- Joined
- Feb 17, 2023
It had nothing to do with their janky controller. Reading that case document Wy4M posted, pretty much everything I guessed was the problem:
It was the hull: They built something subjected to 400atm of compressive stress out of composite materials. I've seen composite submarines advertised before, but they were for reef tourism and were meant for less than ~250m of dive depth.
With a composite material, you fundamentally never know exactly what you're working with. There are very limited ways to check for integrity. Stresses irreversibly degrade the matrix of the materials meaning you're going to have life limits. Once water at those pressures finds any way anywhere through a complicated material, it's going to turn into a bandsaw and rip it apart. (The exact properties of the material depend not only on the components but on how it's laid up, who bagged and baked it that day, moisture, the phase of the moon, etc etc. It's more of an art. (Then again metallurgy has a bit of an art to it too, but at least you have a homogenous isotropic material you can do certain tests on.))
It's worse than that. Apparently these clowns fired this guy *after* he warned them about all this, then sued him? No tests of the vehicle at depth prior to sticking people in it? Wow. (Still reading, but it's pretty damning.)
It was the hull: They built something subjected to 400atm of compressive stress out of composite materials. I've seen composite submarines advertised before, but they were for reef tourism and were meant for less than ~250m of dive depth.
With a composite material, you fundamentally never know exactly what you're working with. There are very limited ways to check for integrity. Stresses irreversibly degrade the matrix of the materials meaning you're going to have life limits. Once water at those pressures finds any way anywhere through a complicated material, it's going to turn into a bandsaw and rip it apart. (The exact properties of the material depend not only on the components but on how it's laid up, who bagged and baked it that day, moisture, the phase of the moon, etc etc. It's more of an art. (Then again metallurgy has a bit of an art to it too, but at least you have a homogenous isotropic material you can do certain tests on.))
It's worse than that. Apparently these clowns fired this guy *after* he warned them about all this, then sued him? No tests of the vehicle at depth prior to sticking people in it? Wow. (Still reading, but it's pretty damning.)
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