titanic gawker submersible still missing.

[Fireball]

Yeah, 5 privileged thrill-seeking men pay $250k to view a sunken boat; navy, air force, coast guard, state air guard rescue, front page news

While desperate migrants die on sea and no rescue, not much news cover.

Well, technically three privileged thrill-seeking men paying $250k. Two of the five were crew members. Also, given that two of the three were father and son, I suspect it might only be two wallets being opened.

Frankly, if there's anyone who really doesn't deserve sympathy, it's the people who made the damn sub. I can remember watching James Cameron's Titanic and the opening scenes were set on a somewhat similar submersible. I say somewhat similar because I remember them going out of their way to explain how high-tech everything was, and how everything was still in a precarious situation, since if any of the windows cracked, everyone involved was dead. And this wound up being the exact opposite of High-Tech.  

You know what they used for navigation? This.


It's a Bluetooth video game controller that costs $30 new on Amazon. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the sort of hardware that exists to help you play Ocarina of Time is not the same sort of hardware you should trust to keep you alive 12,000 feet below sea level.

There's more information on the Titan's previous voyage. At least it survived that time, but there were still a lot of red flags:




And because they operated in international waters, they apparently weren't even subject to any sort of safety regulations.

The structure was completely unqualified for its mission, as many sources have mentioned. Not saying that your complaint about the controller is unfounded. In any investigation I've been involved with when something failed, there is a plethora of associated contributing factors.

[Rev. Rye]

I did not bring up the controller to say “this is the one thing that doomed the Titan.”

I used it as the most glaring exemplar of why it was utterly unfit to cruise the briny depths where the Titanic lay. Like talking about Action Park and bringing up that looping waterslide.


Looking up the Wikipedia article, I found myself thinking “the only way I could see more red flags is if there was a football match between Turkey and Albania.”


And those are some pretty red flags.

[Anomalocaris]

I saw photos of the pressure hull under construction, with a carbon fiber laying machine laying layers of fiber in epoxy laminate. I am somewhat puzzled by the choice of carbon fiber composite for pressure hull. Carbon fiber is exceptionally strong in tension, but not particulate strong in compression. A pressure hull under seawater pressure will be all in compression. So why carbon fiber and not steel or titanium like every other manned deep sea submersible?

In addition, when placed in compression carbon fiber composite is subject to unexpected failure due to any difficult-to-detect de-lamination and other flaws in the composite matrix. Metal pressure vessels under compression experience no such vulnerability.

[The Valkyrie]

There’s a lot of tasteless jokes being made about that submersible. How can people sink so low?

Boru

[Deesse23]

I dunno why this is a thing. These people paid $250 000 for the ‘Titanic experience’. Dying in the ocean is an integral part of that. 

Boru

The CEO of the company who built the submersible was on board. He is on record of having said: "At some point safety is just a waste. If you wanna be safe, dont get up in the morning". Good riddance.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I dunno why this is a thing. These people paid $250 000 for the ‘Titanic experience’. Dying in the ocean is an integral part of that. 

Boru

The CEO of the company who built the submersible was on board. He is on record of having said: "At some point safety is just a waste. If you wanna be safe, dont get up in the morning". Good riddance.

He could have added, 'If you wanna be safe, don't ride in my submersible.'

Boru

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I dunno why this is a thing. These people paid $250 000 for the ‘Titanic experience’. Dying in the ocean is an integral part of that. 

Boru

The CEO of the company who built the submersible was on board. He is on record of having said: "At some point safety is just a waste. If you wanna be safe, dont get up in the morning". Good riddance.

Why not just dry your hair in the shower then?

[zebo-the-fat]

I just watched Scott Manley's live stream about this, he calculated that the energy involved in a failure of the pressure vessel was equivilant to 50 Kg of TNT, not a lot of point looking for any bodies.

[Anomalocaris]

I just watched Scott Manley's live stream about this, he calculated that the energy involved in a failure of the pressure vessel was equivilant to 50 Kg of TNT, not a lot of point looking for any bodies.

The air inside the pressure hull has been under one atmophere pressure before the implosion,    During the implosion it would undergo instantaneous adiabatic compression until its pressure equals the pressure of water outside.   In this case the pressure outside is 400 atmophere..  

That’s a compression ratio of 400:1.

To put that into perspective,  the people inside rhe Titan submersible were experiencing air being compressed 20 times more than it would be inside the cylinders of a giant running diesel engine in the compression cycle, which also uses adiabatic compression to heat the air/fuel mixture inside the cylinder until it detonated.

Even though the seawater coming in is nearly freezing,    The process would have been so quick, that the air instantly heated to tens of thousands of degrees and would completely incinerate their bodies before the heat would have the time to be dissipated by contact with the cold sea water.

That’s if the pressure hull fails completely all at once.

The other possible mode of failure is the pressure hull first fail locally and spring a leak before the failure propagates and the entire pressure hull collapses.   In this case a jet of water at 400 atmospheres will squirt in at the first point of failure.    Water at that pressure, while not quite enough to cut steel, will instantly cut through any skin, muscle, or bone it encounters along the way.

[zebo-the-fat]

I just watched Scott Manley's live stream about this, he calculated that the energy involved in a failure of the pressure vessel was equivilant to 50 Kg of TNT, not a lot of point looking for any bodies.

The air inside the pressure hull has been under one atmophere pressure before the implosion,    During the implosion it would undergo instantaneous adiabatic compression until its pressure equals the pressure of water outside.   In this case the pressure outside is 400 atmophere..  

That’s a compression ratio of 400:1.

To put that into perspective,  the people inside rhe Titan submersible were compressed 20 times more than they would be if they were inside the cylinders of a giant running diesel engine, compressing the diesel fuel air mixture until it detonated.

Even though the seawater coming in is nearly freezing,    The process would have been so quick, that their bodies would have been instantly heated to thousands of degrees and would be completely incinerated before the heat would have the time to be dissipated by contact with the cold sea water.

Nasty, but probably very quick, unlikely they would have had time to feel anything