391–400 of 1001 posts
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How do you not test this at the bottom of a harbor rather than in prod.
my guess is that they did test in a shallow location, but ... not nearly enough unit tests.
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The periscope is a combat critical device, lose control of it and the enemy will see you first and you're dead.
It's something that can be quickly swapped out if it does fail though being a wired controller, I'd put decent odds on this company not bothering to put a backup controller in their death tube. Also a periscope is less critical to combat in the age of sonar that can tell you bearing, heading and what type of ship often without the risk of surfacing and getting lit up on radar. Modern subs basically never want to surf…
Can anyone who knows something about this industry answer a question? I know nothing about it and I was surprised to read about this situation because I would have assumed a submersible would be in fairly constant sonar contact with its surface vessel. I would've thought it would be followed a rigidly planned route and its location relative to the surface ship would be well understood at all times, i.e. "you are 3508…
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This is what happens when you take the move fast and break things culture to anything where people die when things break. Really just sad and so stupid.
It’s sad of course, but the early days of flight were also quite dangerous but they lead to rapid innovation and the stable industry of today. It’s a tragedy, but high risk activities are by definition going to have a few.
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…
Maybe so, but it's easy to say this after the fact. When kludges like this work, we admire "scrappy" and "ingenious" engineers who are finding ways to launch rockets or build submarines or medical devices or whatever for fraction the price. It's only when it blows up that it turns from "ingenuity" into "amateur hour". People who participated in this knew the risks. They fucked up. None of us would have designed a bet…
Did they? Knowing the risks, imo, requires more than just being aware of the failure scenarios - it also means having an understanding of the probabilities involved. Playing Russian roulette with 1 vs 5 rounds have the same worse case outcomes, but the odds are very different.
Not doing destructive testing, hiding info from the guy who was supposed to look at the ship, etc. that's avoiding getting a handle on risk.
> None of us would have designed a better submarine
Probably not, but otoh, it sounds like they probably could have done so and failed to take the necessary steps to make it happen.
The US Navy uses an Xbox 360 controller in active service [0] Mass market has a lot of R&D to leverage so it makes sense. Nothing to say this is the cause of the fault and probably going to be more reliable than something hand rolled. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-military...
The Xbox controllers are used to control the periscope which is not a safety critical device. Regardless, the navy uses wired controllers and did extensive testing and verification. This outfit didn't do anything like that; in one video with a journalist the bluetooth controller was a 'feature' because they could pass it around the sub.
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You’d expect companies that sell these kinds of tours for 250k a pop to be vetted though? If it’s uncle bob in his garage I’d be fine with lack of regulation, but when he starts commercially selling his trips he’d need to pass safety standards.
He is not selling the trips they are paying to be crew. This is such a needless story.
So literally, it is like, "the four of you's job is to look out this window, make sure it doesn't fog up, my job is to do everything else, alright let's dive"
Can anyone who knows something about this industry answer a question? I know nothing about it and I was surprised to read about this situation because I would have assumed a submersible would be in fairly constant sonar contact with its surface vessel. I would've thought it would be followed a rigidly planned route and its location relative to the surface ship would be well understood at all times, i.e. "you are 3508…
The sea is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. The only thing bigger is space.
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This is what happens when you take the move fast and break things culture to anything where people die when things break. Really just sad and so stupid.
> This is what happens when you take the move fast and break things culture Or then you take things slow and you end up like NASA who has not launched any new rocket in years. Is that better?
I am blown away that there is any overlap between HN readers and people getting gotten by this clickbait. The controller is sending control signals to the computer which controls the motors. The controller itself is basically irrelevant . It’s not actually doing the control, the motor controllers are. Using off the shelf stuff like this is also common since it’s extremely well tested and usually very physically robus…
While this probably wasn't the part that failed, it shows an incredible lack of judgment.