Submiss alert near Titanic wreck site

[johnny.dollar]

@Earl_Boebert1

I think our definitions vary considerably. What I mean by “startup culture” are the current irresponsible, VC-driven bubbles that percolate mainly out Silicon Valley.

There is one simple root cause to the entire “startup culture” you mention. It was the Federal Reserve implementing ZIRP (zero interest rate policy). If interest rates for the past 15 years were not artificially low, the free money that funded these unprofitable startup scams (yes, that is what they are) would never have flowed.

@Steamer

be very careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The tech assholes hijacked the term “startup” and totally bastardized the idea. Very few of those jerks self funded and organically grew like the majority of small businesses that made America great.

[Bruce1]

it seems to me that quite a few people and organizations new all aspects of the construction of this vessel and had voiced their concerns. the reply was your “stifling innovation.” the vessel owners did everything possible to eliminate the regulation by staging the voyage from newfoundland and using as old Canadian ice classed buoy tender as a mother ship as they say fit and with many deficiencies and lack of back up systems for safe operation. the area is international waters and the costs are a dog and pony show. The funds could be better spent on laying the keel of a new ice breaker which the USA desperately needs before the Russians and the Chinese take over all of the artic.

why should the USA be the world’s policeman?

[Earl_Boebert1]

Agree.

Earl

[MorrisMynor]

Now eight days on and the Ocean Gate Expeditions page is still selling trips to see the TITANIC!

Titanic Expedition – Explore the Titanic - OceanGate Expeditions

This is waaay past the point of being only farcical…I guess everybody who worked there has simply skedaddled on the first bus out of Everett so nobody will be present when the Feds arrive with a search warrant and lots of moving trucks.

[squidly]

Departures

2023 Expedition

Currently underway

Inquire for available dates

---

“Currently underway” isn’t exactly correct. I don’t think PH Nargolet is going to be available for the 2024 expedition.

The media tab doesn’t have any new updates. Wonder why?

[Steamer]

Bizarre and really really creepy … they have more than a “player error”

[ombugge]

Titanic sub firm: A maverick, rule-breaking founder and a tragic end

The glass viewport, from which passengers could see out, was only certified down to 1,300m, far short of the depths of the ocean floor where the Titanic wreck lay.

Even with a safety factor of 2.0 that is not enough to go to 3800 m. bsl.

David Pogue, a CBS News journalist who joined Mr Rush on a trip to the Titanic wreck in 2021, said the chief executive drove the Titan with a game controller and used "rusty lead pipes from the construction industry as ballast".

I didn’t know that lead could “rust” (??)

.

[Steamer]

@ombugge

I didn’t know that lead could “rust” (??)

That is about as accurate as 90 percent of what’s online. And the viewport was not glass.

[johnny.dollar]

@Steamer

That is about as accurate as 90 percent of what’s online.

While I often get infuriated at the idiot media messing up technical and specialized details regarding topics they should just defer to experts, I must say in this case, the inaccuracy of details is not very relevant. The damn thing failed in spectacular fashion.

And I hope you can answer this query: how many manned submersibles in the oil&gas or research industry or Alvin, or James Cameron, etc have failed in such spectacular (and deadly) fashion?

[ombugge]

@Steamer

And the viewport was not glass.

Well, Acrylic Plexiglass is more accurate:

POGUE: And I guess the last thing, we should talk about the view port.
RUSH: So the view port is seven-inch-thick plexiglass, acrylic, and that’s another thing where I broke the rules. A lot of the submersible industry is run by Pressure Vessels for Human [Occupancy] standards, which acts like a standards body, but it’s not a standards body; it’s a volunteer group that has come up with some rules.

And there was a very well-known person, Clarence Statue (PH), was, like, the king of acrylic. And so he wrote a book—well, he had several books, but one of these is sort of the Bible. And even he admitted that he was super conservative. It has safety factors that—they were so high, he didn’t call 'em safety factors, he called 'em “conversion factors.”

You know, for most things, safety factors are one-and-a-half, two-and-a-half…and it’s four to ten. And most of what he was looking at was lower-pressure applications. And so when you look at the charts, we’re off the charts.

One of the things about acrylic that’s really great is, before it fails, at one-third its failure pressure, it will start to “craze.” So it’ll often be distorted. So you know when that thing’s gonna fail. And so when I was looking at this, that view port is—according to the rules, it is not allowed.

So there’s these weird rules that are out there.

It will shrink. It’s a semi-solid, the plexiglass; it’ll come into the cabin by about three-quarters of an inch—all of the pressure that’s there.

POGUE: Oh, man. And that’s a good thing?

