Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

The reviews for the controller (mentioned by name in the article, so easy to look up) are generally great (4.2/5 with thousands of reviews), and the 1/2-star reviews are as frequently about ergonomic issues as they are about reliability. Every batch of controllers is going to have some unreliable ones, so the fact that that doesn't stand out as the common complaint dragging the reviews down says something.

A lot of the rest of the choices for the sub sound sus, but not bothering to splurge on a game controller that cycles RGB is not worthy of a headline, IMO.

The newer models just add X-input, change the button faces from 1234 to ABXY, and made the wireless receiver smaller.

You know that saying that anybody can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands? From what I've seen and heard, Logitech has used their experience to make peripherals that barely last longer than the warranty/return period.

FWIW my 22 year old optical intellimouse from Microsoft is still going strong.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/LogitechG/comments/pt0fkp/logitech_...

Mass manufactured devices - particularly when they're mature - have the costs squeezed out of them to maximize profit. That means they ride the line close to failure to end of warranty.

Not many companies have NASA levels of "throw money at it until it works, and every part has been signed off on five times."

Absent that, I'm having trouble seeing how custom > COTS.

In all probability, anything in-house would have been worse and added new failure modes.

Better to buy, analyze, and adapt as needed.

And if it turns out you don't need to adapt, because failure modes aren't safety-critical or components are viable in the environment, then spend your time on something more useful.

You only need to spend a little time with a reliability engineer and see some of the calculations they do to start realizing how when even one or two components in a system have little corners cut, how it can drastically impact the overall safety of the system.

With the amount of corners cut on this submarine, I am unfortunately less than surprised at both the failure in the article and the crisis happening to it right now.

I hope all the souls aboard can somehow get home safe, and I hope the people who put them into this seemingly corners-cut vessel do not get to float any more craft, and that they didn't undersell the riskiness of this venture... although I'm unfortunately not optimistic about any of that.

I am pretty sure the camper's equipment industry too. I haven't seen many occurence of campers burning out and in most case it was caused by people smoking in their camper or forgetting to turn off gas stove.

Most people would refuse to play a video game with this controller, let alone use it as a critical component in a vehicle. Joystick drift in a videogame is frustrating. Joystick drift in a fucking submarine is a disaster waiting to happen.

Not the $30 Logitech controller, ever heard of joystick drift? plastic is plastic, imagine you in a mission, and your joystick starts to drift

I wish my friend whose mom bought him MadCatz controllers had your manners and sense of propriety.

It sounds like the screens could be used as backup control mechanisms, but I wonder how much time they'd lose making that transition.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/steam-deck-controls-a-real...

Edit: consumer joysticks normally use potentiometers, which aren't great for deadzones/drift. For things like dust incursion reasons along it would make sense for any industrial/military device to be using hall effect based joysticks.

https://i.imgur.com/lBWlh3i.png

Answer: Look underneath the floor. The Altec Lansing ACS33 PowerCube 2.1 speaker system. $35 used on eBay and again from early 2000s era. -> https://i.imgur.com/fVdQ9Pc.png

Not safety critical, but so extremely indicative of how careless every element of this thing was handled before they started putting rich people in it and sending them 2.5mi underwater. It's as if they put it together by raiding my basement when I was in high school. Unbelievable.

I'll admit I absolutely don't have this adventurous spirit, and I admire those who do. I'm sincerely praying for their successful rescue. But some of this does seem careless and possibly negligent.

* You can't let rescue services decide who deserves to be rescued -- for so many obvious reasons it would be patronizing to list them

* People with a lot of money and no sense can fuck things up on a massive scale if we let them do whatever they wanted

* Human society is not a free-for-all. As much as the civil libertarian tendencies in me want to say 'sure, do whatever you want, just don't mess with anyone else's stuff', it really isn't that simple

Shame and societal norms are a big deal in keeping people in check. Just getting yelled at in public for doing something objectionable is enough to keep most people from spitting indoors or pissing on crowded subway platform or what-have-you.

When shame doesn't work we rely on laws. Laws must be universally enforced and they must be fairly enforced and they must be seen to be enforced.

If we allow idiots with stupid ideas to get lucky enough times then they become looked up to and the shame goes away.

