Titanic tourist sub photos show wreckage being brought ashore | Hacker News Reader

Titanic tourist sub photos show wreckage being brought ashore

bbc.com

88 pointstartoran190 comments

The first image does show the porthole without any glass (acrylic) in it, but I'm sure an implosion would be violent enough to blow it out anyway. I'm going to be very interested in what they determine to be the critical failure point. Porthole is a possibility, but there were some other points of failure in the joining of the titanium domes to the carbon composite hull.

I'm interested in seeing the skids, and learning about where they were found relative to the rest of the debris. Were the skids totally mangled, implying that they were attached when the implosion occurred? Is the debris field pretty contained, or very spread out? The former implies that the sub was close to the bottom, the latter implies that whatever happened occurred at a depth which allowed for currents and drift to spread the debris. If the skids are mostly intact then maybe there was some warning of trouble and the people in the sub tried to drop ballast. If the skids are destroyed then whatever happened is more likely to have been sudden and without warning.

Yes, this technique was critical to understanding the break up of the space shuttle Columbia as it re-entered. The debris track stretched across Texas and Louisiana, and in general objects to the west were those that had broken off first. Although things were confused because differences in ballistic number affected how far fragments travelled eastward, and in some cases modules broke off, travelled east and then disintegrated into sub-components.

From everything I've read, the entire carbon section of the hull could be considered a weak point.

> the entire carbon section of the hull could be considered a weak point

It is possible that the carbon fibre delaminated catastrophically, possibly as a result of stresses accumulated over multiple descents.

The only way the carbon tube hasn't turned to sea dust is if the porthole failed first. When carbon fibre fails it catastrophically fails. I'd put money on the joint between the ti and carbon being the weak point and once there's a chip in the carbon under that much pressure it'll disintigrate.

fair points. Hopefully the investigation will nail the actual cause down.

This is my understanding as well. I'm not surprised to see that the titanium piece survived unscathed. IIRC, the companies goal was to provide more cost-effective trips by transitioning from the standard solid titanium hull to a Ti/carbon fiber composite. This decision was controversial. They fired their head of QC after he strongly opposed the change. One key argument he made was that the design prevented ultrasonic inspection, which would mean that they could not monitor the health of the composite over time.

To be clear, way too much of what I've read on this subject has been excessively confident tut-tutting with little to no real engineering expertise.

People want to imagine that the simple use of carbon fiber here was the sole mistake, I guess because it's easy to understand and makes us feel smart. But come on, engineering is harder than that. Carbon fiber pressure vessels have a long history. Composite material failure modes are for sure more complicated than metals but they certainly aren't a mystery. We've been using composites for more than half a century, we know how they work.

No, my gut says the root cause here (if we ever find one[1]) is going to turn out to be a more routine kind of engineering fuckup. It'll be just some weak point that the analysis failed to turn up.

[1] And sure, if we don't then the "carbon fiber death cylinder" theory will just become part of the folk truth, I guess.

There are non-trivial differences in designing vessels loaded with compression vs. tension, and the most experience we have is with internal pressure (e.g. tension).

The analysis is very nonlinear and unfortunately not as widely understood as internally pressurized vessels. It requires a lot more analysis, troubleshooting, and expertise that is short in supply.

Add the additional catastrophic failure modes for composites and there's a reason that industry experts warned against this.

With respect: that's exactly the kind of glib, drive-by analysis I'm talking about. What you're saying simply isn't true. People have been testing composites in pressure chambers and every load imaginable for decades. Yes, clearly they don't act like steel. But saying that it's impossible is just too easy.

Just watch. It's going to be a routine design flaw, like they added a joint or a wiring hole in a bad place and didn't re-run the model.

(Edit because this was misunderstood: I'm not saying what the failure is. I'm saying that we DON'T KNOW what the failure is, and that given the choice between makes-me-feel-smart pontification about materials and a routine design flaw in a prototype device, I'm going to bet on the routine failure every single time.)

Just watch. It's going to be a routine design flaw, like they added a joint or a wiring hole in a bad place and didn't re-run the model.

I like how you complain about people making glib drive-by analyses (that are at least based on actual submersible experts saying they shouldn't have used carbon fiber) by making a glib drive-by analysis that's based on pure conjecture.

It was a turn of phrase. I made the same point in a neutral, non-prescriptive manner (c.f "My gut says") upthread. Taking that sentence out of context is pretty poor form, whether you agree with me or not.

I'm going to put my trust in the engineer who was overridden and fired for calling the thing a death trap before it killed five people. The thing was down-rated to 3000m and then it was used at 4000m therefore it imploded. I'd call that a management flaw more than an engineering flaw.

You're mixing things up. The hull that was downrated after inspection was a different submarine. The guy who was fired was an executive, not an engineer on the project (no idea about his background), and while he expressed concerns over safety he did not cite the use of carbon fiber as a problem (or at least it hasn't been reported that he did).

Which is all to say: basing your opinions on this stuff on easily-consumed, tempting pseudoanalysis clickbait is a terrible way to figure out what went wrong. And in particular putting your ducks in this carbon fiber nonsense instead of "they probably just put a hole in the wrong place" seems poorly grounded to me.

Just want to say, I appreciate your contributions here, from one grizzled engineer to ... well, I don't know if you're grizzled, but I can tell you're a good engineer. Good engineering isn't a popularity contest, it's a thoroughness contest.

>while he expressed concerns over safety he did not cite the use of carbon fiber as a problem (or at least it hasn't been reported that he did).

That’s exactly what I have seen reported.

>But Lochridge, according to the suit, raised concerns about the design of the submersible's hull, particularly that it was made of carbon fiber instead of a metallic composition.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/lawsuit-alleged-flaws-titanic-subm...

But - sincere question, as I am largely ignorant on such matters: Those pressure vessels made from composites usually are used to contain a pressure on the inside, taking advantage of the excellent tensile strength of the carbon fibers, no?

