Nobody Cares: PRS

[Zaida Gearbox]

Instead of building submersibles that can take passengers down to such great depths, why not make ones that are controlled from the support vessel and equip the would-be deep ocean submariners with VR headsets? For an even deeper immersive experience, as it were, put them in floatation tanks.

Safer, probably easier and cheaper since the drone submersible doesn't need to be hollow, and probably an equally extraordinary experience.

If I could afford it, I would totally pay for an experience like that. I do NOT need to go down there in person.

Someone on TikTok said that Suleman Dawood had a straight up panic attack on the board before getting into the sub. He did NOT want to go, and they bullied him into going anyway. I feel like that waiver should be voided for him. He signed it under duress. I hope God has more mercy on his dad and that CEO than I would. The mom in me wants to know they are roasting in hell. The dad for bullying him into going even though he was scared. The CEO for allowing him to get in it. If someone is obviously that scared. They should not be allowed to go let alone made to.

People keep using the fact that these guys were rich to justify laughing at the situation. But, I feel like if my neighbors built a giant tuna can controlled by an off market game controller and somehow got it hauled out to where the Titanic is and droppd into the ocean. I'd laugh at that too because I feel like anyone with an IQ higher than their shoe size should have known better.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Someone on TikTok said that Suleman Dawood had a straight up panic attack on the board before getting into the sub. He did NOT want to go, and they bullied him into going anyway. I feel like that waiver should be voided for him.

I don't know about what happened just before they boarded the submersible but I know his aunt has been reported here as saying that he really didn't want to go in the first place, and agreed to accompany his father, who wanted him along, as a Father's Day gift.

At least his death, like those of the other people on the submersible, was mercifully swift. When there was some hope they were still alive I was thinking a nightmare it would have been for him. But as it turned out, they'd all have been dead before their brains had chance to register anything was happening.

 

[Zaida Gearbox]

I don't know about what happened just before they boarded the submersible but I know his aunt has been reported here as saying that he really didn't want to go in the first place, and agreed to accompany his father, who wanted him along, as a Father's Day gift.

At least his death, like those of the other people on the submersible, was mercifully swift. When there was some hope they were still alive I was thinking a nightmare it would have been for him. But as it turned out, they'd all have been dead before their brains had chance to register anything was happening.

James Cameron is saying word in "The community" is that they were trying to ascend. So, they did know something was wrong right before the implosion happened.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

James Cameron is saying word in "The community" is that they were trying to ascend. So, they did know something was wrong right before the implosion happened.

I'm not saying I doubt that, but why would the surface boat wait 8 hours to contact anyone if they had even a hint that there had been trouble? OTOH, given their record, who knows.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Someone on TikTok said that Suleman Dawood had a straight up panic attack on the board before getting into the sub. He did NOT want to go, and they bullied him into going anyway.

There are so many levels of wrong, not just morally. The minute Suleman had a panic attack surface-side he became a massive liability for a descent. No one with an ounce of true leadership would have allowed that young man onboard.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

If someone is obviously that scared. They should not be allowed to go let alone made to.

Yeah - like, even leaving aside the problems with the Titan itself, surely someone at risk of having a panic attack inside the tiny submarine is a dire freaking threat to the safety of the sub and everyone on it.

 

[Beebo Brink]

James Cameron is saying word in "The community" is that they were trying to ascend. So, they did know something was wrong right before the implosion happened.

I'm not saying I doubt that, but why would the surface boat wait 8 hours to contact anyone if they had even a hint that there had been trouble? OTOH, given their record, who knows.

Pure speculation, but it's possible that Suleman had yet another panic attack during the descent, bad enough to warrant aborting the dive. The implosion could have been a co-incidence, but If the pilot was distracted by that emergency, no telling what technical mistakes might have ensued in the rush to get back up.

And that kind of cluster-fuck would be exactly the sort of incident the surface boat would want to keep under wraps.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Man this just keeps getting worse.

I don't think there's any signed liability waiver that could protect OceanGate considering all the stuff that's been learned JUST in the last week so far.

I just wanted to follow up on why this is a VERY, VERY, VERY* BAD IDEA.

This is a typical drill bit for glass or similar hard materials that are prone to chipping:

Carbon fiber is difficult to drill because it is brittle. The important thing is that these bits come to a point, and so does the hole it drills. The ideal drill hole has a smooth shaft and a point at the bottom. A realistic drill hole has chipping and cracks around the hole.

As airplanes started to fly higher and pressure differences (as well as heating and cooling) became a bigger factor in their design, engineers noticed stress cracks formed at the corners of the windows where the pressure was increased because both sides of the corner were moving. Now passenger planes have rounded corners on the windows. It distributes the stress more evenly.

Let's assume they didn't thread the hole and they inserted anchors to hold the screws supporting the monitor. Assume they used 3/4 screws and anchors with negligible depth added to that. With a 1/8 plate thickness for the mount we know we can assume at least three spots on the 5 inch hull are no more than 4 3/8 inches. Those are weak spots. That come to a point.

