quote:

Originally posted by techguy:
Has anyone said how deep they think the vessel was when it imploded/exploded?

One presumes the crew on the mothership can come up with the time it submerged and the rate of descent. With the time the U.S. Navy's system detected the sound anomaly, a reasonable approximation should be possible.

quote:

“It looks that the Titan imploded on Sunday on its way down to the Titanic shortly after contact was lost at a depth of around 9,000 feet,” a person with direct knowledge of the matter said.

“The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told The Wall Street Journal in a statement. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:

quote:

Originally posted by techguy:
Has anyone said how deep they think the vessel was when it imploded/exploded?

One presumes the crew on the mothership can come up with the time it submerged and the rate of descent. With the time the U.S. Navy's system detected the sound anomaly, a reasonable approximation should be possible.

They said about 9000 feet. Doing the math...

Titan made it down to 9000'. Titanic sits at a depth of some 13,000'. 9000/13000 = 70%

Contact lost at 1hr 45min. Total normal trip time is 2hr 30min. 105/150m = 70%

quote:

Originally posted by Lefty Sig:

quote:

Originally posted by erj_pilot:
Question…as the FAA is the governing body for all things aviation (even “experimental” builds), who is the governing body for something like this, submersible wise?

Doesn't seem to be a regulatory body for subs, seems more like the industry voluntarily follows various standards and procedures.

Probably because there really aren't a whole lot of subs in operation and the likelihood of accidents that harm anyone but the occupants is low. FAA has to worry about collisions in the air, during takeoff and landing, and crashes - all of which can hurt a lot more people than just the passengers. FAA was established out of need once aviation really got big.

After this I think we will see more strict regulation. The owner of this thing was like many other arrogant "tech" type people that want to change the world. They think they are smarter than the old white guys with all the experience, and generally they find out they aren't. Tesla went through that. They thought they knew better than old Detroit guys about how to build a welded steel unibody car (Model 3) at a lower price than the Model S which is more aerospace technology in it's design and manufacture. They found out real fast they didn't know shit. They bought a bunch of robots to automate the body shop and couldn't get them to work and resorted to manual processes.

The whole situation is not that different than the various people trying to invent the first plane or race early cars or motorcycles and getting themselves killed. The difference here is the expectation that when some thing like this happens the government has to go spend a shit ton of money and mobilize all available resources to search/rescue/salvage. But there is a body of knowledge over several decades about how to build deep sea subs and ignoring it is foolish.

I'm not an expert on subs but I had to learn pressure vessel design, material failure dynamics, cyclic loading fatigue and all that. A carbon fiber tube with titanium end caps bonded on does not sound like a good idea. For high pressure gaseous fuel tanks, plastic tanks with carbon fiber wrap seems to be the direction - but that is using carbon fiber in tension, not compression.

I was thinking earlier that the complexities of deep sea subs are more like space travel than aircraft. The margin for error is minimal.

Probably exactly as critical as space travel as depths increase, or pretty damn close to it. The people who go deep are high performance specialists like astronauts and test pilots, they're all cut from similar cloth. Not regular people for sure.

quote:

After this I think we will see more strict regulation.

I hope not. In some ways this will keep people from attempting crazy things, and at the same time we really don’t need more regulations or, heaven forbid, a new agency.

Plus, it’s not like we need to worry about the debris raining down on Atlanta or Tallahassee.

I wonder how long it will take the media to start referring to these lost souls as Hero’s?

The American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) is responsible, in partnership with the USCG for certifying and inspecting any for hire, passenger carrying submersible or submarines operated in US waters from US flagged ships. Most of the research or “experimental” submersibles persue inspection and certification by ABS as well. The Alvin is one exception, but they belong to the USN.
ABS, though a private organization is basically the FAA of shipping with enforcement responsibilities granted to it by the USCG. Interesting snippet on the Alvin linked below.
https://www.whoi.edu/news-insi...ineering-test-dives/

https://ww2.eagle.org/content/...uwvs-rules-jan21.pdf
A link to the current ABS rules for submersibles,(design, engineering, inspections etc. which Stockton Rush totally ignored. That’s why the whole shady enterprise was being run out of Canada.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
Oh, yes, Mr. I'm-the-world's-foremost-authority-on-the-Titanic-and-blue-people. We must hear from him.

