Hacker News Reader

Comment by kotaKat | Hacker News Reader

Having been linked this elsewhere in the thread I don't quite like the fact that they're so brazen that they bought internal lighting from Camping World and drive it with a Logitech USB gamepad and using half-ass construction piping as a ballast.

Or the fact that they scrubbed a Titanic launch for the media due to weather (presenting from some kind of briefing room where they presented from a laptop on top of a Breville cooker box), went elsewhere, then scrubbed THAT launch while in the water because the launch platform floats detached...

View on HN

> drive it with a Logitech USB gamepad

As opposed to the professionals who went with a microsoft xbox controller? [1]

> Or the fact that they scrubbed a Titanic launch for the media due to weather

Yes? Weather is a thing. This is not a ride at disney land, of course they cancel the operation when the circumstances are not favorable. In fact doing the opposite would be foolish.

The company in question might be full of jokers, but your points don’t quite illistrate this well. They are about appearances and not substance.

1: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/18/17136808/us-navy-uss-colo...

> As opposed to the professionals who went with a microsoft xbox controller?

I think what's more telling is that they didn't even splurge on the actual Microsoft Xbox controller. They cheaped out with an unproven logitech gamepad. When you're already doing something in an unorthodox way at least don't half-ass it.

> The company in question might be full of jokers, but your points don’t quite illistrate this well. They are about appearances and not substance.

Your distinction is a bit arbitrary. Every point about this company will always be about appearances unless you have first-hand accounts or experiences. Otherwise, info on the company's technology, choices, strategies or anything else will always be based on appearance. In the absence of more concrete evidence, these small indicators can at least provide something to infer from.

> Your distinction is a bit arbitrary. Every point about this company will always be about appearances unless you have first-hand accounts or experiences.

Not really. Here is a substance based argument: there is no underwater FAA. This company, and any other private submarine company is setting their own quality level and then marking their own homework to see if they have met it. In a commercial environment they are incentivised to cut corners and there is no external force resisting this.

Then you can ask them about their tech and procedures. Do they have redundant means of communication? Do they have multiply redundant means to release the ballast? How many hull penetrations there are and how are they implemented? If they are unwilling to discuss these questions that is worse than a bad answer.

Some comments are criticising their choice of carbon fiber for the middle section of their pressure vessel. I don’t know enough about the engineering there to decide for myself if that criticism is fair or not but that is an argument about substance not appearance.

I think this is the big thing for me. David Pogue, when he went on a dive with them last year, pointed out that the vessel has no beacon [1]; yet the door bolts from the outside. Apparently there was a five-hour period where the company did not know the location of the sub after it resurfaced.

To me, that seems crazy. Having a GPS beacon seems like a no-brainer for safety purposes. It feels indicative of the engineering as a whole.

[1]: https://twitter.com/Pogue/status/1670826522138091521

>In a commercial environment they are incentivised to cut corners and there is no external force resisting this

Please if you are incentivized to cut $10 on the main control interface of your expensive sub that also is to drive your business, you have some fundamental cultural problems beyond "commercial environment".

>In a commercial environment they are incentivised to cut corners and there is no external force resisting this

Please if you are incentivized to cut $10 on the main control interface of your expensive sub that is incredibly low volume production, you have some fundamental cultural problems and its not a business decision.

> As opposed to the professionals who went with a microsoft xbox controller? [1]

The Xbox controllers have an astronomical number of testing hours on them by now.

Can’t you say the same thing about the logitech one? My point is that using an off the shelf solution is not necessarily a bad one. Probably there are differences between the reliability of the different controllers within that category but not to the level where choosing one over the other is a clear sign of engineering mallpractice.

There are far more Xbox controllers in use than Logitech. In the gaming community, the Logitech controllers are known to be janky and less reliable.

The PlayStation controllers are more popular globally, but have not had a great track record when it comes to operation with anything but a PlayStation.

I get what you're saying, though, and I'm not faulting them for using an off-the-shelf product. I'm faulting them for using a substandard product.

I think you have unreasonable expectations. Off-the-shelf components may be more reliable than custom developed products (especially since you can afford a backup or two).

Also, with respect to emergency ballast - cheapness is a virtue. You're supposed to drop it in an emergency, and hesitating because "I don't want to lose my expensive weights" could kill you. This is a consideration for recreational scuba too, instructors recommend buying cheap weight belts (and the companies selling expensive ones usually advertise "free replacement if you use them in an emergency").

Yeah. I'm not sure having Boeing design and build me a $10,000 LED lighting array is necessarily a big improvement and, if you're worried about the reliability of your game controller? Buy two maybe of everything maybe, even three? There can be reasons to use expensive bespoke coffee pots on commercial flights. But going with the gold-plated aerospace version isn't always the answer.

Though choice is still important, why that gamepad? Especially if it was the wireless version.

Building the controls with wired arcade buttons and an arcade joystick would be a little pricier but you'd get parts designed to take a beating, plenty of real world usage to demonstrate this and no potentially flaky usb/wireless stack that you have no control over to deal with.

I could take some guesses. It's cramped with a lot of people; wires invite tangles or damage if someone accidentally yanks on it. Especially if you want to operate the vehicle from both sides of the interior.

Those controllers have millions of hours of playtesting by people that are sensitive to the slightest twitch. I'd trust them more than most automotive components.

I'm more curious to know how they run the control lines. A thruhull at 400 atmospheres must be something special. Or maybe it's wireless to the machinery outside? But the carbon fibre and titanium enclosure would be a problem.

I would not actually trust them more than an automotive component, I think most accelerator pedals use Hall Effect sensors (usually two of them in the good designs) that are much less likely to wear out and cause spurious inputs or failure than the basic potentiometers on a game console, especially a very cheap one. Get an X-box controller at least, and have a couple spares wired in, in case the wireless one fails.

I've seen optical encoders as well for that. Fun when they don't have a hard 'zero' but just differentials.

To be fair, we don't know that there aren't backup controls.

Does a submersible like this only drop ballast weight in an emergency, or every time they’re ready to go home? I know submarines tend to use diving planes and pneumatic ballast tanks (flood with water, or inject air to push water out), but I don’t know if that’s an option down at 400 atm.

I heard an interview this afternoon on NPR with David Pogue (the bbc guy who filmed a ride). He said there are 7 different ways of surfacing, including several that do not require electricity and don't even require consciousness. For example, some of the ballast is attached by mounts that dissolve after a certain number of hours in water (presumably less than 96).

Thanks for posting that link. However, I came to the opposite conclusion - I was rather impressed. I respect someone who is prepared to make a financial loss whilst breaking new ground technically more than someone who's trying to cut corners on something conventional. (Assuming of course that Stockton Rush is telling the truth about losing money, of course.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com