“I’m surprised they’re missing what would be leementary precautions, like a pinger and a big hook to attack a winch cable, not to mention the capability to haul it up if necessary (plus rover to find it) on board the launch ship itself.”
Guiding a submersible into crushing ocean depths via a plastic game controller speaks volumes of the CEO’s hubris. Despite being a Princeton-educated engineer, he scoffed at the laws of physics and embraced risk, despite a Greek chorus warning of impending doom. The shattered hull of his “invincible” submersible now rests near the “unsinkable” Titanic, making it a bonus side-trip for future Titanic tourists.
Various experts have opined than in another century at most the Titanic will have degraded into a reddish-brown spot on the seafloor, substantially the entire hull and machinery eaten away by bacteria and sea life.
Leaving the carbon composite hull of Titan as the sole big structure down there. Ozymandias would be so proud.
I was reminded of an Onion article that paraphrased read as; “In retrospect we may have resorted to cannibalism prematurely, but the elevator had been stuck for over an hour, and some of us had missed lunch”.
I do have to wonder about the advisability of showing passengers of a submersible the remains of a submersible that didn’t make it. Yeah, most people probably wouldn’t freak out, but there’ll be a few that let their imagination go wild.
Blockquote I do have to wonder about the advisability of showing passengers of a submersible the remains of a submersible that didn’t make it. Yeah, most people probably wouldn’t freak out, but there’ll be a few that let their imagination go wild.
It’s human nature, the first thing that any future visitors are going to want to see will be the remains of this sub.
If you want to be as accurate as possible, certainly. Since water is a tiny bit compressible, and the density also varies with temperature, the density at any given depth depends on the entire state of the water above it–which in turn depends on the water above it. So you have to sum up infinitesimal layers as you go down.
Fortunately, these factors are fairly small, even kilometers down. Water really is very nearly incompressible. And in the case of bouyancy specifically, you pretty much never have to consider the density variation across the water column height. Vessels aren’t hundreds of meters tall (though maybe some oil platforms do take it into account…).
Salinity gets a vote too. Which also varies with depth and location just as temperature does.
As a practical matter you design your machinery against some standard ocean model, plus some fudge for extra cold, extra salty, extra deep = extra3 dense.
Then you in effect “weigh” the water where you are right now by adjusting ballast, or cable tension, or hydrodynamic forces to balance everything out.