To the same end if the shame doesn't stop them we need to physically stop them or take away their ability to do the societally harmful thing they want to do.

People need to re-learn that you should be embarrassed for failing when what you strove to do was stupid and destructive.

But this is why regulations exist in the first place. That's like saying we shouldn't regulate surgery, because it's always risky.

We should require certain credentials and safety measures for people who want to take civilians to the ocean floor in a tiny sub. I don't think that should be a controversial take.

The onus to make sure that a service they are going to use isn't any more dangerous than it has to be, shouldn't be on the consumer. I don't want to live in a society that thinks it's acceptable to hand-wave death and suffering away as if human lives are acceptable collateral in the "free market" correcting itself.

Customers would still understand that the thing they're going to do is super dangerous, but they should be able to rest easy knowing that the company they're using for this meets some minimal level of safety.

Whatever you feel about Elon Musk, I appreciate his distinction in approach between crewed and un-crewed craft at SpaceX. I'm paraphrasing but he has said that when something is uncrewed, you can push it to the limit over and over again to push the technology fwd. But the second you have people on board (i.e. Crew Dragon), the margin for error goes down to zero. There are unavoidable risks, but you want to be damn sure you've minimized the avoidable ones. So you can be both -- a fast moving startup, and a "safe" organization.

Obv we still know so little about the Titan, but what upsets me is that the 'uncrewed' extreme testing does not (afaik) seem to have been particularly rigorous.

They knew things could not be done and kept up the charade for long enough to profit off of it, and hopefully get away.

Social media has shown to be pretty destructive. I don’t think there are many low stakes areas for software. It’s all impactful and potentially harmful at scale.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-55904-2

Could be a pop of the hull that then flooded the inside almost immediately. Would like to see failure tests of how these kinds of hulls fail.

Other subs that failed with other hull designs were pretty gruesome, like Scorpion

As a Quality Assurance person, this is what drives me up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the other wall.

You can always do a test run. Not doing that test run is essentially saying every person you subject to that system is not worth the trouble of doing the test.

In practical terms if push came to shove, an Xbox or PS controller is probably more reliable than most equivalent devices. My stock phrase when comparing normal functions with Safety Instrumented Functions is "I'd trust this with my car, but not my life."

What matters is not the process, but the result. For example, SpaceX are using iterative approach in their design and they now have the most reliable rocket in history.

As long as it can jettison the ballast (and is not tangled up in something on the seabed, say, the Titanic), it will come to the surface.

Usually, the people in these sports say if the worst were to happen to them, they accept that risk and wouldn’t want their fate to stop other people from following their passions. That the feeling of being alive chasing these dreams fulfills a part of them, and they would be lost without that fulfillment.

We all do take risks for our own happiness, different people just want different things from life and will drawn that line in different places.

My guess is the five people on the sub would not want this incident to stop people from attempting to visit the Titanic.

I would largely tune the media out on this. They have no more special insight than you or I. All that's known is that a sub has gone dark; everything else is speculation. Within 3 days we'll know for certain whether the people on the ship have been rescued, or are dead. In case it's the latter, we won't have any realistic idea of what happened until the sub, or its remains, are recovered. And that may simply not happen.

[1] - https://www.oceangate.com/news-and-media/press-releases/2020...

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo1.h...

https://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/invest.html

Where a small fire in a controlled environment killed people in 30 seconds?

or this, where they didn't listen to the engineer?

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781...

NASA isn't a magical place where they don't mess things up

My point was, why would this content be gated.

Well, as 'TV Licence', since that's the spelling of the noun outside the US ;)

Last paragraph:

"This ship is exactly what the Navy needs, when it needs it," agreed EB President John P. Casey, who was on board during the trials. "There is no substitute for the Virginia-class submarine."

Testing included its first dive to max depth.

There was one article I read last year (don't have it here) where he claimed his hard costs were $1M per voyage to cover fuel and consumables. So the $250k buy-in was literally a break-even on his expenses (he carries 4 passengers paying the fee, plus himself in the sub). None of that covers any R&D and he had some very respectable people working for him, including engineers from Boeing, NASA, and Northdrop Grumman. So we can assume those were hefty salaries for his R&D team.