Having to withstand a large, external pressure is a whole different cup of tea, isn't it?

(Please be gentle; I am an electronics engineer)

I have the same question! How can the tensile strength of carbon fibers be an asset if the forces are compressive?

Carbon fiber is stronger per weight in compression too, just not by the same amount.

Again, composites aren't exotic. We've been building with them for decades and decades. It is surely possible that the root cause here was an incorrect accounting for some or another failure mode in the composite hull. It is likewise possible that given correct analysis, carbon fiber just isn't a good material for this application.

But the absolutism of declaring, absent evidence, that carbon fiber hulled submarines are impossible, or that this was the sole reason for the implosion, is just ridiculous. Engineering is more complicated than that.

But (and this is my electronics engineer mind still trying to wrap my head around this) - when you pressurize a vessel made from composites, the tensile strength helps keep it all together, which is trivially intuitive.

When the same vessel sees an exterior pressure, wouldn't basically the full force have to be borne by the epoxy, making, say, knitting yarn as effective a material for holding the thing together as carbon fiber?

(I assume there's some flaw in the above reasoning...)

As for the observed absolutism, I mostly agree - my one nitpick would be that from what I've seen, it is a much more challenging material to monitor, the vessels tend to fail catastrophically rather than gracefully, and, well, let's just say that there were a couple of seemingly bold design choices being made by the OceanGate team, choices which weren't validated through sufficient testing afterwards.

That would be my main criticism, based solely on news reports: That OceanGate appeared to think 'move fast and break things' was an appropriate design philosophy when the stakes were people's lives.

A simple (as such things go...) action like doing numerous unmanned test cycles on a Titan sub to rated depth would have shown what challenges were still unsolved. Instead they basically did the test cycles on manned dives. That was, uh, bolder still.

No. The matrix bears the transverse forces in a composite. The epoxy is there to prevent the fibers from bending or buckling. The carbon holds the compression.

> The epoxy is there to prevent the fibers from bending or buckling.

But isn't that what's external pressure comes down too? The material that keeps the hull from buckling?

> People want to imagine that the simple use of carbon fiber here was the sole mistake

Some people might characterize it as likely being the decisive mistake, but I’ve yet to hear anyone describe that as the sole mistake, there being so many obvious failures.

> Carbon fiber pressure vessels have a long history.

But does deliberately playing with the service life of carbon fiber for pressure vessels have a long history?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/23/titanic-subm...

This submersible involves a field where there is a lot of hard-won experience of how to do things safely, but where much of that experience was overtly viewed by the firm as “waste”.

This sub is not a pressure vessle though, is it?

Here's a video of hydraulic pressing carbon fiber to its breaking point: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xWTXeGiM8K8

Worth noting that because he's using a hydraulic press, the load isn't constant.

It deforms, fibers break, and thus the load decreases as the deflection stays relatively constant in that time frame.

With external pressure the load doesn't decrease. Fibers break -> deflection increases -> more fibers break. There isn't load relief as long as the vessel is still holding pressure.

It is even worse. The load increases with deflation

Imagine how frightening it would have been to hear those crackles inside the submarine. (In reality, however, they had no warning of the impending collapse.)

I'll speculate that because they are pulling pieces of the Ti domes without signs of carbon attached to it that the joint there wasn't stiff enough, and that carbon separated during failure without plastically deforming the Ti at the joint.

But, that's speculation and I'd need to see more pics with more details.

I would speculate that all of the carbon basically instantaneously liquefied under the pressure after a critical threshold of fibers failed, leaving the Ti untouched.

I also want to mention that the large end caps you are seeing weren't bonded to the hull at all- there was a small Ti flange epoxied to the hull, and then the large domes were bolted to that. The front, with the window, was unbolted and rebolted every time for ingress/egress.

There is no way that CF epoxied to thick Ti is going to make a strong enough bond that it will deform the Ti when it detaches. In this case, the geometry of that "glued" joint was such that it was forced together by the pressure underwater, rather than pulled apart- so it was not necessary for it to have any real strength other than for holding the end caps on at the surface, and filling voids to make it seal.

I see. Thus that large Ti flange that was bonded to the dome didn't carry a load through the bolts significant enough to deform the dome either. Carbon gone in a flash and comes apart at that joint totally, Ti is left hanging in water.

I was hoping to see if that titanium flange was still bolted to the cap, but it's obscured by the tarp in the photo.

I just saw this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP4SrLhUHY8

Those tarps may be covering what's left of the crew

In that case, I'm glad that it's covered.

The hull imploded, not the window, but the shockwave probably pushed the window outward or shattered it, as it was only held strongly against moving inwards.

People make a big deal about the acrylic glass not being rated for the depth, but I think it's almost impossible that it was the window, and think it must have been the hull:

  * The properties acrylic are well understood, and the strength of an acrylic disc is trivial to calculate, even if not "rated" you can easily calculate if it's strong enough
  * The window should fail visually with a lot of warning before rupture
  * If the window failed with the titanium end cap, there would be no reason for implosion of the carbon fiber hull

The hull on the other hand is an irregular/non-homogenous part that is impossible to model accurately. There was no way to know how strong it was without extensive testing on a number of identical hulls- which they never did. The solidworks modeling method they used to give a ~2x margin of safety was nonsense as it ignores the realities of stress cycles, defects, etc.

The monitor mounts screwed directly into the hull seem a likely starting point for the failure.

In the photos I've seen, it was pretty clear that they had a separate inner hull for mounting stuff. If they really drilled into the outer hull, it wouldn't have survived the first trip as that would have certainly caused matrix cracking that propagated to the skin. It would have failed in the first 1000 meters.

> The monitor mounts screwed directly into the hull seem a likely starting point for the failure.

Nothing was screwed directly into the hull:

> These handle-lights aren’t attached to the carbon fiber. The sub is lined with a big insert, a perforated metal sleeve, that fits snugly against the carbon fiber, like a rolled-up poster in a mailing tube. “The thing with carbon fiber is you can’t cut holes in it. It doesn’t like that,” Rush says. “Nothing touches the carbon fiber.”