No shit...his PR team is working over-time on this one.
He's been on ABC, CNN, Reuters, and probably a handful other news services, this guy can't help himself, he's got to be the voice of authority on this. Breathlessly talking about his reservations about the sub, regret about not being a dissenting voice in the news narrative, finding irony with the Titanic tragedy....just stop, shut up Jim. Take your hockey jersey and fuck off

I ran the math for the full depth, so the figures are a bit off. But assuming the sub was at 1 atm and perhaps a little chilly I set it at 14.7 psi and 65F. If it imploded at 16,000 ft at the instant of implosion the pressure hit 5,546psi and the temperature over 127,000 F.

Given that it imploded at an estimated 9,000 feet the values would be a little over half that so 3,105 psi at around 71,000F so needless to say, anything that wasn't metal was likely liquefied before anyone could even say "huh?"

With regard to his comment about safety being a waste of time and if you're that worried stay in bed. To a point, day to day, walking around being a normal human I agree that safety can be taken to unnecessarily extremes.

However, when you're going into an area where the environment itself is doing everything it can to kill you, you are going to be separated from any sort of assistance for an extended period if time, and ANY failure no matter how slight will lead to serious injury or death.... safety is absolutely the first, middle and last thing on your mind at all times.

Amazing how far people fall when they 'think' they are right

Sounds like the 19 y/o was terrified of the trip.

^^^Any chance you could share where you heard these sounds?

In aviation there is always the safety argument. If you keep the plane in the barn you never can get anyone hurt. That is true. This is way more dangerous than aviation though. That this was a commercial for profit enterprise should be criminal.

This guy was a fucking shyster. He killed those people as sure as I am typing this. There is no way paying customers knew half the bullshit about his company that we are reading after the fact. Nobody would take that trip knowing the viewing port wasn’t certified for that depth, nobody else uses carbon fiber, the whistleblower story guy that was fired, the letter from the sub guys, the 50 year old white guy bullshit, zero redundancy, faulty comms, impossible to navigate without support, etc.

I really particularly hate the 50 year old white guy bullshit. Only in this PC woke environment would you get away with that. This guy used this environment to hire young, completely inexperienced, zero submersible knowledge young people because they don’t have the balls or the experience or the knowledge to call him on his bullshit. It isn’t about inspiration it’s about control the narrative. That TikTok of the female sub “pilot” is very telling.

Those customers made a poor choice but that choice was muddied by this MF’s lying by omission about the true nature and safety of his operation. Plus he was an idiot himself because he DID know all the shit we are reading now. Can you imagine knowing all the backstory on this design and still agreeing to do this? Wow.

I know para will hate this, but this is going to make a great movie.

quote:

Originally posted by Rightwire:
I ran the math for the full depth,

Any estimates on the time or speed of the implosion? I've seen estimates described in milliseconds. With the data you're giving that doesn't seem impossible?

How does one calculate the temperature rise when the pressure increases?

pv=nrt has one too many variables to resolve the question by itself.

On the surface of it, most of the information we are reading now about the guy, his company, his submersible, etc. was fully available to those who chose to go for a ride on the thing. Certainly, the billionaire had the resources and capability to do due diligence and fully vet the operation before hand. Same for the Pakistani guy. His 19 year old son, maybe not. The retired French submariner was surely knowledgeable and experienced enough to make an informed decision.

My point being, if I can look it up on the internet and see things that don’t make sense to me with basically high school level science, a bit of woodworking knowledge, some mechanical aptitude, and a healthy dose of skepticism, then billionaire, the wealthy Pakistani, and the French submariner were certainly able and capable of coming to the same conclusion.

These people had their big boy pants on and made their own decisions. They’d have nobody to blame but themselves.

quote:

Originally posted by Georgeair:
Any estimates on the time or speed of the implosion? I've seen estimates described in milliseconds. With the data you're giving that doesn't seem impossible?