Every time the sub was under pressure the points of those drill holes took on more stress than the rest of the hull. They moved as the hull was compressed and they moved again as the hull returned to surface pressure. Pressure at that depth is tremendous and unforgiving. Every dive cycle increased the risk of stress fractures.

I am not saying this flaw was the cause of the hull failure. I am saying that this is one piece of evidence that they ignored basic physics in at least one area of the sub construction. Know that now matter how lonely you may feel, Basic Physics will never ignore you. It is always there for you, especially at 8,000 feet under the Atlantic. I'm saying return Basic Physics' texts.

If they made this kind of first year engineering error,** how many more errors did they make and how many corners did they cut? With what is known about their former employees, did the engineers feel they could push back?

* I am a writing instructor. I hate the word "very" as the laziest possible superlative. When I use it three times, this shit is serious.

** I just teach future engineers to write, and even I know this was a VERY, VERY, VERY*** BAD IDEA.

*** See note one.

**** Don't get me started on heat buildup from drilling on the glue layers holding the carbon fibers together.

***** What was that last endnote anchored to? What is this endnote anchored to? Is this the Bad Place?

 

[Veritable Quandry]

As far as the panic attack goes, the Submarine corp in the US Navy has the most extensive psychological screening of any service specialty. Claustrophobia and isolation in a small vessel with no exit is a terrible combination.

There are a few possibly related reasons for them to give up the dive. Others with submersible experience who had been on the Titan reported stress noises that they found troubling. There was also a hull monitoring system of some kind.

Combine noises and alarms that may have finally made the pilot take the danger seriously with a young man who just had (or was still having) a panic attack and it is ample reason to surface.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Another interesting detail mentioned by Cameron: there are aside Titan around 10 submersibles worldwide, which can go 4000 meters deep and beyond. Aside of the Titan all of these are certified by at least one major well known institution which has experience which such vehicles.

Also Oceangate bragged about that they are working together with NASA, Boeing and University of Washington on the design of the Titan. Truth is: that's a downright lie. Either they didn't work at all with the organization (NASA, Boeing) or only on another submersible for a short time (UW).

OceanGate exaggerated details of industry partnerships behind lost Titan submersible

The company behind the missing Titanic tourist submersible exaggerated the details of the industry partnerships behind its titan submersible.

abcnews.go.com

 

[WolfEyes]

I just wanted to follow up on why this is a VERY, VERY, VERY* BAD IDEA.

This is a typical drill bit for glass or similar hard materials that are prone to chipping:

Carbon fiber is difficult to drill because it is brittle. The important thing is that these bits come to a point, and so does the hole it drills. The ideal drill hole has a smooth shaft and a point at the bottom. A realistic drill hole has chipping and cracks around the hole.

As airplanes started to fly higher and pressure differences (as well as heating and cooling) became a bigger factor in their design, engineers noticed stress cracks formed at the corners of the windows where the pressure was increased because both sides of the corner were moving. Now passenger planes have rounded corners on the windows. It distributes the stress more evenly.

Let's assume they didn't thread the hole and they inserted anchors to hold the screws supporting the monitor. Assume they used 3/4 screws and anchors with negligible depth added to that. With a 1/8 plate thickness for the mount we know we can assume at least three spots on the 5 inch hull are no more than 4 3/8 inches. Those are weak spots. That come to a point.

Every time the sub was under pressure the points of those drill holes took on more stress than the rest of the hull. They moved as the hull was compressed and they moved again as the hull returned to surface pressure. Pressure at that depth is tremendous and unforgiving. Every dive cycle increased the risk of stress fractures.

I am not saying this flaw was the cause of the hull failure. I am saying that this is one piece of evidence that they ignored basic physics in at least one area of the sub construction. Know that now matter how lonely you may feel, Basic Physics will never ignore you. It is always there for you, especially at 8,000 feet under the Atlantic. I'm saying return Basic Physics' texts.

If they made this kind of first year engineering error,** how many more errors did they make and how many corners did they cut? With what is known about their former employees, did the engineers feel they could push back?

* I am a writing instructor. I hate the word "very" as the laziest possible superlative. When I use it three times, this shit is serious.

** I just teach future engineers to write, and even I know this was a VERY, VERY, VERY*** BAD IDEA.

*** See note one.

**** Don't get me started on heat buildup from drilling on the glue layers holding the carbon fibers together.

***** What was that last endnote anchored to? What is this endnote anchored to? Is this the Bad Place?

It would have been easier to say that drill holes weaken the hull integrity. It's highly unlikely but could very well be the cause of the implode.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

There is another interesting thing that happened with the sub. I had been curious about the sharp dropoff in the quality of the accomodations aboard the support vessel that I was seeing in assorted videos put out by previous passengers. One of the more recent videos was made by a YouTube vlogger who was going to be given the trip for free for publicity reasons. His accomodations looked very, very different than those on the "Take Me to the Titanic" video, I posted earlier in the thread.

They had been using a different support surface vessel up until recently. He switched to the Polar Prince because the cost of renting the previous vessel went from $100K to $200K/per day. The previous support vessel had a crane onboard which would lift the sub/platform offboard. Now, the Polar Prince did not have that capability and they began to tow the Titan from St. John's port to the Titanic location on the float that was used to lower it into the water. Who knows what kinds of extra stresses were put upon it in that scenario.

