You mean… the Cold Deep Equations?
I would feel really guilty if it turned out to have been sunk by Phil (my kraken) hitching a ride.
It’s all part of the narrative framing. This guy, born into old money, named after two prominent slaveholder ancestors, child of oil magnate, rubbing elbows with the worst sorts of people, running oil missions for his parents in Saudi Arabia as a teen… It’s a construction of a very specific sort of monied identity because the entire point of the podcast is to hate on the subject.
Strange - their website was down completely last week and it didn’t just appear to be DOS from all the traffic there - the website was just missing. Maybe they host onsite and someone just turned off the server.
I’ve seen speculation that the cylindrical part of the hull might have been crushed concertina style, behind the partition at the rear end (so supposedly not obvious to the occupants - the reduced overall volume would mean reduced buoyancy. This seems pretty unlikely to me though - that it could have been crushed lengthways in a manner that is both significant and also results in a temporarily stable outcome.
On the authenticity of the transcript, nobody seems to have stepped forward to say it’s fake, which I suppose might indicate that it’s real (If it is real, I would not expect them to confirm that, but if it’s fake, I think they’d have nothing to lose in calling it out)
That seems… dubious.
Yeah, things that fail don’t normally fail into something else that is still useful (escalators being the exception that proves the rule; when those fail, they either become stairs, or a really big meat grinder)
Good one, Henry!
'Zactly. Thank you. I was wracking my brain for the title and it didn’t seem very amenable to searching without knowing that or the author’s name. But that was exactly the story I meant.
It’s not the only one, but it’s sort of the ur-text for that plotline.
“So, I notice there’s a recent gap in your resume… what exactly was your last job?”
“I was… an engineer. At… well, a company. That did… stuff… look, can I just say I was in jail? Or, no, I was a spy and I can’t reveal anything about it!”
The water in itself is neutrally buoyant. There would need to be deformation to reduce the interior air-filled volume to reduce buoyancy.
Notably, Antipodes was classed by the American Bureau of Shipping — meaning it was checked to see if it met industry standards — whereas Rush’s Titan sub that imploded on the way to the Titanic was not, Reoch said.
Wow, there are still web sites that are run on DOS computers? I’m surprised.
Oooohhh, you mean “denial of service”. Got it.
I suppose water could be intruding via faults into small voids in the composite that were previously filled with air, which would make a difference to buoyancy, but I think only very slightly.
So if a sub descended faster than expected wouldn’t that be a warning that something was amiss? It seems to me that when anything even the slightest bit seems “off” in an operation like that, you should abort the mission.
This guy had so many chances not to kill people.
That ought to be on his tombstone, but somehow I doubt it will be.
To be fair, there hasn’t been any confirmation it descended faster than expected.
There is a “spanish submarine expert” who was interviewed and outlined what he thinks happened. Why he has special insight I don’t know, but suggests an electrical problem was the proximate cause and that the Titan then descended rapidly vertically, “like an arrow” with all passengers piled up in a jumble against the porthole window, in complete darkness for over a minute until it imploded.
That sounds pretty horrific.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. The ballast is attached to the rails below the craft and it can’t get all that off-kilter. But even if it did, it wouldn’t descend all that much faster in that direction. It’s a little more hydrodynamic, but not so much that it’ll go “like an arrow”. And the descent rate is unlikely to be a major factor anyway. It’s largely about the pressure it’s experiencing at that depth.
That… does sound pretty terrible.
That would contradict the theory that they dropped ballast to rapidly ascend, yes?
It’s easy to see why this case has attracted so much attention. Even leaving aside the whole billionaire hubris thing, the visions of possible last moments in that sub are hard to shake.