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

arstechnica.com

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

#621

Post by ikekkdcjkfke »

brutusborn wrote: post #482
rdtsc wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one thing for them to take the risk for themselves, but it's a whole other level selling to others. For example, if someone wants to drink a refreshing glass of strychnine soda, it's hard to stop them. But opening a stand and selling at the street corner is a bit different.

The distinction is artificial, both parties paid for either the materials or the final product. Financial gain doesn’t fundamentally change who is responsible, that it just you applying your personal values to the situation.

A kid walks up and wants one

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

#622

Post by Aeolun »

brutusborn wrote: post #476
sn41 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In such a truly free world, you might have to check every piece of chicken for salmonella contamination. You might have to stop your truck at every turn to see if people are racing from the opposite direction. You might not be very sure that your alcohol is not actually methanol.... Regulations do make our life smooth, even if there is a tendency to go overboard.

The difference is scale and ability to measure risk. We know how to make chicken safe and a lot of people eat it, so regulation works well. For subs, it is a tiny number of people and risks are nearly impossible to assess.

> risks are nearly impossible to assess

We have subs that have been touring the oceans for several decades, so we have a pretty good idea of what is unsafe and what works.

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

#623

Post by freetanga »

neither_color wrote: post #359
ethbr0 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pressure hull >> ballast control >> thrusters >> everything else I'm not sure why everyone is taking potshots at a company for trying something crazy with willing passengers . Everyone involved knew what they were getting into. Kudos to them for trying, even if they're dead. > See: the fact that they lost their diving vehicle. That's an awful lot of keyboard engineering, given nobody knows what happened yet.

>Everyone involved knew what they were getting into. Not necessarily. For extreme sports like skydiving, bungee jumping, hang-gliding scuba and the like customers still expect a high level of adherence to safety and quality products and certifications exist. Would you want to parachute off an uncertified plane with an un-licensed pilot and inexperienced jumper?

Well, I am carrying a parachute and getting out halfway, so if they can land is not my concern…

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

#624

Post by csb6 »

zarzavat wrote: post #583
csb6 wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't stop that, and personally, I don't think its a good idea. To get it you'd need a nanny state that snoops on everyone and steps in to stop you "for your own safety". It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand. Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety. I seriously doubt the passengers onboard were aware of OceanGate’s whistleblower lawsuit or the claim…

The founder is likely dead and paid the ultimate price for his negligence. There’s simply not much you can do about people who are willing to die and take other people with them, whether intentionally or negligently. You can’t put a dead person on trial. I believe that the GP’s point is that there’s no omniscient agency that can preemptively stop people from doing stupid things. There’s not enough resources to watch…

> I believe that the GP’s point is that there’s no omniscient agency that can preemptively stop people from doing stupid things. There’s not enough resources to watch everything that everybody is doing all the time.

I didn’t suggest that this is necessary. It seems like there should be enough resources to look into the construction standards of a tourism company based in the U.S. that has received international press coverage for several years. It is possible to stop a tourism company from operating. This wasn’t a secret deep sea dive that no one could halt - it was the latest in a series of commercial voyages that were covered in the press (a BBC reporter went on one a few years ago, and there is a video tour of the vehicle). This dive was publicly announced.

No one needs to be surveilled 24/7 for regulations to work.

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

#625

Post by hinkley »

ethbr0 wrote: post #51
addaon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and what would that change? Suitability for purpose. Some obvious ones: Defined and validated environmentals (temperature, voltage, and in this case pressure). Qualified components — capacitors chosen for lifetime rather than shaving a cent, perhaps avoidance of MEMS oscillators with helium sensitivity. Failure analysis. Low and understood probability of fail-unsafe conditions (short circuit), mitigation for those…

Yes, if one had the budget to do all those things, from scratch, better than an existing component manufacturer. Not many companies have NASA levels of "throw money at it until it works, and every part has been signed off on five times." Absent that, I'm having trouble seeing how custom > COTS. In all probability, anything in-house would have been worse and added new failure modes. Better to buy, analyze, and adapt a…

It many companies are going places NASA fears to tread. 12000 feet is pretty fucking deep. That’s why the wreck took so long to find in the first place.

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

#626

Post by thehappypm »

dharmab wrote: post #594
thehappypm wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would off the shelf be considered a bad thing? If you’re an engineer, finding a reliable part from a supplier that meets your spec is an amazing thing. Intel processors are off the shelf, as are 555 timers, screws, literally everything. Not every field is like computer science where “isEven” has a library that makes sense to avoid

It's less than it's off the shelf and more that it's the cheap brand your mom might buy your little brother as a second controller because it's half the price of the first-party one.

Fair!

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

#627

Post by thehappypm »

iancmceachern wrote: post #613
thehappypm wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would off the shelf be considered a bad thing? If you’re an engineer, finding a reliable part from a supplier that meets your spec is an amazing thing. Intel processors are off the shelf, as are 555 timers, screws, literally everything. Not every field is like computer science where “isEven” has a library that makes sense to avoid

If you learned the autopilot on the 777 your flying on was running on a dell laptop they bought at best buy running windows, would you feel safe on that plane?

Sounds like a false equivalence

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

#628

Post by Aeolun »

mcpherrinm wrote: post #424
Aeolun wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of us would have designed a better submarine I dunno. I would never go with wireless over cabled, certainly not as my primary steering method, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be the only method onboard to control the thing. Maybe it’s better if these things are build by paranoid instead of adventurous people?

People are latching onto the logitech controller, but I think it's low on my concerns list. Controllers are relatively robust, and they stated they had backups, and could surface without any control input by manually dumping the ballast. Much more concerning are the potential flaws in the carbon fiber hull, as disclosed during the David Lochridge lawsuit (mentioned in another thread), the rumoured lack of surface rad…

I mean, there’s more egregious flaws, but I believe this thread was about the controllers?

If we’re talking worst mistake I think the lack of any form of communications equipment is it.

Hell, have a 4km long cable. Even if you can’t communicate because the sub is on fire or imploded you can drag them back up.

Of course it’s not nice if your sub implodes, but that’s kind of a requirement for using it in the first place.

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

#630

Post by marmakoide »

Aeolun wrote: post #365
javajosh wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard. As I get older, I see this sentiment as very naive. The tacit assumption seems to be that there is an agency, a government, an organization, that would review and approve such endeavors. But that's just not how the world works. You can't stop people from going to sea, or sending contraptions to t…

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.

Even Uncle Bumblefuck alone in his garage need some regulation. Imagine him deciding to build a solid fuel rocket, he might send shrapnel all around the block.
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