I'm sure they were scrappy too, hence the "cobbled" together nature of things. But it does seem like this was a true startup in ever sense of the word.

Unfortunately it might be leaning closer to the Theranos type of startup where he might have oversold his capabilities to keep the ball rolling and investors happy.

(Lesson learned the hard way)

It's probably the goal, but complex endeavors mean you need to iterate to get there

It’s a tragedy, but high risk activities are by definition going to have a few.

Or then you take things slow and you end up like NASA who has not launched any new rocket in years. Is that better?

If you want to carry paying passengers then things are different, but that's why they were officially crew.

(Crew members who are paying to be there has a very long history. One of the last lines operating sailing ships, in the 1920s and 30s, made money from merchant marine cadets whose countries still required them to have a certain amount of experience as crew of a sailing vessel to get their ticket.)

If it’s uncle bob in his garage I’d be fine with lack of regulation, but when he starts commercially selling his trips he’d need to pass safety standards.

I've worked at some companies that manage huge systems that affects tens of millions of people, which cause extremely severe problems if they break, and they are "cobbled" together with a surprising amount of metaphorical bubble gum and duct tape.

Every time I go somewhere new, I assume they have their shit together and I am surprised every time.

So no, it doesn't surprise me that an operation like this was cobbled together in the same fashion.

Yes, my impression is that this feels naive, especially if reflects a more general viewpoint of surprise when organizations do negligent things. The law of large numbers combined with human nature seems to statistically all-but guarantee such failures over a few decades.

> ... The tacit assumption seems to be that there is an agency, a government, an organization, that would review and approve such endeavors.

No. You made that tacit assumption, not the commenter before you. This assumption makes it easy to setup a straw man.

> But that's just not how the world works. You can't stop people from going to sea, or sending contraptions to the bottom. It's a very big world, filled with mostly ocean, and plenty of thrill-seekers who will attempt anything half-way reasonable. Even 10% reasonable. You can't stop that...

This is a false dichotomy. A more apropos question is how to reduce undesirable outcomes.

> ... To get it you'd need a nanny state ...

"Nanny state" is loaded language, "... rhetoric used to influence an audience by using words and phrases with strong connotations. This type of language is very often made vague to more effectively invoke an emotional response and/or exploit stereotypes." - Wikipedia

> ... that snoops on everyone ...

More loaded language.

> and steps in to stop you "for your own safety".

More loaded language.

> It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand.

Are you using the slippery slope fallacy? I'm not quite sure.

Regardless, wise public policy is not exclusively based on such an approach of imagining things getting out of hand. There are better ways. To name just one, scenario planning is a powerful way of combining probabilistic decision-making across potential scenarios.

You aren't explicitly stating your political philosophy, but I'd bet it underlies your thinking here. I just hope that you are open to hypothesis-testing and avoiding dogma.

## Useful Responses

There is a wide menu of public responses and/or policy instruments available to reduce undesirable outcomes and promote desirable ones.

It is an interesting question, I think, not one that should be quickly dismissed. Legally, jurisdiction seems to be a good place to start. Culturally and economically, what motivates such negligent underwater attempts? Maybe it isn't the top problem in the world to solve, but I think too many tech people have a huge blind spots and pretend to know more than they actually do. This example is newsworthy, fun, tragic, and not particularly politically charged, best I can tell. So why not use some good reasoning here and discuss it?

We have laborious and very expensive approval processes for airplanes, ask the 737 MAX inspector from the FAA how well that guarded against bad engineering.

If even the bad engineering is at fault here (unknown as of writing this).

I think the former is totally fine and there's no need for governments to get involved, while the latter is pretty bad and very possible to regulate.

A lot of ocean activity is thoroughly regulated. For example: https://www.imo.org/en/About/Conventions/Pages/International...

Moreover, It's not like they're getting paid in sand dollars or doubloons from the bottom of the sea. The passengers are signing contracts and paying large fees in landlubber currencies. There's a company involved here, a legal entity. The company is based in Washington State.

If this was really not covered by any law in any country with a plausible claim on it, you can bet that people will soon be clamoring for one. Remember that air travel was once entirely unregulated. Now it's one of the most highly controlled activities. A lot of regulation like that happens in response to notable disasters; the regulations are, as they say, "written in blood."

