Most old engineers I’ve worked with are terrible and many younger ones are way more talented.
He proudly describes it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkytJa0ghc
As for the carbon fibre:
>OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush says the company had been evaluating the potential of using a carbon fiber composite hull since 2010, primarily because it permits creation of a pressure vessel that is naturally buoyant and, therefore, would enable OceanGate to forgo the use — and the significant expense — of syntactic foam on its exterior. So, for Cyclops 2 OceanGate decided to avoid the metallic hull altogether and began a search for a manufacturer that could help it develop a composite hull.
https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersib...
Handing the controller around smells like marketing wank, especially when you learn they bolted down the shitter and made the controls remote. Seems like an odd tradeoff. I’d be inclined to use a portable toilet or diapers and firmly attach the controls to the sub near the only window. People can still take turns.
Maybe the intent was for someone to peak out the window to perform a maneuver.
Still, I hope there was a wired controller as a backup just in case.
I would wager that safety is better - not least because standards are tougher - on almost every amusement ride around.
I kind of envision this craft as being a sealed capsule full of humans with all the propulsion equipment and batteries strapped to the outside and controlled wirelessly from the inside. But I haven't seen a full diagram of how Oceangate worked. Like, how did CO2 get scrubbed from the cabin?
The Bluetooth?
Eh. It was there.
The sad thing is, the carbon fiber hull material may not necessarily be a totally losing proposition if you can make the carbon fiber hull module swappable and recyclable, and testable.
Evidently they got, what? 20ish descents to service depth before it lost integrity?
If you worked from there, and figured out those pesky details, you could make something workable.
In fact, we may even be lauding the man if they'd done the 30 + journeys to service depth unmanned, and used the data collected from scanning/ultrasounding or otherwise probing that hull piece to draw strong, clear, unambiguous bars around "number of trips til new hull needs to be swapped in".
Nobody would fault the guy for doing that, and he may have truly advanced the State of the Art in ways he'd still be alive to enjoy.
But here we are.
- Battle-tested and easily replaceable, compared to a custom one.
- Cables have a snapping risk in that limited physical space, Bluetooth solves it and there's no risk of EMI 4km underwater anyway.
The carbonfiber structure... that's another story. Terrible.
It is battle tested by being used by so many people around the world.
I don't understand what you imply by "3rd party". 3rd party in relation to what exactly in this context?
Logitech makes some great mice but their game controllers are notoriously poor quality for the price, especially since the first party controllers aren't much more expensive.
Some of the "weird brand" gamepads like 8bitdo are considered better than Logitech or even Nintendo!
The navy uses the standard actually battle tested xbox controller and the logitech one has many 1 star reviews on amazon, enough said.
You can literally search on google and see this in 5 seconds, it's bizarre that it keeps being spouted in some posts, almost makes me a bit suspicious because it's so dumb.
How about the batteries that are required to power a wireless controller? Everything on a patchwork sub needs to be at least n+2 across failure domains. I wouldn't have gone in that sub even with n+5 and a paycheck TBH.
How much money was he trying to save here? Competitive gamers with a way lower net worth stick to tethered controllers for a reason, low latency and reliable connection.
Furthermore, I can believe a bunch of b/millionaires being duped into paying a non-refundable $250k. But I am struggling with the fact that they saw the abyssal porta potty and the BT controller, and still thought it was wise to enter.
The best case scenario here was an 8 hour trip in a space that's worse than long haul Economy to see Titanic ruins on a TV screen. I really don't get the value proposition here.
That poor kid.
- Cables have a snapping risk in that limited physical space, Bluetooth solves it and there's no risk of EMI 4km underwater anyway.
Controls could also be mounted directly to a fixed panel, as is the case in most (all?) other submarines
My engineer brain says that moving from 'wired' to 'bluetooth' for a safety-critical connection is pure lunacy. I don't think any objective appraisal could reasonably conclude that this decreased risk or increased safety. Bluetooth is not even close to reliable enough for this application, and neither is any other wireless technology as far as I know
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve looked at a project by some engineer in their 20s, and it is so over-engineered and complicated, entirely lacking in any ability to future proof against onboarding or feature development, so clever they probably are very proud of themselves, but mostly useless.
Hubris like this will leave you joining the other ghosts floating around the wreck of the titanic shortly.