— David Pogue in “What I Learned on a Titanic Sub Expedition” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/what-i-learned-on-a-...

That’s just random 4chan speculation passed off as fact.

How was the window "connected" to the hull? Would that be a weak point?

Deep sea portholes are usually cones of acrylic that seat right into a port in the hull [0]

[0]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340442621_Predictio...

This sub was a carbon fiber cylinder with two titanium end-caps, and the porthole was fitted into the forward end-cap.

They machine a wide ledge on the titanium, so the window is pushed into the groove/sill under pressure, basically a large window that is covering a smaller hole that it can't fit through. For all practical purposes, it justs sits on there and the pressure holds it on. It would also have bolts and/or sealant to keep it in place when not diving.

> The hull on the other hand is ... is impossible to model accurately.

Why is the hull difficult to accurately model? (assuming the exact materials and precise dimensions were known).

Carbon fiber can't be inspected like metals can using radiographic, liquid penetrant, or magnetic particle testing, so even if we did know the exact materials and precise dimensions [1], it's very hard to characterize them and how they responds to stresses.

[1] composite materials are not as homogeneous as metals are, so most of the time we actually don't know the exact materials and precise dimensions. Only manufacturers that make enough parts to afford to do destructive testing can characterize the process enough to make reliable guarantees about part strength.

There are a variety of non-destructive inspection and testing methods for composite, like ultrasonic c-scans and pulsed thermography that I know of.

And you can produce reliable composite parts (you don't want homogenous, but them to come out exactly as spec'ed) under strict control, but it doesn't look like they necessarily did that here. They seem to have eg foregone autoclave curing of the tube section probably due to cost.

They could have identified defects with non-destructive testing, but they almost certainly would have found a huge number of them, and had no way to reliably model the importance/potential impact of them.

We're talking about a bunch of layers of fibers, and woven cloth impregnated in epoxy. It's a pretty messy, irregular thing with voids, gaps, broken fibers, etc. even if you lay it up robotically (as they did).

The modeling they did assumes a perfect material, and then adds some arbitrary factor of safety that will hopefully account for imperfections. It probably would have been fine if only used for one dive, but not after a substantial number of fibers had snapped as the hull flexed across numerous dives.

Can we assume that if the acrylic was a point of failure, then the whole titanium end cap section would appear much more damaged, than what we can see on those pictures?

Doesn't it depend on the type of failure? Apparently it didn't break but might have deformed to the point that the seal was compromised.

Assuming violent implosion.

> The window should fail visually with a lot of warning before rupture

The window would deform up to 2" during dives, according to passengers.

That does sound pretty sketchy... but from what I've heard, acryrlic should start to fracture in a way that makes it opaque before it catastrophically fails.

The time between opaque and failure might be little at that pressure.

Somewhat related (possible material fatigue):

A 16-meter (52-foot) high aquarium has burst at a hotel in downtown Berlin (2022): https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-massive-aquarium-home-to-1500-f...

Manufacturer: https://www.reynoldspolymer.com/projects/aquadom/

> If the window failed with the titanium end cap, there would be no reason for implosion of the carbon fiber hull

I feel like if the window failed then the sheer momentum of inrushing water could detach titanium cap on the opposite end of the sub. A bit like you can break the bottom o a glass bottle by hitting the bottle from the top which causes the water in the bottle to separate from the bottom of the container and then come back down with enough momentum to break the bottom.

It seems likely much more effort will go into evaluating the failure than went into designing this submersible. It would be interesting to know how much more.

Videos of the thing being built show a very sloppy epoxy job of joining the titanium ring to the carbon fiber hull. There seems to be no dust control, no climate control, and no attempt to make sure the epoxy is free of voids. I've honestly seen more care go into random youtubers making "river tables" than the epoxy job that went into this critical structural junction.

Curious how this is recovered. So they send down another submersible that is able to attach a cable to debris that can be pulled up by a winch?

Yes, it's done via ROV's with manipulator arms that attach salvage cables to them. Way less failure prone than trying to bring them up with the ROV's directly because the ROV's are normally tethered via a fairly light duty tether that's connected to a base station that raises/lowers the craft. That keeps things much more maneuverable because the ROV doesn't have to drag around thousands of feet of cable, and, it provides some damping from any movement of the host ship operating it.

Additionally, the ROV can stay submerged, looking for other things to grab, while salvage cables are raised/lowered. Doubly important because those sorts of winches run at ~1000ft/hr, and the wreck is ~12.5k feet down, so over a full day for one recovery.

They have 12k feet of cables?

No, they have cables over twice that long...

https://www.whoi.edu/what-we-do/explore/ships/ships-atlantis...

Worked on a software system for deep sea cranes, where they wanted us to be able to support them having 4000-8000m cables on the crane.

I have never hauled submersible wrecks from the seabed, but have recovered lots of other stuff from the same place.

Depending on the weight and bulk of the component, you'd likely do one out of three (at this depth; in shallower waters, you have more options)

a) Small-ish items are simply dropped in a basket attached to the ROV doing the recovery, then brought back to the surface with the ROV.

b) Larger items may be handled by the ROV to a basket suspended from a winch, then hoisted to the surface.

c) If the items are too large for the ROV to handle, it will be used to attach a sling to the item, which is then in turn attached to the hook of a crane/winch, before being hoisted to the surface.

and why did they do this? who paid for this recovery?

In the cases I've been involved in, it has largely been oil companies or their subcontractors footing the bill, occasionally scientists or, uh, treasure hunters. (I work for a company making this exact type of recovery gear, so every now and then I have to do some field work)

The U.S. Coast Guard is investigating the cause of the incident, so they are collecting evidence.

The Navy also has the FADOSS, though it wasn't needed here I believe. It can lift insane amounts, at insane depths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyaway_Deep_Ocean_Salvage_Sys...

