Instead of torn apart you are smooshed, is to be expected, but the degree of final smooshing would depend on the pressure differential and the medium doing the compressing.
Titanic tourist submarine missing 6-19-2023 (Debris field found, passengers presumed dead. 06-22-23)
I would think shredded (by all the debris accompanying the failure of the hull, assuming that fractures form from the deformation) or incinerated is more likely.
To The Ends Of The Earth?
Harold And Maude?
The debris was found a quarter of a mile away from part of the ship. In an environment where the water isn’t that clear and your lights penetrate only a few feet. Imagine groping around an NFL stadium and the entire surrounding parking lot when you can only see about 10 feet and you can only move at a slow walk. A meticulous search of that area might take a long time.
And, as others already said, it took a couple days to get search equipment out to the site to even begin searching.
“Purina crab chow” in the argot of airplane accident investigation.
Absolutely.
See here for more about the predecessor system that was super secret for most of its life. The existence of a current successor system is well-attested but damn near nothing about it is publicly known.
…I don’t think that details like the controller are mundane and unimportant.
I think they paint a picture of a bunch of cowboys, the peak of “agile tech bro” culture. They installed the thruster the wrong way around. They didn’t test it. They just did it. And they think “holding the controller the other way” was a “brilliantly simple solution” rather than something that never should have happened.
A hatch that opens from the inside can be opened at the surface; but at depth, the pressure should keep it closed just as effectively as bolts do. Not that it would have mattered in this instance; just overall.
That was the problem. Not that it was a cheap PC game controller. And that same lack of testing and general care was probably the source of the structural failure as well.
The $30 controller was probably more reliable than anything they could hack up themselves, even at 1000x the price. Mass produced items are exceptionally reliable. But there’s no excuse for installing the thruster backwards (or getting the mapping backwards, or whatever it was) and then continuing on with it not working right.
…it was a cheap PC game controller where one of the solutions was to remap the controller, but they didn’t have the instructions on hand to be able to do that.
Not without the instruction manual.
Scrolling down through that twitter thread, I came across this video of James Cameron discussing Titan and other submersibles:
Depends on the design. I’ve no idea if they used anything like this, but one possibility for really tight seals is to use something like a lead (the metal) gasket. You carefully bolt the surfaces together, the lead deforms and forms a really tight metal-on-metal seal. But you aren’t going to want to depend on water pressure to accomplish this process. You want to torque the bolts down to a specified clamping force.
Also, don’t forget that the hull (on the Deepsea Challenger) was 2.5" steel, and the hatch probably weighed a few hundred kilos. It’s unlikely it could even be opened without some sort of external device.
Jesus, what a terrible way to die. How soon until the movie comes out?
…here is the rest of the video of that sequence, where they discuss remapping the controller.
https://twitter.com/wapplehouse/status/1672004334240841731
They knew before they went down there was a problem.
Clown show.
It was a Logitech PC gamepad that uses the same HID controller interface as every other PC joystick. There’s no need for an instruction manual. The remapping would be done in their own software.
Regardless–still not relevant. The issue wasn’t even that the mapping was backwards. It’s that they didn’t stop the dive at that point. Lots of stupid things happen with experimental hardware. It’s not a problem as long as you don’t ignore the failures that crop up.
Um… Every concert I ever went to in my youth looking for keys.
The rationale I have seen, referred to by the NYT among other sources, is somewhat more mundane: that because the data wasn’t absolutely conclusive (and of course it wouldn’t be) they decided it was best to continue the search on the off chance it was a coincidental anomaly.
And that kind of makes sense doesn’t it? Because if the concern is secrecy, it doesn’t make any more sense to release information now than three days ago. It didn’t suddenly get less secret in the time it took to get eyes on the debris field and confirm results. Alternatively, it does make sense that they would want to keep the information somewhat close hold rather than risk the possibility that the data has not been properly interpreted, but then call of the search, only to have the submersible be found intact, either on the bottom or on the surface, years later and learn that in fact everyone survived for days, if only the search hadn’t been called off…
I didn’t know Cameron was a Jedi. Learn something new every day.
First, I was going to say: Nope! as I thought you referred to the sea drama of 2005, but you are referring here to the movie of 1948 (Missed my target by 2 years, and it was the US coast guard pursuing the smugglers, memory put together the Chinese smugglers and the pursuers as being the same guys.)
Nightmare inducing scene at 3:55 :
Thanks for that find!
…and yet, the didn’t know how to do it.
My issue is that I didn’t bring up the controller, and the twitter thread I linked to only mentioned it once. But since you did, I’ll use it to highlight how the controller is just an exemplar of agile-tech-bro culture. “Its good enough” isn’t actually good enough.
But we don’t know that the controller had any part in the implosion. It may have been working perfectly well.