It’s starting to seem like the movie would be 2 hours of quietly sinking into darkness until some ominous cracking sounds and warning alarms go off before Fin appears on the screen.
Titanic tourist submarine missing 6-19-2023 (Debris field found, passengers presumed dead. 06-22-23)
I’m sorry but I’m calling shenanigans on the controller. This wouldn’t have passed any kind of certification for … ANYTHING that wasn’t a toy.
That is a good question. My family is comfortable enough that we don’t bother with it, and we are nowhere near a billionaire.
The Twitter thread and every third news article on it. Not to mention others on this forum that couldn’t even be bothered to get the irrelevant details right, like whether it was a PC or Playstation controller.
There is a relevant and irrelevant part to the controller story. The irrelevant part is that it was a $30 Logitech gamepad. The relevant part is that their processes were so sloppy that they had a mapping issue that they didn’t even find out about until they were already on the seafloor.
If Cameron is directing it there will have to be goo shooting at you from the screen in 3D. Way of (high pressure) Water II.
OMG! I cannot believe that anyone would willingly get into that clap-trap of a vessel. Maybe they hammed it up for the cameras that they used RV parts, but anyone that has owned an RV knows that the parts are bound to break.
FWIW, I think a one hour episode of an anthology series could cover it. Something like The Twilight Zone, perhaps. It could be about the hubris of man (or at least a certain kind of man). The audience could be expected to sympathize with the son and perhaps the research scientist, with the CRO being the chief antagonist, along with a simmering father-son conflict. There could be a bit of magical realism injected into things to help heighten interest and open up the possibility of a more mystical ending.
Yep. Plenty there for an hour-long installment.
Of course, the Twitter twits are going on about how this means Biden staged the whole futile rescue attempt as a distraction from the Hunter charges.
Did they forget that it’s called “the deep state”?
…I didn’t claim that it did. I don’t even think that it did. It was a commentary on the culture. Nothing else.
But not me. Not in the post you responded too. And I thought the comparison between the joystick and the controller in that Twitter thread was apt and relevant.
Thats relevant!
I get why you don’t think it’s relevant. But I personally don’t think your arguments hold up here. I don’t think that “$30 controller was probably more reliable than anything they could hack up themselves, even at 1000x the price” is a correct take.
It wasn’t a mapping issue. It was a thruster issue. And they knew about it before they got to the sea floor. They saw it before it descended.
I didn’t mean to imply you did. I see focusing on the controller as being analogous to ‘He didn’t file a flight plan!’ in aviation. IOW, I thing it’s irrelevant.
The diving capsule was on the deck of the drilling rig when this incident occurred. It wasn’t underwater.
Then you underestimate the reliability advantages of selling millions of units.
Logitech spent way more than $30,000 working the bugs out of that controller. Its guts, software stack, and so on are shared with their other controllers, and probably had tens of man-years put into it. And they had more than a decade to work out even the tiniest issues.
A custom setup is easier in basically only one respect, which is that it doesn’t have to be cost optimized. But it has to provide the same basic function. It needs some kind of controller board and software stack. $30k is only a couple months of engineer time–not a lot for something like this. There are ways to shortcut the process (using semi-off-the shelf stuff like Arduinos), but they still won’t be as robust as a pure consumer project. And you’d still get the breathless articles about how they used a $10 Arduino to control the sub.
If I had to drive across Asia or something in a $25k Toyota vs. a $25M vehicle where every bit was made from scratch–give me the Toyota.
I can’t quite understand what the boat guy was saying at first. But in the second scene, it came up that he replaced the thruster and that “they checked it and said it was good.”
Regardless, either the crew knew about it on the surface and should have stopped it there, or they didn’t bother to test it on the surface and only found out later. Sloppy either way.
I worked with (uncrewed) submersibles for a few years and when chatting with others with long experience, the consensus was if the vehicle isn’t floating at the surface a short time after communications loss, it’s scattered at the bottom. You can hope for a miracle, but we know the vehicle and those onboard were gone.
…you miss the point.
Reliability is a single metric.
It isn’t the only metric.
Yes, its reliable.
But I’d happily spend 1000x the price to build something even more reliable, more durable, purpose built to do the job. If I was betting my life on it, I’d go with this:
Over this:
Every single time.
Indeed, I can’t think of anything more optimized and thoroughly tested for controlling a vehicle like this than a game controller from a major HID manufacturer. It offers enough inputs to cover any reasonable maneuvering requirements in a form factor that’s comfortable to use for extended periods. What are people expecting them to use, a mechanical flight yoke?
Now, the software they hooked it up to might make the Subnautica devs facepalm, but that’s not the controller’s fault.
I don’t understand the attraction of this submersible, especially at $250,000 a pop. You’re squished in, you have one twenty inch window on one end to see anything, and you’re only going to see pitch black at Titanic depths. What’s the attraction, even if the trio goes off without a hitch?
I’d certainly rather be in Cameron’s sub as well, but not for that reason.
That controller looks rather… unergonomic. That’s what custom (or low-volume) engineering often looks like. It’s boxy and bulky because it costs too much–way more than 1000x as much–to make something really comfortable and light. And it’s probably no more reliable than the Logitech. But they weren’t as sloppy with the testing and presumably didn’t have any similar thruster issues.
There’s a big messy bundle of wires on one side that could easily catch on something. It’s probably good enough for whatever purpose it serves. But not as nice and integrated as a consumer product would be.
Obviously, the vehicle as a whole is totally custom and there’s no way around custom engineering. But it’s smart to use consumer hardware whenever possible. Yeah, it needs to be tested and there should be some understanding of the internals to ensure they’re compatible with the situation. But that’s still way cheaper than certifying something that’s 100% custom.
You get to tell all your rich friends you’re an “explorer.” Space tourism, underwater tourism, climbing Everest? It’s all the same. A bunch of people who think being a tourist with more money than sense makes them some kind of trailblazer, never mind the trail that’s been laid out in front of them already, at great expense, by all those who have preceded them—some of them actual trailblazers.
Would a $30 item from Logitech be such a focus if it was a keyboard?