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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

Does he ever explain why carbon fiber and bluetooth were improvements over working technology?

I read somewhere that by reducing the weight of the hull, it eliminated the need for the expensive tooling traditionally needed on the mothership to hoist the vessel in and out of the water. This was key to the business model of his shoestring budget amusement park ride to the bottom of the sea.

> amusement park ride

I would wager that safety is better - not least because standards are tougher - on almost every amusement ride around.

"Carnival park ride" would have been more apt. Those things aren't nearly as safe as the rides at real amusement parks.

I remember seeing a claim that the Bluetooth part was a feature since you could just "pass the controller" inside the cabin but I haven't been able to find a source for it.

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...

> I remember seeing a claim that the Bluetooth part was a feature since you could just "pass the controller" inside the cabin but I haven't been able to find a source for it.

Here: https://youtu.be/ClkytJa0ghc?t=40

Thanks for the citation.

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.

It kind of makes sense considering the only viewport is on the opposite side of the submarine away from the PCs which interface with the controls.

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.

The carbon fiber obviated the need for expensive to produce syntactic foams.

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.

Is it possible that you can keep the carbon fiber hull as a solid piece with no penetrations, making it more watertight?

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?

To lower costs in order to attract more billionaire customers.

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