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Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

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Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon fiber seems like a weird choice for this application anyway because its big advantage is in its tensile strength compared to its weight. Here, it’s in compression, not tension. And its light weight doesn’t matter.

Carbon fiber is a lot easier to work with than metal in this case because welding metal creates failure points. I don't think they could afford building a titanium pressure vessel. Weight is a factor too, carbon fiber is lighter so you can make the pressure vessel thicker and still have enough buoyancy to reach the surface(probably a good thing). From their perspective it kinda made sense even though its not safe at…

> I don't think they could afford building a titanium pressure vessel

If they could they probably still wouldn't have done so. The founder who was onboard the Titan was known for calling safety regulations unnecessary and a barrier to "innovation", like a window only rated for a depth of 1300m used at 4000m.

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#202
Well, that's a conclusion that I suppose many expected. It's rather tragic, yeah. What I can't say I expected is the gleeful tone from:

- class warfare enthusiasts because the passengers were rich

- regulation enthusiasts because the pilot espoused weakening them

You'll see this online when a pedestrian or cyclist gets hit by a driver (along with "right of way doesn't mean anything when you're dead!" and "was he wearing a helmet?")

At some point, the personal tragedy for me is realizing that a lot of people in this world really take great pleasure in others' suffering even if those people have done them no harm. Makes me want to use the Internet less, if I'm being honest, since I don't want to encounter this kind of glee at others's suffering.

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point he was with his dad right? That age you still feel invincible

Yeah. Being legally adult only means something when you are 19yo yourself. If I was in the same shoes I would've followed my dad on a cool adventure without question and definitely could not have spotted any of the glaring red flags that presented themselves before the dive.

Yeah, legally adult is several years off minimum from neurologically developed prefrontal cortex...

I'm sad for everyone that died TBH. The website for OceanGate was taken down, but when I took a look yesterday it was full of stuff about how their pedigree and NASA/MIT tech, etc. I can see myself buying that, I'm not exactly a marine expert.

Not to mention it went down there something like 40 times already? It's not really fair to assume the passengers would have known the things that have come out since the submersible went missing.

Most damning to me, is that the sub's design was derived from Virgin's DeepFlight Challenger, which was scrapped because they could only be sure it was safe for a single dive due to the carbon composite hull.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFlight_Challenger

As a final point, one of the victims was a seasoned explorer (Paul-Henri Nargeolet) and Titanic expert, having gone on multiple prior expeditions. Kind of arrogant to assume we'd all know better and somehow have all this knowledge that has come out since the sub disappeared.

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#204
post #192

What I don't understand is, if it imploded, why didn't the boat hear the implosion? Surely that would be really loud. Louder than the 15 min audio ping that the boat is normally listening for.

Or half the east coast. The implosion[?] of the ARA San Juan was supposedly heard 6000km away by hydrophones at Ascension Island. ( https://www.ctbto.org/news-and-events/news/ctbto-hydroacoust... ) Or maybe they did and the data hasn't been processed/made public yet.

San Juan appears to have been about ten times the size of Titan, and that article says it took them over ten days to report the finding.

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#205

Stockton Rush (OceanGate's CEO) was known in the Seattle tech community [0] My understanding (very much not first hand) is that he was seen as an expert in the specific engineering disciplines necessary to safely build and operate deep sea submersibles like Titan. He was also apparently a father to members of the Seattle tech community, who are no doubt grieving at the moment. Please remember that, for some members o…

Not gonna shed a tear given how avoidable this entire tragedy was, and how terribly managed and selected his engineering team was.

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#207

Well, that's a conclusion that I suppose many expected. It's rather tragic, yeah. What I can't say I expected is the gleeful tone from: - class warfare enthusiasts because the passengers were rich - regulation enthusiasts because the pilot espoused weakening them You'll see this online when a pedestrian or cyclist gets hit by a driver (along with "right of way doesn't mean anything when you're dead!" and "was he wear…

We're not allowed to "eat the rich" anymore because of the repressive nature of the neo-liberal system, so incidents like this one where not one, but two billionaires find their gruesome death is the closest to a Middle Ages egalitarian-imposing peasant revolt that we could ever get.

Sucks for the 19-year old kid involved in all this, that I agree with.

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#208

It is notable how much news-coverage this received (for understandable reasons [1]) relative to the almost simultaneous disaster in the Mediterranean [2], where a shipwreck killed hundreds of people. [1] What springs to mind: Dramatic search action well suited for live blog coverage; psychological impact of the idea of people stranded in a submarine for days; And of course the average person here is probably a lot cl…

Yes, it's more similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue than to other disasters, which should illustrate that it's not about the kind of people so much as the story itself.

I lived in South Asia for a while and the thing that would strike me is the everyday catastrophes. For instance, there was a recent Indian derailment that you barely heard about here in the US https://apnews.com/article/india-passenger-train-derail-dead...

275 deaths.

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#209

Stockton Rush (OceanGate's CEO) was known in the Seattle tech community [0] My understanding (very much not first hand) is that he was seen as an expert in the specific engineering disciplines necessary to safely build and operate deep sea submersibles like Titan. He was also apparently a father to members of the Seattle tech community, who are no doubt grieving at the moment. Please remember that, for some members o…

He's also on record as saying things like, "It's obscenely safe because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn't innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations." (https://www.insider.com/titan-submarine-ceo-complained-about...)

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#210

It is notable how much news-coverage this received (for understandable reasons [1]) relative to the almost simultaneous disaster in the Mediterranean [2], where a shipwreck killed hundreds of people. [1] What springs to mind: Dramatic search action well suited for live blog coverage; psychological impact of the idea of people stranded in a submarine for days; And of course the average person here is probably a lot cl…

I agree with your observation but Mediterranean disaster had coverage since last week at least in European news I am following. This accident will also soon disappear from the news since we now know the fate.
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