quote:

Originally posted by Rick Lee:
Gotta be some irony in spending so much money and taking so much risk to go see an unsinkable ship at the bottom of the ocean.

Excellent point – it is ironic. I hope those folks are rescued, but odds are against it, I fear.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
Former Navy officer, US congressman calls for deployment of nuclear sub to search for missing Titanic tour

Uh, no

Get a grip, congressman. Really

Yea, in over 12,500 feet of water. Uh, no.

I think somebody's seen The Hunt for Red October too many times.

Since the passengers are literally bolted in from the outside, I'm wondering if they'd have access to fresh air if they did in fact make it to the surface. Would the 96 hour clock for onboard air still be ticking?

I took care of rebuilding DC motor for Seacliff and Turtle, DSV's. Seacliff was capable of going 20k back in the day and I think it had a 1.5 factor on the crush factor. The dome was made of Titanium.
It will take a while to bring them up slow.
The only thing that can help them would be a DSRV to latch onto the hatch if it had mil spec sub hatch.

Something i learned at SF and think it applies here:

“Play stupid games….”

0-0

Not no but hell no. .even if i had the money it would be money not well spent.................... drill sgt.

I wonder if the navy’s SOSUS buoys picked up anything?

Rule #1 as a submariner:

Always keep your dive to surface ratio even.

have seen reports of who is on the submersible:


Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush (founder of company behind Titan submersible)

British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58

British-based Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son, Suleman, 19.

French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who works for OceanGate


https://uk.news.yahoo.com/insi...No9C72wYvjil55O9eScQ



CBS News correspondent David Pogue previously took a trip on OceanGate's Titan submersible to see the wreck of the Titanic.

"The crew closes the hatch, from the outside, with 17 bolts. There's no other way out," Pogue said in his November report.

"You steer this sub with an Xbox game controller, some of the ballast is abandoned construction pipes," Pogue told the BBC.





https://news.yahoo.com/people-...sible-081031782.html




OceanGate said the Titan communicates with the crew on the surface via text messages sent via a USBL (ultra-short baseline) acoustic system.

quote:

Originally posted by SeaCliff:
I took care of rebuilding DC motor for Seacliff and Turtle, DSV's. Seacliff was capable of going 20k back in the day and I think it had a 1.5 factor on the crush factor. The dome was made of Titanium.
It will take a while to bring them up slow.
The only thing that can help them would be a DSRV to latch onto the hatch if it had mil spec sub hatch.

DSRV max depth is about 5000 feet, so that’s a no-go.

Read a report that on a previous dive, the sub lost communication with the support ship for over two hours and ended up missing the Titanic because they need to be guided by directions from the surface.

I hope they find these guys alive. Of course I think that chance is basically zero. Let’s be honest though, this is about as idiotic a thing to do as humanly possible. All of this could be done remotely. Zero risk of human life. This is about the “feels”. I saw it in person. I summited Everest. I went to space. Blah, blah, blah. As long as people attempt amazingly risky shit for no actual gain people will continue to die in horrific ways. It isn’t that I have no sympathy, it is that I’m not sure what expectation of outcome is reasonable here. Absolute best case is they can show me pictures that I could find on the internet, that is best case. If this company has a second sub, eventually they will kill more people. This is the space shuttle without any benefit to humanity. If I knew any of these people personally I would try to talk them out of this “expedition”.

Also, I can’t be the only one to look at that video game controller and shudder while thinking, no the fuck not. Just no.

This is squirrel suit crazy yet worse in my head.

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:



CBS News correspondent David Pogue previously took a trip on OceanGate's Titan submersible to see the wreck of the Titanic.

"The crew closes the hatch, from the outside, with 17 bolts. There's no other way out," Pogue said in his November report.

"You steer this sub with an Xbox game controller, some of the ballast is abandoned construction pipes," Pogue told the BBC.

Insanity!

My first career was as a digital microcircuits engineer in military and space applications. The Space Shuttle was my biggest program. Then I spent 30 years as a professional airline pilot. So I've seen both sides of the reliability coin.

Stuff fails. Environmental factors attack hardware. Weird interactions crash software. Being in a very humid salt water environment there is no reason to expect commercial grade electronics to do well. Even mil-spec hardware is subject to corrosion. Frequently the failure mode of very sophisticated systems comes down to something mechanical, like a bad connector or failed solder joint. Not exotic physics. Fault tolerant designs need to be engineered in so that if one thing fails it doesn't take other things with it.

