Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 649 posts

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#281

Post by neerd »

detaro wrote: post #272
ridgeguy wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read that many military submarines have an "I've sunk" buoy. It detaches from the boat under commanded deployment, after some elapsed time without reset, or when external pressure rises way beyond crush depth. They're positively buoyant. They have radio beacons to report the event when they rise to the surface. edit: No cites, sorry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_buoy_(submarine)

> As it may be difficult to manually release the buoy, or the compartment where the buoy controls are located may have been flooded, the buoys were arranged with automatic releases, in the event of a fire or internal flooding. Such automatic sensors proved unreliable and buoys were sometimes released unexpectedly. Accidental release of a buoy would have been a hazard during wartime operations, or even during exercises. There is some indication that unreliable buoys were welded into place. This may have been a factor in incidents such as the Kursk sinking, where the buoy was not released and it was difficult to locate the wreck.

I see so many parallels to bad devops patterns I’ve seen. You build your incident response protocols around a metric alarm (bouy being released). However the alarm is noisy so people either ignore the alarm or suppress it (welding the bouy in place). And then when an actual accident occurs your response is ineffective.

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#282

Post by patrec »

jacquesm wrote: post #217
floxy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The failure mode for a member in compression is buckling, which is resisted by stiffness Hmm, this is probably the right answer. When things start to buckle, you'd be putting part of the surface in tension, which would be resisted by the fiber. I would definitely be very interested to see the plots of strain gauges embedded throughout the thickness of the wall as it goes to depth (in all three axes, hoop, radial, an…

It would be a good thing if the people who did make this contraption also didn't make submersible vessels based on the bits and pieces that have made it into the news so far. This sounded like an accident waiting to happen. At those pressures if something goes wrong it will crumple like a tin can and having the hatch sealed from the outside means that even if they didn't die at depth they may not have a way out if th…

In what scenario would not being sealed from the outside make a positive difference? If they managed to surface, how would being able to "get out" in the middle of the ocean be helpful? If they didn't manage to surface, under what circumstances would have opening the hatch helped?

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#284

Post by smegsicle »

epgui wrote: post #253
carabiner wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No coincidence the company is in Everett. LinkedIn shows lots of people overlap with Boeing. Also the CEO built his own composite airplane while an undergrad at Princeton.

It's completely unclear how that is "no coincidence" or how that is at all relevant.

the joke, you see, is that there must be something in the water or other environmental factor in the area that causes gross negligence toward commercial vessels

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#285

Post by belorn »

imglorp wrote: post #53
ralphhughes wrote: post #40

Skimming the website, I assume this submersible is using electromagnetically attached drop-weights so that if anything goes wrong and power is lost, the weights drop off and the submersible floats up to the surface again? And 96 hours of life support sounds good, but unless there is another submersible nearby that can dive down, find them AND attach a line, the number of hours of life support will be irrelevant. Of c…

A location pinger would be a no brainer but like you say, it only helps if there's another sub with a grapple in range, in time. I understand why oceanographers /might/ want to do this, but not in person when ROV tech is so good now, for biology and tourism. There are so many things that can happen to fragile humans in that complex machine: drowning, freezing, asphyxiating, crushing, oxygen narcosis, nitrogen narcosi…

It is one thing to do it in person and an other to see it on a screen. As a diver I can fully understand why they want to go down there, for the same reason astronauts want to visit space instead of just sending up a satellite with a video camera.

That said, yes, titanic might not have been my choice personally. It has a sister ship that lies at a more reasonable depth of ~100 meters, so divers can actually be in the water and explore the inside. It is also fairly intact in contrast to titanic which is broken in half with the stern being mostly destroyed.

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#286

Post by fullstop »

bastawhiz wrote: post #246
orbital-decay wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This sounds like this group is just taking billionaires' money while running a death trap. What if people pay for that exactly because it's risky and potentially fatal?

I mean, if you accept that what you're doing is inherently unethical and immoral (I made a death trap but I'll let you pay to ride in it anyway instead of fixing it because you like danger and I like money!), then there's really no limit to the kind of terrible things you can put out into the world. But most of us would stop and reconsider what we're doing.

Mitchell and Webb had some fantastic skits about this: https://youtu.be/DTcBWo4Aj0g

https://youtu.be/xXSRvQlALMA

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#287

Post by Vecr »

ralusek wrote: post #277
Vecr wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any glass. Both of the end caps are supposedly titanium and there are cameras.

At that point just watch a video, or drive an unmanned submersible.

I think the point is to reduce cost and speed up operations by not having a tether. You can't do wireless video under thousands of feet of salt water. The options are AI or humans. There is a podcast and a news video linked here on HN.

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#288

Post by [deleted] »

fergbrain wrote: post #247
sclarisse wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty bad, but when the door accessible from the inside implodes from the insane pressure of the water around it, that’s even worse.

The door can still be designed to open outward and also able to be unlatched from the inside: those aren’t mutually exclusive properties.

[deleted]

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#289

Post by scarnz »

minedwiz wrote: post #267
systemtest wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some sort of underwater "GPS" tracker they can use to track the sub?

Communicating with submarines is actually a nightmare. The saltwater ruins most radio communications, so you have no chance to receive GPS signals, which are pretty weak even on the surface. One thing the military does/did to communicate with subs is use low-bandwidth text-only very low frequency radio, but you need colossal transmitters and there's no way the mother ship carries one. Hydrophones are also an option,…

I concur. Message is authentic.

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#290

Post by fullstop »

krisoft wrote: post #126
kotaKat wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://youtu.be/29co_Hksk6o?t=157 Having been linked this elsewhere in the thread I don't quite like the fact that they're so brazen that they bought internal lighting from Camping World and drive it with a Logitech USB gamepad and using half-ass construction piping as a ballast. Or the fact that they scrubbed a Titanic launch for the media due to weather (presenting from some kind of briefing room where they presen…

> drive it with a Logitech USB gamepad As opposed to the professionals who went with a microsoft xbox controller? [1] > Or the fact that they scrubbed a Titanic launch for the media due to weather Yes? Weather is a thing. This is not a ride at disney land, of course they cancel the operation when the circumstances are not favorable. In fact doing the opposite would be foolish. The company in question might be full of…

> As opposed to the professionals who went with a microsoft xbox controller? [1]

The Xbox controllers have an astronomical number of testing hours on them by now.

Post reply on HN