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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

#451

Post by plewd »

jart wrote: post #409
ehnto wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major difference is serving the public I suppose. I would admire a scrappy vessel for research (SV Seeker for example) but if you are essentially building a transport service for the consumers, you are now being irresponsible. All credit to SV Seeker, it is a wildly impressive project, but I don't think they would be mad if I suggest they had the resolver spirit while putting that vessel together.

Are you saying consumers lives matter more than researchers?

Researchers are aware of the risks they're taking.

Consumers (who don't really understand the dangers of the environment they're about to enter) just blindly trust that they're in good hands, and in this case it seems like they were deceived about the trustworthiness of this vessel.

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

#452

Post by dharmab »

nocoiner wrote: post #450
dharmab wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their game controllers are low quality. For example, home and professional desktop flight simulators prefer to use VKB or Virpil joysticks instead of Logitech or Thrustmaster.

I’ve owned and used Virpil and VKB, and they’re both terrific (Virpil is just insanely over the top good, though), but I wouldn’t even think to put them in the same sentence as Logitech. And I think Logitech makes pretty good peripherals generally! But that enthusiast sim stuff is just in a different realm. Anyway, my point is, I wouldn’t necessarily look down on a Logitech controller. Now if it were MadCatz….

And yet, the Logitech X56 is substantially more expensive than a VKB Gladiator...

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

#453

Post by nocoiner »

dragontamer wrote: post #149
WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Consumer grade products aren't built to last, they are built to be cheap so they can sell them to actual consumers We all know how the military ends up using these consumer grade products; lobbying, aka deep state corruption "if that happens in…

> Consumer grade products aren't built to last, they are built to be cheap so they can sell them to actual consumers Video game gamepads are probably some of the most well designed pieces of equipment I know of, with each part having a guaranteed lifetime of clicks and/or swipes, and other such details. Video gamers are really obsessive over these details. It wouldn't be surprising to me if the latest hall-effect sen…

> Bottom of the barrel $30 Logitech is barely something I feel good about giving to a friend during a gaming session, let alone a life-or-death equipment choice for steering a submarine.

I wish my friend whose mom bought him MadCatz controllers had your manners and sense of propriety.

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

#454

Post by chrononaut »

joemazerino wrote: post #432

Where do they.. Go to the washroom? Or sleep? It looks like a pipe.

> Where do they.. Go to the washroom?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65960217

> Unusually though, it includes a private toilet for customers at the front of the sub. A small curtain is pulled across when it is in use and the pilot turns up some onboard music.

> However, the company's website does recommend "you restrict your diet before and during the dive to reduce the likelihood that you will need to use the facilities".

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

#455

Post by throwawaylinux »

reaperman wrote: post #366
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…

There’s a difference between Jacques Cousteau building a janky submarine rig for himself vs. Creating a business model of selling tickets to random strangers on that janky submarine.

Is it really a good use of our tax money to have (usually equally incompetent) government bureaucrats chasing rich "eccentrics" around and policing how they hurt themselves? Department heads, and chiefs, and comptrollers and TPS reports and meetings to decide the meeting to define the committee to oversee efficiency standards, to go tell millionaires they can't ride in shonky submarines? Not using that on say schools or roads or reducing taxes or paying down government debt or anything?

Seems like a worse deal than the war on drugs. At least you don't get many people breaking into houses or neglecting their children to pay for their next trip to the Titanic.

Let them go nuts. Tax it like you would a commoner with a loaf of bread, bill them in full for any rescue efforts, and let nature take its course.

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

#456

Post by AmericanChopper »

philistine wrote: post #441
AmericanChopper wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of a wireless input is a bit suspect, but the headline seems rather sensational to me. What’s wrong with using an inexpensive logitech component? The critical systems in my car are filled with cheap off-the-shelf components.

> cheap off-the-shelf components Your car is filled with cheap off-the-shelf *car* components. There's far more scrutiny given to car parts, even though they're cheap stuff. But to get back to the controller, while it's not necessarily the worst problem, it is emblematic. That's why people reduce it to that. It signifies immediately what kind of company they were. Emphasis on were.

I think the claim that you’re getting better safety outcomes from a $2 ISO26262 IC over a $30 ISO9001 piece of consumer hardware is a bit spurious in this case. Especially since the operator could just replace the consumer hardware input device with a spare in a few seconds if they ever needed to. I don’t think this is emblematic of the problems with this company at all, because this specific complaint is simply sensationalised and overblown.

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

#457

Post by lagolinguini »

wongarsu wrote: post #449
Solvency wrote: post #438

"At the meeting Lochridge discovered why he had been denied access to the viewport information from the Engineering department—the viewport at the forward of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers down to depths of 4,000 meters. Lochridge learned that the viewport manufacturer would only certify to a depth of 1,300 meters due to experimen…

The sub has already survived multiple dives to 4000 meters, and so far nobody has come out with reports of any apparent problems with the viewport. Maybe it failed from an impact or from accumulated fractures from all these pressure cycles, but I'm also completely willing to believe that the depth-rating for human occupancy has enough of a safety factor that going 3 times deeper doesn't lead to failure. From the pre-…

Not an expert on submarine design, but if it's comparable to aircraft, each pressurization-depressurization cycle actually increases the stress on the vessel. Just because it worked once doesn't necessarily mean it will always work.

https://simpleflying.com/pressurization-cycles-aircraft-life...

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

#458

Post by neuronerdgirl »

ekianjo wrote: post #332
medellin wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

... yes?

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

#459

Post by antonvs »

jacurtis wrote: post #405
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…

As I have moved through my career and been in charge of larger and larger companies, I continue to be surprised how much of what you would expect is critical infrastructure that affects many people is being "cobbled" together. I've worked at some companies that manage huge systems that affects tens of millions of people, which cause extremely severe problems if they break, and they are "cobbled" together with a surpr…

The difference is that the cobbling together at a large org has generally been battle-tested over time, at scale. The bits that were going to break have already broken and been replaced with something better. While it may seem horrible aesthetically from a developer's perspective, it's nevertheless functional and reliable for its purpose.

But when you use that approach on a new, one-off device with life-threatening consequences for failure, sooner or later you're going to find out that "testing in production" may not always be appropriate.

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

#460

Post by ghostpepper »

jibe wrote: post #429
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was some speculation that any sort of implosion would've been detected by military sonar, and it hasn't been yet. I do not know if that's accurate -- just repeating what I've heard.
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