Everything controlled by a computer is asking for trouble. No physical switches is a mistake. There need to be layers of backup modes such as power buses to disconnect failed equipment and preserve emergency functions. This requires physical switches and circuit breakers which reportedly were not installed.

The weird things I've seen in both of my careers includes several supposedly impossible combinations of failures. And that's with much higher grade equipment than an Xbox controller.

I happily get on cruise ships, 3 so far this year. I worry about germs in the buffet line but not the ship itself. I don't do excursions such as helicopter rides, submarine rides, zip lines, or scuba. I mostly don't do foreign airlines except long established big non-discount carriers.

I hope but am not optimistic for the safe recovery of this sub.

quote:

Also, I can’t be the only one to look at that video game controller and shudder while thinking, no the fuck not. Just no.

Yeah, I’d be saying “Get me the **** outta here” once I saw somebody whipping out a game controller.

quote:

Originally posted by pedropcola:
Also, I can’t be the only one to look at that video game controller and shudder while thinking, no the fuck not. Just no.

quote:

Originally posted by shovelhead:
Yeah, I’d be saying “Get me the **** outta here” once I saw somebody whipping out a game controller.

Why?

Even the US Navy has adopted video game controllers for some of their systems.



Video game system designers like Sony and Microsoft dumped huge amounts of R&D time and money into figuring out the most optimal, most ergonomic manual controller layouts and construction, designed to be comfortable and easy to use and able to stand up to thousands of hours of often-rough use.

Naturally, other industries are going to piggyback on that. Why reinvent the wheel.


Similarly, other US military branches use video game controllers for stuff like drones and EOD robots.

There's no way in hell I'd go on something like this.

IF something goes wrong... It goes WAY wrong. I don't even like flying and do it out of necessity.

Having joystick controllers is fairly common. Controlling a manned submersible with one and by all accounts no manual backup is fucking insane. Feel free to tell us about the military equivalent. That thing is a disaster waiting to happen. Just the fact that it isn’t hard wired is fucking idiotic. It adds one more level of complexity for zero gain.

You gotta realize everything you just linked is unmanned. You get that right?

To put it in reasonable terms. I have been a professional aviator, military and civilian, for 34 years. I don’t know a single aviator that would sit in an airplane (without a parachute or ejection system) and be handed a remote controller and go flying that way. Nope and nope.

There is over 5000lbs of pressure per square inch on that shell.

If one of the seals where the wires go through started leaking it would just blast into the cavity with ease with crushing pressure to the internal atmosphere. It would probably detonate the atmosphere.

I can understand people doing exceptionally hazardous things if there's an important goal. Legitimate scientific research, national defense, etc.

This is none of those. It's ghoulish death tourism. Paying a quarter million bucks to spend an hour or two in the wreckage where 1500 people-- roughly half of whom were from steerage class, and were assuredly NOT there for "tourism" but because the ship was taking them from a crappy Point A to a potentially less crappy Point B-- died terrified and in pitch darkness? Who the hell does that? Put aside the "bolted into a homebrew diving contraption" aspect.

I don't get it.

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:

quote:

Originally posted by pedropcola:
Also, I can’t be the only one to look at that video game controller and shudder while thinking, no the fuck not. Just no.

quote:

Originally posted by shovelhead:
Yeah, I’d be saying “Get me the **** outta here” once I saw somebody whipping out a game controller.

Why?

Even the US Navy has adopted video game-style controllers for some of their systems.

Companies like Sony and Microsoft dumped huge amounts of R&D money into figuring out the most optimal, most ergonomic manual controller layouts and construction, designed to be easy to use and able to stand up to thousands of hours of often-rough use.

Naturally, other industries are going to piggyback on that. Don't fix it if it's not broke.

Style is one thing, actual design and construction is something completely different.

Is that Logitech controller built with mil-spec parts and construction? Or is it commercial grade?

How about all the connectors in their system? Are the mil-spec? Are they accessible by the crew while submerged? Connectors develop high resistance over time due to oxidation, and solder joints or wiring fails. I cannot count how many times maintenance swapped boxes in an airplane or just unmated and rejoined connectors due to connector problems. And that's with high quality mil-spec hardware.