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Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

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Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#113
My kids play with these controllers a few times a week, the latency is horrible and it's easy to accidentally hit the mode button which causes directional control to shift from the left joystick to the directional pad. The user can also switching between d and x mode and that would also cause the controller to stop working.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#114
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Summary: water attenuates radio signals, and a 4Km cable is going to be way heavy and subject to currents.

what about fiber ? <4kg per km. throw at end powered buoy. maybe inflatable to hold more of it. currents still will be mess, but with lower than copper weight you could have a few km slack

I think your assumptions are unrealistic. A fiber optic cable weighing 4kg per km with no other reinforcement or protection would be extremely fragile.

According to my back-of-the-envelope math, using the density and tensile strength of typical glass, it would have a breaking load capacity of around 10 newtons (roughly 2 pounds of force). Even a steel cable with the same weight would only be about 20 times stronger.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#115
post #17

> According to the BBC, the entire sub is bolted shut from the outside, so even if the vessel surfaces, the occupants cannot escape without outside assistance and could suffocate within the capsule. Why is the submarine bolted shut from the outside?

There is no point in allowing the door to be opened underwater since it doesn't have an airlock.

No one is proposing a literal "suicide door". But it makes sense to have it openable after surfacing, at least for emergencies.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#117
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the math exercise with him for how much volume 2 miles of string takes up

Do the math for the weight of a string 2 miles long. Then take a look at how much weight a string can hold up. Then you're ready to be taking on space elevators

> Do the math for the weight of a string 2 miles long.

There are materials that are a bit more dense and others a bit less dense than water. It should be possible to craft a string with a "weight" of zero, when submerged.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#118
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering how naval submarines work when they get in trouble. I would expect to see some sort of emergency button (internally) that you could press, that would release some sort of buoy, that would float to the surface and start transmitting with gps etc. I think that would help narrow down the search. The buoy would be in an external container (to prevent pressure problems), with explosive bolts or something t…

> I was wondering how naval submarines work when they get in trouble. Naval subs in trouble? They go "forever on patrol." A naval sub is an espionage watercraft; signaling an emergency isn't exactly in the playbook for most of their mission cycle. ;)

The alternative is death of 134 odd people. Not ideal. :/

I would expect some e2e encryption satellite communication, however that might be still traceable to the enemy listening posts.

Man, I now need to watch "Hunt for Red October" again [0]. lol

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C2tE7vjdHk

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#120
post #71
post #46

There's a BBC documentary from last year which I just watched: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0fpz9zw and honestly a lot of it seems quite amateur hour. One of the steering motors was fitted backwards. When they discovered this, at the bottom of the ocean and a few hundred feet from Titanic, the solution they used was to hold the gamepad at right angles to compensate. That time they proceeded with the tour and mad…

So apparently this OceanGate company is a VC-funded startup or some such founded "to make underwater exploration cheaper and accessible to private citizens" (Wikipedia quote). Tells me everything I need to know about how this all came to be.

I don’t think this is (was) a money maker at all. There’s a clip on YouTube where they invited a CBS journalist to join. The CEO, to me, seems like a passionate dreamer who definitely 100% ate his own dog food (ie took huge personal risk). He was onboard this likely final voyage. They didn’t make any profit, at least back then. It’s obviously incredibly expensive and near-impossible to scale such an operation.

Look, I despise VCs as much as the next guy, but this doesn’t smell like a typical cynical VC money grab, like at all. To me it smells like an ultra-extreme sport. To ordinary people, it’s extraordinarily stupid, they’re certainly in over their heads, but nobody casually signs up to go to 4000m depth without being well aware of the risks.

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