Something I always wondered about tourist submarines…Do they sell fudge?
Titanic tourist submarine missing 6-19-2023 (Debris field found, passengers presumed dead. 06-22-23)
They do, but you have to buy all the fudge no matter what kind, or else if you refuse Elon’s help he will call you a fudge-picker.
I ventured over to Fox News for entirely unrelated reasons, to see how they were handling today’s political news, and came across this interesting article. Apparently Oceangate and an ex-employee were involved in a lawsuit and counter-suit around 2018 concerning the employee’s allegations about the lack of proper safety certification of the viewport on the submersible:
Moderating:
Reminder: no political jabs in breaking news threads.
Everyone, please try to stick to the topic. As usual, feel free to start a new thread and link to this one if you want to comment more broadly.
They are dead, all of them. OceanGate is based out of Everett, Washington. The company may be proficient in diving Puget Sound, but they had no business diving to the Titanic.
Endless CEO ego, and a Play Station controller, that controls the entire sub? Play Station? Really? With no location device? Even the hikers on the NW peaks usually take a tracker.
Stupid Darwin Award. No need for hope.
Why weren’t they livestreaming on Twitter? Elon could at least have been giving them advice.
Oh, sure. That’s what they do. But 150 years from now, guess what quote he will be remembered by?
It’s like that civil war general riding the front lines on his horse. The soldiers cautioned him to get down. “There’s no way anybody could hit anything at this dis” Bam! He was shot dead on the spot.
From the link:
The documents say Lochridge learned the viewport manufacturer "would only certify to a depth of 1,300 meters due to the experimental design of the viewport supplied by OceanGate, which was out of the Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy standards.
“OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth of 4,000 meters,” the complaint states.
Pretty damning, if true. And I agree that the viewport (which I didn’t realise was that big) looks like a likely point of failure.
I see that The Onion is already on top of the story.
Coast Guard Sends Another Submersible Full Of Billionaires After The First One (theonion.com)
So do I understand correctly that only the one person knows/knew how to operate the vessel and its communications? Seems like you’d want a backup for when the first person has a stroke.
Salt water taffy. Duh.
NBC is reporting that the CEO of the company is piloting the voyage. So I guess the passengers can get their money back.
(That was just gallows humor. Human death is a terrible, inevitable, expected thing.)
Lochridge had also expressed concerns about potential stress failures on the hull itself. But the refusal to certify the viewport at the intended operating depths, if true, is unequivocally damning. It could be the basis of a ruinous lawsuit against whatever is left of OceanGate by the surviving relatives.
But despite the reality of Lochridge’s allegations in 2018, the rest of this is all just speculation at this point.
“Refund?!!! Over my dead body!!!”
Actually, it’s an Onion two-fer.
A negative 2018 letter from the Marine Technology Society:
Supposedly the passengers are also taught how to operate the equipment on board, including communications.
Thank for that @PastTense.
As I’m not a Marine engineer, I suspected that the explanation from Broomstick over here:
Sounded too simple. While it is true that anything going that deep is “experimental” there is also “experimental” with standards. And, as it is becoming clearer, that bit about the maker of the sub avoiding standards and oversight in order to have progress; was not a great idea.
It’s a PC controller, not a Playstation controller.
A lot of hay has been made of it being off-brand or a knockoff or whatever. Mostly that’s ridiculous since Logitech is a perfectly fine input device manufacturer.
But this controller has a quality that I haven’t seen mentioned as a boon: it runs on normal, alkaline AA batteries. That is, not built-in lithium batteries like most modern controllers. It seems like a very wise move to not have the risk of a lithium fire in a space like that.
That would demonstrate some useful planning.