-This was interesting, thanks!

It appears they utilize a passive system to dampen the effect of vessel movement, whereas in many (most?) other cases compensation is done actively by the traction unit (the twin drums with the rope looped over them in the center of the photo) and the storage winch (bottom) being wired to an accelerometer installed on the vessel.

I guess the navy uses the passive system as it will be good enough and does not require that you spend time figuring out the vessel geometry to input the data into the winch control system - which is just another source of problems when you're in a hurry.

I like this, it seems they've made the kit as simple and robust as possible while still fulfilling its intended purpose.

Unpopular sentiment, but: The comments and memes I've been seeing at just about every corner of the internet regarding this disaster is downright shameful and disgusting. I don't care if they had it coming or they were terrible people. It is fundamentally shocking for me to see so many people who I guess were just never brought up or taught to have some minimal value and sanctity for human life?

I always thought it was sort of a joke when people said "eat the rich", especially when they're living in developed countries.

People are the scariest monsters out there.

Celebrating someone's death means you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence, am I wrong in saying that?

It's not like I am rich or have some sort of billionaire-fetish. But a human being is a human being right? And it's a horrible thing to celebrate a person's death right? Even with bin laden's death, I understood celebrating defeat of an enemy but not death of someone's child/family.

This stuff combined with sentiment/hatred towards people who are politically hostile/disagreeable paints a picture of a bleak future for this society.

It's a different type of humor is all.

> Celebrating someone's death means you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence, am I wrong in saying that?

The right word is probably contempt. For example, contempt towards the rich and corporations for being responsible 1/2 of the inflation in the EU, while people are struggling.

Totally agree with you. I've found this very surprising too. (Perhaps I was naive).

Edit: The {at the time of writing} downvotes of your comment kind of further illustrates your point, sadly.

Agreed, the amount of hatred and us vs them mentality between groups that is forming online is really saddening. Different groups have their preferred target- "immigrants," "boomers," "billionaires," etc. to justify dehumanizing people, and blaming them for things based on some arbitrary category, rather than judging people by their own actions, and having empathy for people even if they did something you don't like.

Rush was arrogant, and made some big mistakes, but I don't wish death on him or his passengers. I do hope this example will serve as a warning for engineers in the future to be less arrogant, and more safety conscious.

I honestly haven't seen much of that on HN at all.

There's really three things that make this a hugely curious story. One is that it's relatively unique. The same way that car crashes don't make the news but plane crashes do - effectively, this is to plane crashes, as plane crashes are to car crashes.

Next, it's frankly interesting from an engineering point of view. Especially as it doesn't need to be your wheelhouse to understand the enormity of 2.7 tons per square inch. It's On with an 'n' that's obviously enormous.

And thirdly, the fact that the CEO appears to have ignored the experts and YOLO'd it, is hugely vindicating to anyone who considers them an expert in their niche. That's the closest this gets to schadenfreude for me.

The only thing really interesting about the people inside, is that it removed said CEO from the story so he can't answer for himself.

> I honestly haven't seen much of that on HN at all.

I read the parent comment as more a general commentary on the overall internet-wide reaction to this rather than being specifically about HN.

I agree with all your points. You summed up why this is interesting, relevant to this audience and worthy of analysis to see what we can learn from it.

I also agree with the parent that many (online and in media) seem to be showing very little respect for the deaths of fellow humans, based on arbitrary labels/assessments, when most of these "commentators" had never even heard of these unfortunate individuals before last week.

> it removed said CEO from the story so he can't answer for himself.

Yes this is worth repeating too. We're getting one side of the story from what has been rather sensationalist reporting all round. It looks on the face of it like he made some pretty terrible mistakes, but we don't know all the facts yet. I think inquiry is appropriate at this stage, but assassination of character before they've even finished recovering the debris [0], not so much.

[0] I would have said "buried the dead" but of course the families and friends have nothing to bury. If people can't feel empathy for the dead, perhaps they could at least spare a thought for their families.

> I honestly haven't seen much of that on HN at all.

dang is an excellent moderator :)

It's not as much as "celebrating someone's death" (you can't really celebrate the death of someone you didn't know even existed) as much as pointing out the idiocy of paying 250k dollars to see the Titanic in what can be only described as a MacGyvered cylinder of death, ignoring regulations, advice from experts, and even basic engineering. People being killed by their own hubris has usually been a source of comedy.

> This stuff combined with sentiment/hatred towards people who are politically hostile/disagreeable paints a picture of a bleak future for this society.

Well, something that might add context for you is that a lot of people already think the future for society is very, very bleak; and they think that the ones to blame are just like the ones in the submarine, specially the CEO. So it's no wonder there's not much empathy going around for them.

> It's not as much as "celebrating someone's death" (you can't really celebrate the death of someone you didn't know even existed...

I have seen many posts wishing elon and zuckergerg would also make a similar trip in this same context, not just celebrating but begging for more bloodshed.

> Well, something that might add context for you is that a lot of people already think the future for society is very, very bleak; and they think that the ones to blame are just like the ones in the submarine, specially the CEO. So it's no wonder there's not much empathy going around for them.

B.s.! Everyone making such posts is living in the best time to be alive in human history and most of them in developed countries which at a global scales makes them the filthy rich people! To me these are all spoilied rich brats with iphones whining about billionaires because they hate their shitty lives. In a way they earn their misery by showing their true hateful and pessimistic nature. Their parents voted badly and they vote badly and then blame anyone but themselves in this democracy. Can't even blame billionaires controlling the media because everyone has a smartphone now. They all stay in their bubbles and hate each other and everyone outside that bubble and blame anyone but themselves.

> Their parents voted badly and they vote badly and then blame anyone but themselves in this democracy. Can't even blame billionaires controlling the media because everyone has a smartphone now. They all stay in their bubbles and hate each other and everyone outside that bubble and blame anyone but themselves.

