shouldn't have had a controller that you can move around in the first place. From what you see in documentaries on ocean exploration submarines, their controls normally look more like an airplane or helicopter cockpit. Probably with good reason. Wiring that doesn't move and is zip tied to a frame behind a cover can last decades. Just look at old cars.

>>40357
It looks like an absolute piece of shit compared to the very fancy 2/3-person ones that proper billionaires have in the middle of their yachts.

>>40355

Bluetooth is famously reliable of course, especially on Windows. Stays connected through thick and thin doesn't it.

Good grief.

>>40365

I was going to say that bluetooth also doesn't travel well under water, but if it comes to that, it'll be far from your biggest problem.

Channel Five's are doing a live broadcast about the missing sub this evening, right before the new Lucy Worsley show.

https://www.radiotimes.com/programme/b-r22m52/live-the-titanic-sub-lost-at-sea/

They're saying that the sub wasn't insured because no insurance company would touch it due to glaring safety issues.

It'll essentially mean that OceanGate will go bankrupt from wrongful death lawsuits if the occupants have actually died. Two passengers will each leave behind billion-dollar estates which should be enough to hire a whole army of lawyers to sue the company into oblivion.

If your submarine is such a shit design that you can't even get insurance for it, then that should tell you something. But it ties into what was probably the company owner's generally cavalier attitude to risk.

Risk always comes with its own probability attached. Sure, even a well-engineered submarine that ticks all the boxes of industry safety standards can have a fatal accident. But the more you design for safety, the less likely an accident will become. Just look at how far the aviation industry has come. Your risk of dying in a plane crash is almost infinitely small nowadays. Because hard learned lessons were taken on board and incorporated into modern aircraft design and operation.

>We all agree exploitative billionaires are a bad thing but please don't discuss it as your opinion might upset them

>>40371
Personally I think the media should back off and give everyone involved a bit of privacy. By which I mean they can fuck off with wall-to-wall coverage of five rich people under the sea and report on something more deserving of their attention.

>>40372
I agree with that entirely different reason for doing it, but not to spare their feelings from knowing how they make people feel about them.

Out of curiosity - who picks up the tab for this whole rescue operation? I know it's the Coast Guard's job to save people, but this is a bit more than a capsized fishing boat half a mile from shore. And then all the other privately owned equipment that's now brought in.

>>40371
I hate billionaires as much as the next (sane) person, but people the presuming Orca's are our friends are vile. The human race, were we to have any decency left within us, ought to exterminate ourselves at the soonest opportunity and cede the planet to them. I've been on this for years and all these people jumping on the bandwagon since the yacht attacks, whilst assuming they have common cause with Killer Whales, disgust me.

I'm sure there's a thread on here where I posted about cetacea being the rightful rulers of Earth, there's certainly an audio recording somewhere.

>>40375
You first.

US Coast Guard saying they have found a debris field.

>>40378
I wonder who that was tapping away then?

It's remarkable, to me anyway, that we'll never actually know what happened to the Titan. If it's been imploded to pieces there isn't a way know how that happened in detail, is there? I assume the tube of doom didn't have any kind of blackbox-like device on board, though I might be wrong, but as it had a single button I wouldn't count on it.

>>40374
I'd imagine no one. I would be suprised if the US Coast Guard and the Canadian Navy slap anyone with a bill. My understanding is the military is already paid for, it's just not necessarily doing anything with the gear they have. OceanGate are probably going to pay someone through the courts, even if their waiver does sound like it had any signees agree to an assisted suicide in case exactly these events took place.

>>40376
Alright, mate, don't cry. Shockingly I wasn't being entirely serious, biped boy.

>>40380

https://www.mapquest.com/travel/pay-for-search-and-rescue.htm

It looks like it's going to be on the taxpayer, save for the third-party equipment from private rescue firms. A lot of the latter is going to depend on their good will.

Some U.S. states have started passing statutes that allow their coast guards to demand back part of the cost when there was gross negligence involved. Probably like if you go out to sea in extremely bad weather with a tiny vessel. But there haven't been many cases where they have acted on those new statutes.

>>40381
"The taxpayer" in this instance includes us as the RAF has also sent two massive planes out there to help.

>>40382

In fairness, one of the passengers was a Brit.

They're now saying they've found a "debris field" within the search area, but essentially can't tell yet what that debris is.

https://twitter.com/USCGNortheast/status/1671907901542211584

It would make sense if the sub simply imploded around the moment that they lost contact with it. That would explain why the automatic safety mechanisms for an emergency ascent, of which the sub apparently had several, didn't kick in.

>>40379

Could have been multiple failures, up until the final one.

>>40380 we'll never actually know what happened to the Titan

Surely they were all recording on phones, and that

>>40386

>Surely they were all recording on phones, and that

I think they had cameras inside the ship. If they recorded the video onto an SSD on one of the sub's computers, maybe they can recover that. And maybe some raw data from the sub itself that'll tell you what happened.

Salt water isn't your friend though. Especially if the power didn't cut out before that SSD was submerged.

>>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.