In addition, I was curious about why he chose to call the passengers, "Mission specialists". It's because they put them to work each day during their trip onboard the support vessel, according to their skills. They were to attend all safety meetings, during which each "issue" would be discussed and put in a bulletpoint list. There were many issues each day. There were no days in which there weren't many issues. At one point in the youtuber's video, he called upon them all to go to work in the evening to help bring the platform the Titan sat upon back in, after some issue getting the Titan back in, which the youtuber did as did Rush's wife. Sure, nothing wrong at all with having completely untrained passengers and others performing work upon such a crucial vessel.

There were some claiming that there was actually an inner liner and that the monitor was not actually screwed into the carbon fiber hull itself. I saw this picture which does appear to support that. I don't know how thick that inner liner happens to be or what size screws they would have been using. I also do not know why we can see a gap in there. In a different video where the skin was off, he showed off some $15K non-compressible insulation. Perhaps that is what is in that space? I dunno.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

Here is that youtuber's video. At 12:04 an employee discusses the computer/communications issue that had happened on a test dive, followed by Rush explaining that "it just didn't seem quite right" and that they need to find out what the control problem is, and asking them all to volunteer to go on the platform, swap the pods and see if they fix it.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Stockton Rush had a degree in aerospace engineering, so probably he threw a lot of what he's learned overboard. Here's another engineer about which design choices he really finds troublesome, aside the acrylic glass windows which was rated only for 1300m depth.

The Titan for example had to be closed from the outside with 18 bolts, but it had no emergency release mechanism at the inside, like explosives. This means it could have emerged on the surface, and people inside would still die a slow death suffocating because there's no was to open the hatch.

Actually I disagree on one point with most engineers though: the Logitech controller probably was still the most reliable part of that submersible, because its mass produced and designed to work for a long time.

One important takeaway for me is the thing with the operational lifetime of the Titan: this is unknown, because the knowledge about carbon fiber in that use case is still pretty much limited. He argues if it is 4-5 dives (probably it's just one) and then needs to get replaced, the better price point would have been 1 million $/passenger.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I don’t think I ever had a bad Logitech input device.

 

[Sid]

I don’t think I ever had a bad Logitech input device.

My respond comes to you trough a Logitech keyboard, supported by a Logitech mouse.
Both have worked flawless for years and years already.
I never had any trouble with Logitech stuff.
But it is not the kind of material I would rely on to dive that deep in the ocean with.

In fact, I don't think I would trust anything to do that. I've seen some footage of the wreck down there and that's good enough for me.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

Stockton Rush had a degree in aerospace engineering, so probably he threw a lot of what he's learned overboard. Here's another engineer about which design choices he really finds troublesome, aside the acrylic glass windows which was rated only for 1300m depth.

The Titan for example had to be closed from the outside with 18 bolts, but it had no emergency release mechanism at the inside, like explosives. This means it could have emerged on the surface, and people inside would still die a slow death suffocating because there's no was to open the hatch.

Actually I disagree on one point with most engineers though: the Logitech controller probably was still the most reliable part of that submersible, because its mass produced and designed to work for a long time.

One important takeaway for me is the thing with the operational lifetime of the Titan: this is unknown. He argues if it is 4-5 dives (probably it's just one) and then needs to get replaced, the better price point would have been 1 million $/passeger.

Yeah, the logitech controller by itself wasn't an issue, though they should have actually had a specialized one built specifically for them (or splurged for the real deal XBox or PS controller), but of course he wasn't going to do that. Of more serious consequence is letting any passengers control the vessel. On one trip a passenger hit a rock at the bottom. Another one is not noticing until they were already at Titanic level that one of the thrusters had been put on backwards and having to use Google to see how to remap said controller, giving up on that, and just holding it sideways or upside down. That's just nuts. Another issue is using a *wireless* controller.

I, too, am using a USB wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse, but not bluetooth. I have an Xbox bluetooth controller and it loses its connection pretty oten. That (Logitech F710) controller they were using was bluetooth, yes?

I've read that the door had 18 bolts, but they only actually bolted 17 of them because the last one was too high up. That is not verified, but if so, damn.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Yeah, and also the lack of communication that thing had is bonkers. In case it emerges it even didn't have a GPS transponder, it completely relied on its mother ship for that.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

There were some claiming that there was actually an inner liner and that the monitor was not actually screwed into the carbon fiber hull itself. I saw this picture which does appear to support that. I don't know how thick that inner liner happens to be or what size screws they would have been using. I also do not know why we can see a gap in there.

In this video, beginning at just past the 1:00 mark, the camera helpfully pans across the opening from the outside to the inside and I think you're right, that definitely looks like an inner metallic liner with a gap between it and the carbon fiber pressure hull:

 

[Cindy Claveau]

I've seen some footage of the wreck down there and that's good enough for me.

I had understood that no photos of the debris have been released? This is from Friday, 2 days ago.:

Photos do not show remains of OceanGate’s Titan submersible

Just asking.