That does seem like a very simplistic take. How do you fit climate change into that? Or rising inequality? Or opaque lobbying? Or, in the US, an electoral system that just gives two options to people? Or the housing market going bonkers almost everywhere?

I don't undersrand why that is simplistic. The solution may not be simple but we live under rule of law and law makers are elected and therefore voters are ultimately responsible. I don't recall billionaires literally deciding elections. They may influence who runs and donate money but even that is a matter of laws that were loosened or can be passed to fix them (e.g.:citizens vs united), but by all means please educate on why that is too simplistic in this context of "blaming" someone.

It's simplistic because "voting wrong" assumes that voters can vote right and ignores problems such as limited party systems (see the US, where a lot of people feel their only choice is between "bad" and "worse"), lobbying, limited information, media influence... Not to mention that even if you "vote right", other people might "vote wrong" and thus your efforts are void.

It also assumes that everything can be realistically changed by "voting", as if legislation wasn't a slow process that's error prone and subject to manipulation, and also sometimes limited. See climate change, for example. Shell knew about climate change in the 70s and kept that information hidden. How could someone in the 70s could have realistically voted against that?

And finally, it assumes that people can vote in the countries that are doing "the bad things". I don't live in the US so I had no way to vote against the US pulling out from the Paris agreement, even when that decision will affect me. Someone in a sweatshop can't vote in western countries to force companies to stop using forced labor overseas.

So yeah, dismissing the influence of the ultra-wealthy in how the world is run and what future is going to be left for us because "you could have voted right" is incredibly simplistic.

> They may influence who runs and donate money but even that is a matter of laws that were loosened or can be passed to fix them (e.g.:citizens vs united)

So wait, citizens can be blamed for "voting wrong" but billionaires can't be blamed for influencing who runs and with how much money? Specially when those politicians supported by billionaires will definitely stop by all means necessary those laws that would take away some of their power? That doesn't seem fair.

> Their parents voted badly and they vote badly and then blame anyone but themselves in this democracy.

Careful you don't break your arm with all that reaching you're doing.

I feel like every English speaker has seen or read one of the versions of "A Christmas Carol", so you'd think the idea that a wealthy miser would be hated by his community would be a fairly fundamental idea.

Hate and dislike are different things. Hate means you wish harm on them imo. In this case people are not only glad someone died, they are joking about more people like them dying. And i guarantee the majority are not even joking.

You can disapprove of people's decisions and dislike them for it but life is sacred and loss of it is not a cause for celebration.

I don't know where you get the idea that life is sacred, but that hasn't been my experience. I also wonder if maybe there's a lesson you can take from learning how despised these men are in much of the world.

I think the problem is that you all have a poor understanding of death maybe? When someone dies, that person including their whole life from childhood to time of death is removed. Never to come back again. Have you ever been in a situation where you were sure you were gonna die or someone you love a lot suddenly pass away? That's why life is sacred because for all humans, there is nothing more valuable than their lives and if not theirs then it is the life of someone else that is most valuable to them. Everything else you can value is meaningless if you are no longer around to do something with it. Therefore, for anyone who can exhibit emphaty towards others, life is more sacred than all else not just sacred. Because you can appreciate the impact it will have on their loved ones or appreciate how you would want others to treat your death, you should extend that value of life to others in form of empathy. Even to the most despised, unless you have completley dehumanized them as creatures you can't possibly relate to in any way, shape or form. I think that grouping and dehumnaizing is what is affecting you and others.

They did the same thing with the jews, rohinghy, uyigjhur, tutsi,black americans,etc... and no, the fact that billionaires are a small portion of society that are "terrible" people does not change the fact that they are human. And if you disagree, look at how many millions literally starve to death around the world while we have full bellies and excess money and food. I sure as hell don't want to be judged by that measurement to avoid becoming a hypocrite.

I think you're reaching a bit.

I'm not seeing very many people "celebrating their death". I am seeing people making fun of the complete absurdity of the situation: a couple of billionaires are spending the equivalent of two Starbucks coffees to visit a mass grave in an untested discount submarine known to have safety issues, fully aware that it could mean their death and just... not caring?

When you are a minimum wage worker, seeing people spend several years' wages on something as silly as this, it just feels like you are living in a completely different reality. It is so absurd that I wouldn't have believed it if it was written in a science-fiction book. It is so detached from normal life, it just doesn't feel real.

> I always thought it was sort of a joke when people said "eat the rich"

It is both a joke, and not a joke. Some people are literally starving, and wealth inequality is worse than it was during the French Revolution. I don't know anyone who wants to literally "eat the rich", but it is getting increasingly obvious that the status quo isn't sustainable either.

> you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence

No, that's not how it works. Very few people actively want other humans to die, but that doesn't mean they will mourn the death of every single stranger either.

>fully aware that it could mean their death and just... not caring?

The reality is that these people have ZERO proper understanding of risk, because they've never actually been allowed to fail in life, so they regularly make stupid choices and dumb mistakes that normal people with normal experience would not, because many normal people have functioning risk management.

Then also remember that "for some reason" these kind of people run everything.

normal people who are allowed to fail die doing stupid things all the time. people die climbing or skydiving or any other number of ways. the fact is people are just really bad at risk assessment.

More likely they just have a different value system from yours. Some people see life more as a resource to be used than a treasure to be protected. For some people boredom is a fate worse than death. Some people value intensity of experience over duration of existence; a higher risk of injury or death is acceptable in service of a more satisfying life.

I'm not sure about celebration. But not being particularly sympathetic when few ultra-rich die by essentially playing russian roulette for entertainment...

There are each day huge number of bigger tragedies. From people starving to death or more rarely by being murdered by someone. Like for example drone-strikes. Both of those should be considered infinitely larger disasters than this.

You should see what the newspapers of the time looked like after the Titanic sank. Jokes around rich people dying are a classic source of humor in the English language.

