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Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

bbc.com

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Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#351

Post by prawn »

spaceguillotine wrote: post #190
jonathankoren wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus. This sounds like this group is just taking billionaires' money while running a death trap. How the hell do you lose your sub for five hours? This should have stopped all trips until they fixed this problem through a combination of technical and procedural changes.

when you put it like that i'm suddenly pro death trap

Their business model is to take wealthy explorers and also researchers, hoping that the explorers subsidise the researchers. So there is collateral damage.

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#352

Post by ta93754829 »

codersfocus wrote: post #303
fhub wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a surname that is easily made fun of, I urge you to just leave off irrelevant quips.

Nomen est omen is a saying since the Roman times, and there are scientific studies that show names do have an effect on professions (eg there are more people named Art working with Art than youd statistically expect)

nominative determinism. I did a whole lot of research into this because my surname is Opmomfucker and yeh it checks out.

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#353

Post by totallywrong »

mechhacker wrote: post #254
scarnz wrote: post #30

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've had some work in designing vessels to take external pressure. It's fundamentally a nonlinear problem. A lot of new(and some not so new) engineers don't understand the process of solving it properly For instance, euler buckling is the simple eigenvalue problem of solving a column in compression. But, it misses: initial defect because nothing is truly straight, material nonlinear effects if the part approaches yie…

Always nice to see the breadth of knowledge we enjoy in this site.

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#354

Post by Mizoguchi »

How come there's no way to communicate once under water? Wouldn't be possible to launch a tiny probe attached to the exterior of the sub, either manually or automatically when in trouble, sort of a black box, that bounces back to the surface to broadcast crew messages, sub data and location? Seems like an obvious safety device to have. Are there any technical reasons why this is not available on a vehicle with suck poor performance?

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#355

Post by prawn »

dangle1 wrote: post #171

Few more details from The Seattle Times: >David Concannon, an adviser to the company, said Oceangate lost contact with the sub Sunday morning. It had a 96-hour oxygen supply, he said in an email to The Associated Press on Monday afternoon. “Now 32 hours since sub left surface,” said Concannon, who said he was supposed to be on the dive but could not go due to another client matter. He said officials are working to ge…

They went during a brief weather window. One of the people on board had suggested just prior to departing that this was likely to be the only trip the vessel made this season. Rough phrasing in hindsight.

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#356

Post by bagels »

varjag wrote: post #235
jliptzin wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a pretty stupid design if you ask me

It's traditional in deep submersibles design, dating back to bathysphere. You probably weren't hanging around when they were designing them

Tradition itself is probably the worst rationale for an engineering solution. Maybe it's the right way for other reasons?

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#358

Post by canadianfella »

varjag wrote: post #235
jliptzin wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a pretty stupid design if you ask me

It's traditional in deep submersibles design, dating back to bathysphere. You probably weren't hanging around when they were designing them

[dead]

Re: Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

#359

Post by housemusicfan »

lode wrote: post #85
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…

David Pogue went down with the same vessel last year for CBS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29co_Hksk6o "I couldn't help noticing how many pieces of the sub seemed... improvised."

At 3 minutes in:

> "We only have one button, it should be like an elevator."

Oof. The thought of being at that depth being at the sole mercy of automated software. Godspeed to those aboard.

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