What happens when a sub implodes?
Any breach of the submersible would see it implode into pieces instantaneously due to the weight of the pressure from the Atlantic Ocean.

If the Titan had descended to around 3,500 meters it would have subjected to 350 atmospheres of pressure, while the inside of the vessel would be slightly below one atmosphere of pressure, the equivalent to almost 10,000 tones of pressure, professor Thornton said.

“When the integrity of one component fails, if a small crack appears that part won’t have the strength to resist that force,” he said.

“So it will be like a chain reaction of structural failures. This is what we mean by a catastrophic failure, it will be very quick. I haven’t calculated but we’re talking about something that takes milliseconds. So from the blink of an eyelid from the perspective of a human.

“When a failure like this occurs with this type of material, there won’t be anything that resembles a cylinder, the original structural shape, nothing like that will remain. It will either be broken down into fine particles like a sand or a powder.

“It’s possible that there might be some shards of the actual carbon fiber itself. But we wouldn’t expect to find any blocks or any voluminous parts of the cylinder.”

The chances of finding any human remains after such an implosion were “very, very small”, he added.

Dr David Gallo, a senior adviser with RMS Titanic Inc, believes something happened “mid-water” which caused power and communications to be lost.

“If there was a rupture of the hull. It’s just over within milliseconds,” he added.

https://inews.co.uk/news/what-...bris-titanic-2431580

At extreme depths, an implosion isn't exactly a "blink and you'll miss it" type affair. It's much faster than that. A pressure vessel would go from fine and functional to a crushed piece of wreckage faster than your brain can comprehend what has happened. If you're unfortunate enough to be inside an imploding vessel, it will be over before you know what's going on.

In the case of Titan, a catastrophic hull failure may look a little different. A large section of the vessel was made of carbon fiber, which doesn't deform like metal. Instead, the material likely fractured and disintegrated once its integrity was compromised. While the loss of the USS Thresher, an imploded U.S. Navy sub from the '60s, resulted in a debris field, the vessel itself broke into three large pieces, and the hull didn't disintegrate.

Unlike the movies, a failure is unlikely to be preceded by a crack spider-webbing its way across a porthole. Because of the forces involved, any failure would be instantaneous. The consequences for anyone inside an imploding vessel are equally swift. Organic matter is not designed to stand up to extreme forces, and with an almost instantaneous pressure change from one to hundreds of atmospheres -- death is likely to happen before a human central nervous system can even register that something has gone wrong.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...380b65197308ec&ei=56

It's going around the innerwebs, what happens to the body during decompression, a few years back Mythbusters did a show on this, it's test subject is called "Meat Man" due to what they used to make the subject.

The depth of this experiment was "only" 300ft and around 135 psi, the "body" was made from pig parts and a skeleton, with real internals, trying to make it as real as possible.

At the 9000 ft the Titan was at when it imploded the speed would have been significantly faster and damaging to the occupants.

Perhaps. My point which you are seeming to ignore though is that this guy purposely tried to keep that information quiet. My reading indicates that the only reason we know about the whistleblower was that he was forced to counter sue and was able to get around the NDA’s that constrained him and until now no one seems to have known the contents of that lawsuit. Was there an NDA after the settlement? As for the “letter”, I’m not exactly sure how a customer would have even known it existed. It came from the society and went to the company. They certainly didn’t put it in their pamphlets.

I agree that they knew they were undertaking a risky venture and that absolutely is on them. Stockton Rush clearly made large efforts to control the information regarding his product. He stymied or buried anything negative that he could. He hired employees that were star struck at the operation and had neither the brains nor the balls to stand against him.

At what point does burying critical safety related issues pass into nefarious territory? My opinion is that he absolutely did cross into this territory in this situation. Dangerous is always dangerous. Making sure your customers don’t know that the manufacturer of the front end of your submersible only rates the viewport to a third of the depth you are going is beyond the pale.

I suspect more and more of this behavior will come to light. Knowing that parachuting is dangerous is one thing, knowing the manufacturer refuses to certify the chute is quite another, hiding that fact to your clients is yet another.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: pedropcola,