Generally the easiest way to be obscenely wealthy and avoid having people celebrate your demise is to make your vanity projects acts of public good. A few of the billionaires of the previous century figured that one out.

Then those people back the sucked too.

Are you familiar with the fable of the fox and the grape? That's what these people are like, the bitter fox who hates grapes only because it believes it can't have it.

As a cave diver it just pissed me off when people take completely unnecessary risks and then after they die we can't discuss that they were idiots after the fact. I've read so many accident reports of people dying while scuba diving on dives that should be easy.

James Cameron has been down on the Titanic 33 times. It can absolutely be explored safely over and over by human submersibles.

The only reason for this entirely avoidable accident is the hubris and overconfidence of the OceanGate CEO.

The fact that it imploded on a dive to a monument to engineering hubris is almost like Nature is trying to put a period on the end of the sentence here.

And there's a lesson to be learned here about silicon-valley-esque "move fast and break all the rules" counterintuitive/contrarian decision making. The blog article on why Titan isn't Classed is a good example of this kind of thinking, which has now been decisively marked-to-market:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230619161930/https://oceangate...

And there's a lesson here about the fact that otherwise smart and intelligence people (which he must have been to found the company) can be utterly stupid at times, and even over the long-term. There's a very common fundamental attribution error / correspondence bias / actor-observer asymmetry going on here where people cannot decouple someone's traits from their actions. You see this as well in some of the recent discussion around Prigozhin where people assert that he is not a stupid man (okay) therefore it is impossible that the whole explanation for the recent coup-attempt-whatever was that he got angry and make a dumb mistake--so it must be some kind of overly-complicated ruse. Also that buying Twitter could be really dumb, and that invading Ukraine could be really dumb. Lots of intelligent men being royally stupid in public lately.

I understand if you criticized their decision but saying they deserved to die or that it was a good thing or even wishing more rich people would have the same fate is what my comment is about.

> Celebrating someone's death means you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence, am I wrong in saying that?

Yes, I think that you're wrong -- I do find some of the memes amusing, but I'm not celebrating a person's demise. I find humor in the absurdity of it all. Most, but not all, of the memes that I've seen have been making fun of the sub itself and not the passengers. Yes, I find a photo of a ps2 controller attached to a propane tank amusing, but that's about the sub and not the passengers.

HN is a a bubble, and the people here live in a different world than a lot of the rest of the world. On the same page, the ultra wealthy live on a different plane entirely. Surely you can see how a person struggling to make ends meet might laugh at the short-sightedness of a person willing to spend as much as they earn in years on a deadly weekend excursion?

> Surely you can see how a person struggling to make ends meet might laugh at the short-sightedness of a person willing to spend as much as they earn in years on a deadly weekend excursion?

No. That is hypocrisy. I guarantee 99% of people if they had the same amount of money they would something adveturous. Maybe a balloon trip in the alps, a visit to antarctica, sailing the pacific whatever. And if an accident befell them they wouldn't want people to treat their memory and their loved ones who are survived by them this way.

Honestly, I look at shit like this and I absolutley do not want to help anyone in need in this society at all except maybe children. The people who are not scammers pretending to need help are hateful and bitter. Well good luck, you earned your position life by hating on others simply because they are not helping you because they can.

Don't get me wrong, I get the sentiment that if it was I, I would give a lot more and help people but the idea that simply because you have lawfully earned money you owe people shit? How ridiculous! That is theft! These people want to steal money that isn't theirs simply because they are many and that person is one and they can take that money that does not belong to them. And why exactly should a bunch of theif-at-hearts be helped?

I don't hear any starving third world kids demand americans "struggling" with obesity owe them food. Even post-colonial countries at most demand debt forgiveness not an outright transfer of wealth.

Well this is certainly a passionate response, bordering on off-topic. My comment was about laughing at those with more money than common sense, and you've rambled on about people trying to steal your money.

> No. That is hypocrisy. I guarantee 99% of people if they had the same amount of money they would something adveturous. Maybe a balloon trip in the alps, a visit to antarctica, sailing the pacific whatever.

Yes. This is why lottery winners, famously, go on arctic expeditions and other risky endeavors.

> Don't get me wrong, I get the sentiment that if it was I, I would give a lot more and help people but the idea that simply because you have lawfully earned money you owe people shit? How ridiculous! That is theft!

I never suggested anything about this, and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up. With that being said, are you sure that it was lawfully gained? I've personally earned a lot through the stock market and part of that was definitely facilitated through both wage theft and slave labor. I don't directly see that, of course, but pretending that it doesn't exist is foolish.

> Celebrating someone's death means you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence, am I wrong in saying that?

No it does not mean that, obviously. In your quest to righteous anger you have just wrote nonsense.

Not surprising that the Titanium parts are coming out what looks like whole.

No sign of the composite cylinder in those pictures.

The composite cylinder likely turned into physics

I think it was physical to start with

> and his son, Suleman Dawood, 19 [...] died in the incident.

I wonder what the liability waiver said that made the father think this wasn't a terrible idea.

The waiver was apparently quite thorough in communicating the risk of death. From my reading of coverage of this though it sounds like while the waiver was probably correct from a legal standpoint, the communication of the likelihood and factors contributing to that were not communicated to customers.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Hamish Harding, two of the other victims, were somewhat experienced in this, the former having travelled to the Titanic on other deep sea submersibles with basically flawless track records (Mir? I think, and Alvin), and the latter having travelled to the challenger deep in DSV Limiting Factor which seems much better built.

Should they have known better? Maybe. This makes me wonder if they were actively mislead, rather than being left to make their own mind up.

> DSV Limiting Factor which seems much better built.

Understatement of the year. Limiting Factor is the only manned sub to make multiple dives (4!) into the Challenger Deep.

There’s a good documentary on YouTube from a year or two ago on the design and building of the sub, and overall it just seemed like such a professional operation, whereas OceanGate felt like a DIY operation.

The company that built the LF also seems to have vastly more experience building subs.