People who pay for that kind of trip know the dangers and have money enough to do their own due diligence.

Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety. I seriously doubt the passengers onboard were aware of OceanGate’s whistleblower lawsuit or the claim that the viewport is not rated for the depth it is used at. When interviewed by the BBC, the company represented their submersible as very safe, certainly not as something likely to kill its passengers.

How is it a “nanny state” or “snooping” to require businesses to be honest about their service? This isn’t even necessarily an action a government would have to perform - it could be carried out by classification societies [0]. Do whatever you like with your own experimental sub, but don’t misrepresent it as a safe sightseeing trip for tourists.

> It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand.

It’s even easier to imagine scenarios where a business is allowed to sell trips on a vessel with critical safety issues that the company knew of but did not disclose or address.

We have remedies for these real scenarios - they are called laws and regulations.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_classification_society

This is exactly why we need less government and be slower to call for laws. Human nature cannot be changed despite our belief that it can be.

The same lazy decisions that led to this potential event can also be used to destroy lives.

At the end of the day we are all accountable for our selves.

A nanny state is telling you how to live your life. An example is when NYC banned large soft drinks or when we listed marijuana as a schedule 1 drug. Registration of a mode of transportation is hardly a nanny state activity because vehicles inherently pose a risk to others whether as a passenger or someone sharing proximity with you.

You can certainly build your own car and register it. They're often called salvage titles; this is true for airplane kits too, but you also have to be able to prove the worthiness of the machine. We have lots of process and administration to take care of this, but for whatever reason it didn't work here.

- they didn't do a test dive first with no humans on board

- they didn't do a test dive with just staff, no paying customers

- the first "test" was to the full depth where the craft would be basically unrecoverable

- they didn't seem to even test these things ashore... Because you'd find out if the damn motor was on backwards!

If true, this strikes me as beyond amateurish and outright insane.

4,000 meters should mean 400 bars of pressure from the water, would the thing need to be inflated at more than 400 bar?

I imagine maybe carbon fiber would be better in tension (e.g. airframes) than in compression (this), perhaps. Or do carbon fiber and titanium not get along somehow?

(EDIT: Had tension and compression backwards.)

There you go :-)

Tesla likes to boast about the safety of their cars, and while I don't deny this, I believe that the safety is an accidental side-effect of the inherent properties of building a car with no explosive fuel and a heavy battery pack at the very bottom of the car.

Haven't they? They've removed radar from their cars and now the AEB system uses image recognition. Does any other manufacturer do that?

Much more concerning are the potential flaws in the carbon fiber hull, as disclosed during the David Lochridge lawsuit (mentioned in another thread), the rumoured lack of surface radios, the limited communication with the surface, the lack of any exits, and even the use of carbon fiber (which is strong in tension, good for high pressure tanks, but weak in compression -- not what I'd want for a submarine under massive compression)

So many problems with this scheme, though. No rigorous test (depth, survival, atmosphere), lack of SMEs, carbon fiber hull, failed to learn lessons from aviation (don't lock people in a room that can burn), lack of ventilation, failure to provide emergency breathing, no voice comms, and finally the comms loss during testing that was normalized as operating procedure.

All you'd have to do is not make one of those mistakes, and you'd be doing a better job. These are all issues that are solved on US Navy subs, where we train hundreds of people every year to work on and retire just as many. You don't need to know all these systems, though, just find a retired sub chief and have them walk you through the safety systems.

One thing I've picked up working in software, is that you can enter new domains with relative ease if you just align yourself with experts, and at least listen to their advice. This isn't something that happened on the sub, and I'd be surprised if it ultimately didn't contribute to the total vehicle loss.

https://www.chronline.com/stories/woman-paralyzed-in-toledo-...

I really hope that the foresight of the MTS is recognized amongst the general public, and the DSV space doesn’t suffer a setback in perception and/or funding. At present, it does seem like the general sentiment is that this specific submersible was built to an incredibly poor standard when compared to, say, the famed Alvin or Deepsea Challenger. I hope that sentiment holds.

https://www.cpsc.gov/content/bicycle-requirements-business-g...