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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

#671

Post by hef19898 »

finitemonkey wrote: post #634
twbarr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a middle ground between "hardware store crap" and "custom." The aviation industry has plenty of standard interior lighting and environmental control system that's known not to light people on fire or short out or otherwise fail and kill somebody. https://www.collinsaerospace.com/what-we-do/industries/busin... These are still COTS products.

Apollo 1 has been too long ago. Collective memory fades. Each generation seems to need its own disasters to keep its safety standards up.

The general public does, for those in the respective fields those safety lessons are ingrained in proper procedures and constititional knowledge. That's why start-ups in those fields are risky, usually their founders have never witnessed said procedures and knowledge at work, never worked under those procedures. Employees, especially early on, tend to be young an inexperienced as well. As a result, those companies neither have the constitiational knowledge nor the processes of their more mature counter part. Some try up make for this with "hacker" culture...

Those things are valid for everything from med tech to aerospace and, yes, cars. The dangerous thing so, and I saw that in real life, is when that culture spreads. Usually through juniors who gained their first experience in said start-ups, and not one of those legacy shops.

Edit: None of what I wrote prevents legacy giants from cutting corners themselves, the B737 MAX showed us as much.

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

#672

Post by toofy »

ncallaway wrote: post #348
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. Did they?

my guess is no. purely speculation on my part, but my suspicion is that the dangers were downplayed and the sales/marketing people paid the bare minimum attention to how close this was to a backyard project.

“we wouldn’t charge you $250,000 if we weren’t serious.”

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

#673

Post by EricDeb »

slushh wrote: post #601
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…

>it could be carried out by classification societies So everything already worked as intended. The tourists didn't bother to check the classification or if they did, were willing to dive anyways. The 737 MAX shows that government involvement is not enough. Likewise doping shows that a legal framework is not enough to prevent advanced cheating. >Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s…

And there might be more planes that would go down and more cheaters without any regulation. Just because you can't stop everything doesn't mean you shouldn't regulate anything

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

#674

Post by concordDance »

dmonitor wrote: post #95
ethbr0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you can't afford to qualify the components on your 4000m diving vehicle, you can't afford to make a 4000m diving vehicle. See: the fact that they lost their diving vehicle.

This is not necessarily the case. For many people it's worth the risk of death to do cool things (e.g. climb Mount Everest).

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

#675

Post by lyu07282 »

ghostpepper wrote: post #460
jibe wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

doesn't necessarily mean they ever tell anyone about it, it would just reveal capabilities.

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

#676

Post by kolinko »

tredre3 wrote: post #16
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...

I personally believe using mass market makes sense. I don't understand the criticism I've seen on this website for using off the shelf controllers or camping lights (what do you expect, an LED strip magically engineered by a large aeronautics firm specifically for the sub? and what would that change?). That being said, the difference between a Microsoft controller and a third party is that Microsoft very certainly di…

Logitech has even more experience than Microsoft in doing controllers

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

#677

Post by concordDance »

finitemonkey wrote: post #639
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.

[flagged]

Those situations are really not comparable. Jumping off a cliff has a near 100% death rate. This sub on the other hand has done this before.

A better comparison might be climbing mount everest in the 80s.

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

#678

Post by toadi »

major4x wrote: post #666

One shall not obsess with the game controller they use, I suppose, in their analysis, failing the controller wouldn't prevent the sub from resurfacing... It is symptomatic, however. The whole Silicon Valley is like that. You have the old guard, NASA, millions for fault analysis, rumors go the C code on some NASA rocket was certified at $1000 per line---human eyeballs reading it... All those start-ups and unicorns, th…

Hacking a social media site together and break stuff is fine. Move fast and kill people and iterate seems not so fine.

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

#679

Post by hobbescotch »

tredre3 wrote: post #16
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...

I personally believe using mass market makes sense. I don't understand the criticism I've seen on this website for using off the shelf controllers or camping lights (what do you expect, an LED strip magically engineered by a large aeronautics firm specifically for the sub? and what would that change?). That being said, the difference between a Microsoft controller and a third party is that Microsoft very certainly di…

You would think that but the Nintendo Switch controller still has analog stick drift many years after being discovered.

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

#680

Post by bagels »

SoftTalker wrote: post #155
ploika wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of a tangent maybe, but according to some expert I heard on the radio this morning, it's a submersible and not a submarine precisely because the vehicle is so totally dependant on the support ship. That includes everything from communication to getting in and out.

It's dependant on a support ship but it's not tethered to it? Maybe depth prohibits that?

Yes, this was my thought too. Titanic depth, I think, would not be too deep for steel cables to reel it back in, but marginally. It could also double as a communication link.
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