Here's the video I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5j9oeZCm0

Thanks, that’s the one! Sorry was on the move on mobile.

Really cool, had never heard of this before. I just watched the documentary on James Cameron and his Deepsea Challenger and was similarly impressed by the extraordinary lengths the team went to in engineering it. My takeaway was that OceanGate likely didn't have anywhere close to the same level of design and testing.

I think that waiver fatigue is a real thing.

I get warned about the dangers of death on basically every waiver I sign. I just checked, and I was warned about death on the waivers I signed for: bumper cars, a sauna, the local rec center, etc... I get that death is technically possible at any of these activities, but how are you to differentiate between the actual likelihood in the real world.

The waivers have gotten so comprehensive as to not actually warn you of the real dangers you might face.

waiver are not here to explain why you should die or not. Just that you won't sue the compagny

Waivers are there to keep you from suing the company BY explaining the realistic risks you are facing.

If the waiver for visiting the Titanic in an untested submersible is the same as the waiver for getting a spa package I haven’t actually understood the risks.

"you may die, more explicitly by instantaneous crushing of the hull on the passenger due to pressure, or alteratively a slow death by lack of oxygen if the sub get stranded at the bottom"

Sure changes everything to know !

Method of death isn't the relevant bit here. Likelihood is. A waiver for a one-in-however-many chance of having a heart attack in a sauna is of different orders of magnitude than a waiver for a one-in-maybe-a-dozen chance of having the poorly built experimental submarine implode.

How would you even start assessing likelihood for that ? You just don't have data for

If you don't have any idea how dangerous something is, you're probably going to want to estimate it as pretty damn dangerous. Of course there's enough data here to make an estimate, though IMO that estimate would still end up being quite dangerous.

>Should they have known better? Maybe. This makes me wonder if they were actively mislead, rather than being left to make their own mind up.

This is why true believers are the most dangerous kind of idiot. They will lead otherwise reasonable people off a cliff.

If you believe the NY Post, the CEO straight up said the sub was “safer than crossing the street” - https://nypost.com/2023/06/23/doomed-sub-ceo-said-it-was-saf...

I think it was probably that they were told the submersible had made a number of previous successful trips so assumed it would continue to do so--not realizing that the carbon fiber material could get weaker and weaker each trip.

If I’m not mistaken, James Cameron said in his CNN interview from last week (maybe the first of many) that carbon fiber is able to seem like its fine after a number of trips and then have all of the previous stress cause it to fail, making the sensors the company used to monitor hull failure useless because such an accumulated failure can happen in milliseconds.

Actually they heard it cracking on each dive, but there was less each time so they assumed the problem was going away.

Liability wavers don't give you an idea of how likely death and injury are.

Right, they only let you know about possible outcomes, not the likelihood of any particular event happening during your dive. Russian roulette with 1 vs 5 chambers loaded have the same set of possible outcomes, but very different odds w.r.t. which is most likely when you pull the trigger.

> I wonder what the liability waiver said that made the father think this wasn't a terrible idea.

Fathers often subject their sons to unnecessary risks in the interests of making them more "manly"...

When even a theme park will have you "be aware" that "death can occur", how seriously will you take the same warnings in another waiver?

People similarly have signed their souls (ie literally) through EULAs as a demonstration that nobody cares.

Hell, we can't even get people to read and acknowledge a one sentence error message in software.

I wouldn’t have done this not because I knew anything about the company but think it’s inherently risky at those depths. But trampoline parks, indoor skydiving, kids school 5k run and ropes course all are wavers I signed that stated there was chance of death for the activity.

Afaik the waiver talked about death and trauma and so on.

The CEO and company also put in a lot of effort to make it look safe. The "waiver is for liability but you are totally safe" kind of game.

Going by stories of people who went, company was plain manipulative in this regard. I genuinely think that millionaires on board were victims prayed on by the overconfident guy who died with them.

From what I've been able to find, there were never any actual pictures/sonar scans of the debris field released. Does anyone know any particular reason to not be releasing that to the public?

Because it would be morbid and inappropriate for tourists to gawk at a shipwreck.

There are literally thousands of people on wreck dives as I write this...

There's pictures or even footage of sinking migrant ships all over the internet.

Wouldn't "people smuggling ships" be a more apt term, if we are to choosing to make the distinction at all?

Which was OceanGate's business model.

to the other commenters: there’s a difference between a week old wreck still being investigated and one a hundred years old.

same way there is a difference between photos of dead bodies undergoing forensic investigation, and those undergoing archaeological investigation.

I wonder how much time has to pass before it is socially acceptable to gawk at a shipwreck?

I'm not really joking here, there has to be some sort of threshold and I'm not sure how it can be defined.

Surprisingly little time needs to pass from what I heard.

The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a protected site due to this very topic of discussion. Diving it can get you in quite a bit of trouble: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/titanic-edmund-fitzgerald-1.68...

That had the added benefit, something which feels very strange to type, of not sinking in international waters. It's significantly easier to restrict access in that case.

It is somewhat surreal that a historically short amount of time must pass before people can visit these areas without it being taboo. Some of them, in my opinion, are extremely important to humanity such as Auschwitz and Choeung Ek, and the latter happened during my lifetime.

because of a false flag conspiracy reason of some sort of course. probably aliens involved.

> probably aliens involved.

Sigh. Shea and Wilson conclusively documented [0] the primacy of Leviathan, a direct continuation of the Ugaritic sea monster Lôtān, one of the servants of the sea god Yammu defeated by Hadad in the Baal Cycle.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

1. Generally photos from active investigations aren't released until the investigation is completed. These are active records, and could potentially become part of civil or criminal hearings, so the agencies in charge of them tend to keep them close until they've finished the report.

2. The US Coast Guard is a part of the Department of Homeland Security; the sonar and pictures they take could reveal capabilities they deem important to US national security (ie how good the sonar is, resolution of photos, etc.).

