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

bbc.com

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

#331

Post by beowulfey »

FinnG wrote: post #273
SirMaster wrote: post #171

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.

My guess would be that the Oceangate ship ignores everything that it's not 'expecting' to hear. I don't really know anything about deep sea exploration, but having general purpose microphones in the water seems like a bit of an oversight to me, given the marginal cost of having them.

So many things about this venture were not really considered. I am terrified that this guy was an aerospace engineer. It feels like he threw the book about engineering safety out the window.

The big one is designing the sub to travel to 95% of the expected maximum depth, leaving a 5% margin of safety. I was taught to aim for a margin of safety of (I think it was) 50% back in the day. Operating so close to the safe limit for the sub is appalling. That doesn't even include all the other warning signs about the design that were brought up.

The missing beacon on the sub, in case of loss of radio contact, is another standout. No consideration given for loss of power or anything. Consideration of contingency plans is so important.

A minor one that is really indicative of the overall attitude is drilling screws into the carbon fiber hull, possibly exposing the hull to stress fractures from both the screws and the constant weight of holding a monitor. It's... just a silly thing that could have been avoided. I'm not saying those screws are why it failed, but if you can use an adhesive to hold your monitor in place, wouldn't you rather do that then by drilling directly into the hull keeping ~100 atm of ocean out of your face?

It just makes me so sad for so many reasons. It definitely could have been avoided...

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

#332

Post by predictabl3 »

seattle_anon wrote: post #166

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…

PSG, WSP. Best I can say is he died doing what he loved.

I do feel awful for the kid seemingly unhappily dragged into the trip.

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

#333

Post by ovulator »

Certhas wrote: post #187

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 feel the same way, but I guess 5 deaths are a tragedy, 300 is a statistic.

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

#334

Post by carbine »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #324
carbine wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No amount of poor decision making changes the fact that several precious human lives were lost. Frustration over the company's potential negligence and sadness over the loss of life can coexist.

Potential negligence? Dude fired the guy who was trying to get the hull checked for voids before doing crew testing. Then they sued him and proceeded to run this thing with passengers without bothering to do non-destructive testing . Sounds more Stockton Rush went well beyond negligence and straight to malfeasance to me.

You're probably right but I, like you, am a lurker on the internet and not in possession of every single fact, so I'm choosing my words.

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

#335

Post by matwood »

Certhas wrote: post #187

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…

You completely missed the fact that this is about the Titanic. People are fascinated by what happened to a lot of other rich people back then.

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

#336

Post by jve »

deanc wrote: post #305
lamontcg wrote: post #58

Well that's better than slowly asphyxiating or dying of hypothermia, probably didn't even know what hit them.

Can someone walk me through what would have happened, physically, to a human body in the moment this happened. I’m curious. Similar to wondering what happens to people in space.

https://youtu.be/C1VKotduWek?t=119

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

#337

Post by dmonitor »

methodical wrote: post #315

Besides the "what about this other accident with 500 victims!!!", "these people are dumb", and the "look how they ignored safety!" comments, I can't help but be amazed at how events like this make people crawl out of the woodworks spouting complete falsities as if they're facts. I've seen so many boneheaded comments over the last few days that I don't even know how to list all of them out, from people saying that Tit…

would they be vaporized or instantly compacted? my morbid curiosity kind of wants to see what would happen to a body under such insane pressure conditions.

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

#338

Post by dctoedt »

deanc wrote: post #305
lamontcg wrote: post #58

Well that's better than slowly asphyxiating or dying of hypothermia, probably didn't even know what hit them.

Can someone walk me through what would have happened, physically, to a human body in the moment this happened. I’m curious. Similar to wondering what happens to people in space.

https://www.quora.com/How-do-humans-die-when-a-submarine-imp...

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

#339

Post by Ataraxic »

cdelsolar wrote: post #194
margalabargala wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea specifically how loud it would have been. However with some probably-reasonable guesses, it looks like it actually would have been quite loud. Here's a naval study where they measured underwater sound propagation: https://www.navymarinespeciesmonitoring.us/files/7514/2780/4... They found that a 10lb block of C4 exploding produced ~210db of underwater sound. If we use that sound level as an approximatio…

my "orders of magnitude" alarm is going off here. There's no way that the implosion of a fairly small sub is going to be heard in Boston even if underwater. Something doesn't make sense here.

Sound does travel extremely well in water.

http://resource.npl.co.uk/acoustics/techguides/seaabsorption... -- here is a quick calculator for sound loss by distance. I think actual geography is important too but from understanding whether or not it's hypothetically possible, it certainly looks like it.

For example, at the default inputs we see .061 db/km absorption. This is at 1khz. Higher frequencies attenuated more and lower frequencies less.

I have no idea what frequencies an implosion generates, but given that, a sound at 120db might still be 60db 1000km later. Certainly seems possible and in fact given what we have seen from the US Navy (detecting imploding soviet subs in the middle of the pacific ocean) it seems totally possible to me that this small sub could be detected if microphones were places in quiet spots offshore of the continental US and Canada.

I think we don't have enough information to rule out that this was detectable.

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

#340

Post by hawk_ »

mock-possum wrote: post #307
hawk_ wrote: post #206

I am curious how we (the society) justify the shared costs incurred in searching for people involved in such a reckless mission.

Easy - if it was us down there, or someone we cared about, we’d want the search to happen

Of course we'd want that. But here's a rich CEO who fired safety whistleblower. Why take all that burden? A bunch of rich people who were lost at sea - we could charge all of their estates for this.
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