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Comment by dmonitor | Hacker News Reader

> That's an awful lot of keyboard engineering, given nobody knows what happened yet.

Unless I'm mistaken, the subject article starts with the words "Submarine missing". The fact that the whole thing was jury rigged and double checked by nobody with certifications is enough to start pointing fingers at the engineers.

This isn't the company's first trip either. They've taken multiple trips down and have almost lost the submarine multiple times. This time they actually managed to lose it for good.

The reason people are mad at the company is because their negligence killed 4 people for no good reason.

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I'm also annoyed at the company for all the public emergency resources being forced to help rescue this contraption.

Budgets are unfortunately a zero sum game, and I have to wonder if there are much more obvious ways to save lives more efficiently with the amount of money it’s costing the US government to undertake a massive and technically complex search for 5 people.

If you're going to go down that route, please direct it at the cost of the US military's unfathomably high spending.

There's capital and then operational costs.

If a Coast Guard ship heads out of St. John's or a Navy aircraft/ship/submarine transits to the area, they burn fuel but already existed with all their trained personnel.

So most of the cost is moving things into position. Expensive, but the asset probably would have been moving somewhere anyway.

I thought about this, and came to the conclusion that the coastguard and especially military see it as a good opportunity to test their equipment and procedures for real.

And seafarers have a strong code of ethics about helping other seafarers.

As long as they aren't brown.

Whilst I agree, and I hope the vessel had adequate insurance for such an eventuality, it's a excellent "training" exercise.

Real world scenarios which don't involve any enemy combatants are invaluable to keep everyone at peak readiness

It's also a little annoying to hear their lead adviser, David Concannon, complain about government moving too slowly: https://youtu.be/nW3r01_ZWmY

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/oceangate-...

He's representing a company that took safety shortcuts because government regulations slow innovation, but is also complaining that the government isn't helping them quickly enough in this search.

He thanks the governments, but says they need to move faster. As an adviser, he should be telling this company to have a better emergency plan.

Yes. "Missing"

Assuming it sunk, it'll be order of week before it's found. It'll be order of month before it's raised, if it can be. And then after analysis we might know why it sunk.

+60 hours after lost contact, while there are possibly still people alive inside the vehicle, seems premature and crass to be casting accusations for internet points.

The fact that they can’t even find it is in part because they didn’t outfit it with any capability to send a distress signal. They lost it multiple times but never added a radio beacon or anything.

Sonar beacon. Radio is useless underwater.

It reportedly has radar reflectors and radio, for when it's on the surface.

At 3800 m+ underwater, it'd need to be a powerful beacon. Even most military sonar maxes out around half that.

Couldn't you have a beacon that detaches from the vehicle, floats up to the surface and transmits the signal from there?

You'd need to carry 4km of cable with you

AKA an EPIRB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_...

You can buy one for a few hundred bucks, but based on everything I've read about this outfit so far, I'd be surprised if they even had that.

It's possible that it's floating just under the surface, in which case the radar reflectors won't help. Radar also isn't necessarily _great_ at finding anything bobbing in waves, as water will itself reflect radar.

Additionally, if the problem was a power outage then the radio also might not work unless it had a separate power supply.

Emergency beacons cost a few hundred dollars and are designed for this purpose, not having one is pure negligence.

If they're on the bottom of the ocean then even if they're found a rescue is unlikely to happen in time.

They claim the vehicle has consumables to last 4 days, so while it’s a little premature at 3 days in to declare it’s over, if you have an injured person that requires an EMT and the ambulance won’t get there until the situation devolves…

In these situations you don’t do everything you can because it will change the outcome. You do everything you can so that someday soon you’ll be able to look at yourself in the mirror while you brush your teeth. So you can sleep at night.

I haven’t been in this bad of a situation, but I’ve been in plenty where people second guessed themselves or someone else for years even decades after. Everyone has to get to “enough” on their own terms or it festers.

So we are letting a bunch of people figure it out. If a miracle happens, awesome. But unless they’re all trance meditating down there and have Wim Hoff hypothermia training it’s not good.

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