3. It's generally considered poor taste to post disaster photos before the families have had funerals. Naval institutions tend to be more tradition focused than other entities.

What would be the reason _to_ release that to the public?

So the next "adventurers" can learn from the mistakes made, have a think about it and stay on dry land or wear seatbelts if they insist on a recovery of their bodily remains...

Morbid curiosity. Like rubberneckers driving by a crash scene.

Or people risking their safety to see the wreck of Titanic for no particular reason.

One thing I've completely missed in all this drama: WHY a carbon fiber hull? Carbon fiber is not known for being easy to work with, or cheap, or strong in compression, or good for water, so WHY would you use it on a submersible as "new" technology?

I must have missed some discussion.

Also, there’s seemingly little benefit to low weight in this application?

In an interview with Stockton Rush, and sure we should take his insights with a grain of salt, he stated that in deep sea submersibles it's not about weight, but buoyancy. The carbon fiber is significantly more buoyant than titanium, meaning they didn't need very special foam and ways to mount it like is used in Alvin.

The carbon fibre was apparently cheap second hand because it was ex-aviation gear past its service life.

If the hull were made out of metal it would be much heavier and require a much bigger support ship to launch and recover. This would increase overall system costs.

The lower density of carbon also removed the need for syntactic foam floats.

The CEO had aircraft experience so he liked carbon fiber.

The official reason given by the company is that carbon fiber allowed the submersibles to be positive buoyant. This in turn allowed them to use electromagnets to hold onto ballast, and in the case of a failure the submersibles would loose its weight and go back to the surface. It was also considered cheaper and smaller than using steel in combination with syntactic foam to achieve the same result.

Money.

A heavy sub requires heavy support equipment. Heavy support equipment requires a large boat. Large boats are expensive. It's cheaper to spend a little extra on the sub and save a lot on the support ship.

I've seen nothing about the absence of bolts, on the retaining flange. If endcap failed, why would the two pieces of that component not be still together? Seems that the mating joint would fail, before all 17 fasteners. Nobody questioning bolts fatigue or even maybe the wrong grade used...? It's happened before in the aviation field.

When are they going to recover the bodies, does anyone know?

Is there anything left to recover?

Mythbusters did a test at one point where they exposed a dead pig to a mere 9 atmospheres/300 feet of water pressure. The result is... not pretty. It's safe to say that no matter what happened to the Titan, there are no bodies to recover.

I've now seen it. OMG.

Yes. The term James Cameron likes to use regarding catastrophic failures from an implosion is, "meat cloud."

Regarding 9 atmospheres, I've not seen the Mythbusters episode, but I'm assuming that was an attempt to recreate the Byford Dolphin incident?

Isn't the mechanism of destruction in that test driven by the pig corpse sealing against the openening of the rigid helmet, creating a pressure differential that the body gets forced through?

There shouldn't have been any of that for our adventurers here.

I've been perplexed by some of the descriptions of what would happen to the bodies and other things on board, so I'm looking forward to reading an expert analysis on the topic that I assume will show up eventually.

A lot of descriptions characterize an implosion as a misspelling of the word explosion, with things turning into a "mist", but this doesn't make any sense to me on its face, with the force being inward.

There are theories about vaporization due to compressive heating, but how this would work doesn't seem cut and dry to me, either, because of thermal conduction in such a short span of time before being immediately quenched by near-freezing water.

Some level of disintegration seems reasonable so there may not be bodies per se to be found, but it also seems plausible that there would be identifiable remains. We were able to locate parts (and verify the identities of) most of the passengers aboard United 93, for example. The pieces were small but they didn't "become physics" in some exotic way.

The fact that it happened in the deep ocean makes collection of any remains somewhere between impractical and impossible, no doubt.

I feel a little guilty indulging this morbid curiosity, and yet I am curious.

> There shouldn't have been any of that for our adventurers here.

Instead they were slapped between two walls of water traveling at supersonic speeds. Still not pretty. Maybe some bone fragments could be found if they got lodged into the wreck of the sub.

The Byford Dolphin happened at much lower pressures and the remains were in very disturbing shape.

But it was also a very different scenario: an explosive decompression that ejected the men through a small opening.

What does a simple high-energy implosion do to a body? What about if you chase that with thousands of pounds of freezing-cold water from literally all directions? Does that make it more or less destructive? I don't know!

There's some absolutely ridiculous forces involved here. "And then they turned into physics" is probably the only respectful way to phrase things.

> What does a simple high-energy implosion do to a body?

Turn it into a paste at best. Get the fire piston effect calculated in and it's an incinerated paste.

> What about if you chase that with thousands of pounds of freezing-cold water from literally all directions? Does that make it more or less destructive?

insofar as everything isn't already destroyed, this would make it a order of magnitude more destructive. Water hammer will get everything up to absolutely ridiculous pressures and temperatures. At this point you're basically as close as you can get to atomizing a person.

Presumed human remains have been recovered, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66049789

I understand the forces are great but the inward direction seemed like it would matter. Remains to be seen how destructive it actually was but we can probably rule out mist or ash, at least, based on this news.

Oh, that's surprising. But given that they say it's "presumed" remains it's probably a safe bet it's not anything remotely resembling human-shaped anymore.

How do large undersea animals like say, the Portuguese dogfish shark exist at these pressures since they are known to dive to 12,000 ft. Clearly organic meat somehow survives at that depth, but how?

I don't think its just the pressure since meat is mostly water which doesn't compress. Its that they are going from a normal one atmosphere of pressure to 400 atmospheres instantly which is pretty violent.

They we're getting crushed on all sides by the pressure. Its 6,500 psi or 400 atmospheres from normal. There are no remains.

Sorry to say, this is basically the "and then they became physics" answer that avoids engaging with the question.

There are no bodies left to recover

UPDATE They've said there were remains within the wreckage recovered.

TBH I can't imagine anything more than a smear of goo on a piece of wreckage, especially after it's been dragged through 3.81 km of water.

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