Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 1001 posts

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

#421

Post by ummonk »

_ea1k wrote: post #168
srmarm wrote: post #3

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...

Yeah, I'm not convinced this is in any way related to the issues. I'm far more concerned with the system that such a controller was plugged into than the controller itself. Commercial off the shelf pc? What kind of redundancy? How was power and power backup managed?

It wasn't plugged in. It was a bluetooth controller.

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

#423

Post by benatkin »

meepmorp wrote: post #395
hunson_abadeer wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> People who participated in this knew the risks. 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…

At least there wasn't a Groupon getting people to sign up.

https://www.chronline.com/stories/woman-paralyzed-in-toledo-...

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

#424

Post by mcpherrinm »

Aeolun wrote: post #370
hunson_abadeer wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 radios, the limited communication with the surface, the lack of any exits, and even the use of carbon fiber (which is strong in tension, good for high pressure tanks, but weak in compression -- not what I'd want for a submarine under massive compression)

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

#425

Post by Osiris »

fasthands9 wrote: post #415
brutusborn wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely a difference, but it doesn’t really matter philosophically speaking. If people want to take huge risks, then so be it. Whether they build the sub themselves or pay and give that responsibility to a proxy, it is still up to them to make their own risk assessment.

This is not really how the government operates. If this was operating at scale the government would absolutely be involved. You can't just run cruise ship operations and advertising without government involvement. I dont see how this is any different. Perhaps you personally have a "so be it" libertarian view but thats not the view the government takes.

It’s international waters. What “government” are you referring to?

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

#426

Post by jacurtis »

klabb3 wrote: post #120
idop wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Yeah my understanding is that it was not profitable either. The founder claimed he was losing money and to his credit, he ate the cost on the previous failed missions (of which there are a shockingly high number of).

There was one article I read last year (don't have it here) where he claimed his hard costs were $1M per voyage to cover fuel and consumables. So the $250k buy-in was literally a break-even on his expenses (he carries 4 passengers paying the fee, plus himself in the sub). None of that covers any R&D and he had some very respectable people working for him, including engineers from Boeing, NASA, and Northdrop Grumman. So we can assume those were hefty salaries for his R&D team.

I'm sure they were scrappy too, hence the "cobbled" together nature of things. But it does seem like this was a true startup in ever sense of the word.

Unfortunately it might be leaning closer to the Theranos type of startup where he might have oversold his capabilities to keep the ball rolling and investors happy.

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

#427

Post by worthless-trash »

svnt wrote: post #419
kevinpet wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have safety, or you can have a submarine tourism startup. You can't have a submarine tourism startup staffed by cautious risk averse people.

How many people should we sacrifice to get a submarine tourism startup?

I believe that question has been answered.

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

#428

Post by [deleted] »

javajosh wrote: post #356
proggy wrote: post #200

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. If they had encountered a program-destroying but non-catastrophic failure earlier on, it is possible we wouldn't be looking at one of the many horrific outcomes that this incident will likely resolve to. Looking at the accounts reported to date, the OceanGate engineering culture was basically non-…

>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…

[deleted]

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

#429

Post by jibe »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #414
proggy wrote: post #200

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. If they had encountered a program-destroying but non-catastrophic failure earlier on, it is possible we wouldn't be looking at one of the many horrific outcomes that this incident will likely resolve to. Looking at the accounts reported to date, the OceanGate engineering culture was basically non-…

The lack of emergency beacon is the real WTF. Not even an inflatable buoy. Using a game pad is probably OK. But no emergency method to mark their last location or even surface?

They did have multiple emergency methods to surface. Neither those, nor a beacon help if it imploded under pressure.

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

#430

Post by efitz »

Why would a bespoke one- or few-of-a-kind controller be better than a commercial one?

The commercial controller has statutory requirements to provide warranty and would financially damage the company if it had a high failure/return rate.

I thought the idea of using it in Bluetooth mode was sketchy, but the selection of a commercial controller didn’t bother me.

Post reply on HN