Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

[Archie Goodwin]

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to use gaming controllers as input devices. The US Navy somewhat famously uses them to control periscopes on submarines. There's little reason to engineer a new input device when someone else has put millions into ergonomics and manufacturability. It's not difficult to train people to use them- they've likely held one before. In theory it should save money (but who knows how those Navy Xbox controllers are procured).

I don't even fault them for using Logitech. They have decades of experience producing peripherals.

To use one as your primary input device, and hooked up to a system that's doesn't appear to be designed for a real-time system is just hubris. I think that's Windows in the videos? Maybe there's some embedded RTOS that thing is talking to. In the BBC doc from last year they managed to put a steering motor on backwards and needed to remap the controller so it does not appear electronics are their strong-suit.

 

[Fluoxetine Man]

If I was a rich billionaire that wanted to explore the Titanic in my own sub, I wouldn't cheap out using fiberglass hulls and logitech controllers. I would go full John Hammond and 'spare no expense!'

https://twitter.com/HelloH04K0/status/1671250821269291008?s=20

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

You'd have to be really, really nice to the guy who bolts you into a thing like that.

Gosh, if anyone was an asshole to that guy, all it'd take is to just do a slightly piss-poor job. There wouldn't be any evidence left. Sure, one of your coworkers dies, but maybe that guy was a jerk anyway. Maybe they wouldn't give you a raise. Maybe you're a Marxist and you fucking hate billionaires. Maybe you actually got careless.

But you'd really have to trust that guy a lot, the guy who tightens the bolts. I wonder what he's up to right now.

 

[Android raptor]

Imagine being a billionaire and paying a quarter of a million to gawk at the Titanic in the sub equivalent of Groverhaus.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Who the fuck decides to go in it holy shit. Its a claustrophobic nightmare and an awful way to die. I feel awful because there's a young kid with them.

But its fucking bolted from the outside who the fuck drank too much when they designed it? Trapped in an elevator at the bottom of the sea...
And one of the victim's sons just getting out of jail.....the twists and turns good god.

There's so much about this that is lolworthy but it is also a very frightening and stressful event. The fact that they fired a guy who tried to get the word out that it was unsafe AND the thing that happened with the CBS reporter...the red flags were everywhere.

(Wonder if Cameron, DiCaprio, and Winslet will say anything)

 

[Vecr]

Forgetting about the carbon composite and the glue and the joystick and getting bolted in and that sort of thing, I really don't think the window is supposed to be there. It's not rated for the right pressure, and it's not in the earlier designs. I think it's quite likely it was added on afterward to please the billionaire clients, because they don't want to look at the original 4K TV screens. If you are going for the Iron Lung aesthetic, go all the way. Windows are for people with experience, like Woods Hole.

 

[Maverick Vile]

"Look at me! I'm a billionaire! I paid a quarter of a million dollars to be bolted into a sinking coffin so I can gawk at a bunch of dead poors at the bottom of the ocean! OH NO! The coffin sprung a leak and now I'm gonna die!"

 

[northstar747]

Imagine being a billionaire and paying a quarter of a million to gawk at the Titanic in the sub equivalent of Groverhaus.

do you have stairs in your house?

Are the insulted stairs?

 

[Betonhaus]

Forgetting about the carbon composite and the glue and the joystick and getting bolted in and that sort of thing, I really don't think the window is supposed to be there. It's not rated for the right pressure, and it's not in the earlier designs. I think it's quite likely it was added on afterward to please the billionaire clients, because they don't want to look at the original 4K TV screens. If you are going for the Iron Lung aesthetic, go all the way. Windows are for people with experience, like Woods Hole.

But if it wasn't for the window, how would they know that they didn't just descend to a safe depth that's juuust deep enough to make the sub produce scary creaky noises and have the screens play a recording from a drone?
Which i would pay money to do even knowing it was fake. Probably especially knowing it's fake. hell, why not just have you crawl into a tube on dry land that has computer-controlled suspension, sound effects, and pressure changes?

