331–340 of 649 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hatch is bolted shut from the outside. When you make it back to the surface, there is no way to get out without external support. If the mother ship can not find the sub the occupants could be trapped bobbing just below the surface until their air runs out.
it should be findable by simple radio/celular contact?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If space is easier than the deep ocean, how is it that the Trieste (the submersible that explored the Challenger Deep) was built in a year on a budget of millions by a single shipyard, while it took massive, multi-year, multi-billion dollar, national efforts to go to space?
Difference in difficulty of getting there. The pressure vessel for space could be far simpler than going underwater. But it is way harder to get to the point where you’d need a space pressure vessel in the first place
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As someone with a surname that is easily made fun of, I urge you to just leave off irrelevant quips.
My maternal grandfather changed his last name when he turned 18, from the German Uhren to Uhrey. If your last name bothers you, fix it.
This appears to be the vessel in question: https://oceangate.com/our-subs/titan-submersible.html Pressure hull made from titanium and carbon fiber, capable of diving to 4000m (13,000 ft). I recall that one reason SpaceX switched from carbon fiber to stainless steel pressure vessels (fuel tanks) was the difficulty of detecting structural flaws. Can any engineers comment on whether that task is easier for a vessel expo…
I'm not really an engineer (general hobbyist, former chemist) but I have built and worked with pressure and vacuum vessels. Positive pressure (tank vs exterior) is much easier to deal with than negative pressure (vacuum vessel at 1 atm, or bathyscape with 1 atm inside and high pressure exterior). In positive pressure, your stress is mostly in the hoop mode, which is stable. This is why aluminum cans can be so thin. I…
Example of implosion of a railroad tank car:
I'm hesitant to speculate but just sharing -- an earlier version of this submersible was scrapped: "OceanGate will take advantage of lessons learned during the construction of its carbon-hulled Titan submersible, which was originally built for Titanic journeys. Rush said tests that were conducted at the Deep Ocean Test Facility in Annapolis, Md., revealed that the Titan’s hull “showed signs of cyclic fatigue.” As a r…
If your design breaks at less than the target then you really have to question the logic of continuing with that design. Making it slightly bigger won't fix the inherent issue with the materials. They're potentially opening themselves up to charges for killing these people. They knowingly or recklessly put them on a boat when it isn't capable of reaching the depth safely and now they are dead.
Would the fact they almost certainly got the people to sign a fairly extensive release before they took them into international waters be relevant? I don't know how much of the "anything goes on the sea" thing is a myth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really an engineer (general hobbyist, former chemist) but I have built and worked with pressure and vacuum vessels. Positive pressure (tank vs exterior) is much easier to deal with than negative pressure (vacuum vessel at 1 atm, or bathyscape with 1 atm inside and high pressure exterior). In positive pressure, your stress is mostly in the hoop mode, which is stable. This is why aluminum cans can be so thin. I…
Indeed. Which is why space is easier than the deep ocean, a fact that whoever was on that sub may not have fully appreciated.
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Seems like a pretty stupid design if you ask me
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.
Doesn’t seem like a good trade off against bobbing around the surface and slowly dying sealed inside a capsule to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it should be findable by simple radio/celular contact?
This is under water. Radio/Cell do not penetrate beyond a few centimeters. Communicating underwater is usually done via acoustics.
just beneath the surface
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…
If so how do you know that?