RUSH: Well, that’s what it is. But the great thing about plexiglass that I love is, you can see every surface. And if you’ve overstressed it, or you’ve even come close, it starts to get this crazing effect.
POGUE: Okay. And if that happened underwater—
RUSH: You just stop and go to the surface.
POGUE: You would have time to get back up?
RUSH: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s way more warning than you need.

A view through the Titan’s observation window.

Source: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush talks Titan sub's design, carbon fiber hull, safety and more in 2022 interviews - CBS News

[Kennebec_Captain]

A search for “David Lochridge” turns up some interesting stuff.

David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of marine operations, wrote an engineering report in 2018 that said the craft under development needed more testing and that passengers might be endangered when it reached “extreme depths,” according to a lawsuit filed that year in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

OceanGate sued Lochridge that year, accusing him of breaching a non-disclosure agreement, and he filed a counterclaim alleging that he was wrongfully fired for raising questions about testing and safety. The case settled on undisclosed terms several months after it was filed.

Lochridge’s concerns primarily focused on the company’s decision to rely on sensitive acoustic monitoring — cracking or popping sounds made by the hull under pressure — to detect flaws, rather than a scan of the hull. Lochridge said the company told him no equipment existed that could perform such a test on the 5-inch-thick (12.7-centimeter-thick) carbon-fiber hull.

" the company’s decision to rely on sensitive acoustic monitoring — cracking or popping sounds made by the hull under pressure — to detect flaws, rather than a scan of the hull."

[ombugge]

All videos I have seen of the launching operation offshore has been from the Horizon Arctic, but the support ship used for most of the dives with the Titan has been the Polar Prince, which is not able to launch from her deck.

I found a video by a Youtuber from a previous dive which shows how the raft with the Titan onboard gets towed to/from the site :

A YouTube star rode in the Titan sub days before it went missing. His footage...

PS> The spoken text is partly recorded after the accident.

[Steamer]

@johnny.dollar

The damn thing failed in spectacular fashion.

We don’t know how “spectacular” a fashion it failed. Since there are no photos released of the debris field I suspect that is because there are objects in a condition which when viewed would traumatize a generation of snowflakes and open the doors to a herd of lawyers. Odds are it failed in the normal fashion.

The street version of the hull shattering into a thousand pieces sounds very much like someone’s clickbait fantasy. Look up “snap buckling”.

Maybe we will know, someone will sneak a photo out sooner or later.

[ombugge]

@Steamer

open the doors to a herd of lawyers.

With any luck they’ll end up behind the door when it opens (the wider the better)

[yacht_sailor]

Why are you impressed with someone who ignored all the accumulated wisdom of centuries of sub building and went off on his own to make a half-assed design and then kill tourists with it?
It would literally be against the law for me to offer rides in an experimental airplane, but I guess I could go out in international waters and fly off an old aircraft carrier if I just had to be me and have tourists with no engineering background to understand the risks pay for it.

[MAK]

Because there are innumerable cases of the accumulated wisdom being proved dead wrong, setting a new standard and permitting incredible progress in fields. Also lots of deaths attempting such.

But primarily because I don’t let the news tell me what to think and don’t participate in viral 2 minutes of hate sessions. I don’t know what happened down there and most accidents happen at the margins. If his hull health monitoring system was slightly different I suspect no one would be talking about this.

People like to feel smug and superior, and death in a gruesome fashion adds flavor to it. That’s why everyone is suddenly concerned about mini sub innovation.

Prior to this happening I wouldn’t have given a shit and neither would you.

[portofdc]

Agree. If your goal is to prevent future deaths, there are many better opportunities than focusing on regulation of submarine tourism.

[johnny.dollar]

@Steamer

We don’t know how “spectacular” a fashion it failed.

But it did fail, correct? And they are all dead, correct?

How many submersibles failed and killed all when you were in the business?
How many submersibles in the research world have failed and killed all?

Innovation is about moving forward and providing the same or better quality widget for cheaper. It is not about going backwards in safety and MOAR DEATHZ@!!

[tengineer1]

@Steamer

We don’t know how “spectacular” a fashion it failed. Since there are no photos released of the debris field I suspect that is because there are objects in a condition which when viewed would traumatize a generation of snowflakes and open the doors to a herd of lawyers. Odds are it failed in the normal fashion.

If it was not so morbid I would consider that humorous. On the other hand I wondered about the ships above making potable water while searching.

[Steamer]

@tengineer1

If it was not so morbid I would consider that humorous.

We are entering a period when a video showing someone frowning would be blurred so as not to induce lifelong PTSD in some snowflake someplace.

Re watermaking, I think 2.5 miles “offshore” is distant enough that no flavor change would be noticed.