 

[W00K #17]

Not that I want to cheer for anyone's death but one of the passengers was British. The tragedy could have been far worse overall.

View attachment 5171681
Yeah, they cheaped out on this shit. Fucking 250k a ticket, didn't even spring for the Xbox Elite, just a $30 ancient controller. 'Good enough' doesn't work for undersea exploration.

What a fucking joke. Though what a great metaphor for modern capitalism.

Imagine discovering the utter frustration of stick drift on a controller when it's controlling your sub vessel 2 miles under the surface.

"I don't get it, the controls keep dragging us into and against the ocean bottom!"

Ya know what, I don't feel so mad at my N64 controller making me walk right off of Zelda's death mountain or Halo 2 marching me into death by the guardians.

I didn't know how bad things could really be.

 

[Betonhaus]

I got to be honest, I'd rather go to space.

 

[Fluoxetine Man]

I got to be honest, I'd rather go to space.

It's a lot safer and easier too!

 

[Betonhaus]

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/travel/news/banging-sounds-in-30-minute-intervals-heard-during-search-for-missing-titan-submersible-report/ar-AA1cOVFb

assuming this isn't a lie, they may be alive still

 

[AnOminous]

Apparently the stupid fucks who launched this deathtrap into the ocean fired an employee who raised serious concerns about its design flaws, then sued him.
It probably imploded and everyone's been dead since a few minutes after it happened.

At the meeting Lochridge discovered why he had been denied access to the viewport information from the Engineering department—the viewport at the forward of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers down to depths of 4,000 meters. Lochridge learned that the viewport manufacturer would only certify to a depth of 1,300 meters due to experimental design of the viewport supplied by OceanGate, which was out of the Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (“PVHO”) standards. OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth of 4,000 meters.

Imagine being a billionaire and paying a quarter of a million to gawk at the Titanic in the sub equivalent of Groverhaus.

Load bearing viewports.

 

[Orkeosaurus]

it lost contact roughly the same amount of time it takes to get to the wreck and has a maximum safe dive depth of half of what James Cameron used. It definitely decompressed. Be a better death than slowly suffocating while forced to stare at that goddamn nightmarish prow.

 

[Super Guido]

Signs point to incompetence and corner cutting. Not that they saw the the biblical leviathan or Cthulhu.

It's not just incompetence and corner cutting - it's deliberate disregard and contempt for regulations. The CEO is on record saying he thought regulations designed to protect passengers messed with commercial innovations (archive), so there were some criminal levels of stupidity coming out of that guy. If anyone absolutely deserved to die on that piece of shit, it's him.

A lot of these regulations are written in blood, but when you've got shitloads of money it's easy to get complacent. The only thing I can say in favor of him is he was ballsy enough to actually go with them on the death vessel.

 

[Almighty Space Duck]

What I don't understand is why the US Navy hasn't stepped forward to say if they picked any events up on their hydrophone arrays.
Those arrays picked up Scorpion's implosion all the way over at the Azores in 1968. Detecting something by the Titanic wreck should be a piece of piss.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

What I don't understand is why the US Navy hasn't stepped forward to say if they picked any events up on their hydrophone arrays.
Those arrays picked up Scorpion's implosion all the way over at the Azores in 1968. Detecting something by the Titanic wreck should be a piece of piss.

The military never admits shit, because it gives away what they can detect.

If I were top brass I'd be operating under the assumption that this whole thing is some damn Soviet plot.

And then I'd drop some depth charges on the Titanic for good measure, fuck that thing.

 

[JustSomeDong]

Load bearing viewports.

I know what I'm gonna build my backstreet garage diversity submersible out of. Any billionaires want a ride?

What I don't understand is why the US Navy hasn't stepped forward to say if they picked any events up on their hydrophone arrays.
Those arrays picked up Scorpion's implosion all the way over at the Azores in 1968. Detecting something by the Titanic wreck should be a piece of piss.

Because we've cut the fuck outta the funding, and now SOSUS is a poor shadow of it Cold War glory.