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Comment by time0ut | Hacker News Reader

If I picture myself in this CEO's shoes (wanting to innovate in the materials/approach to DSVs), I imagine instructing my team to design a system that can perform test dives autonomously and then use that to gather data over many duty cycles. Of course, I have no idea what I am talking about, so maybe that is simply impossible or impossibly expensive. It does seem cheaper than just YOLOing it and getting yourself and four other people killed though.

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Compare it to SpaceX where they’ll fly it unmanned until it explodes and then figure out the failure points for future models.

There’s no excuse with this. There’s no fuel or disposable parts so they could have run it a hundred times a day until it popped.

> so maybe that is simply impossible or impossibly expensive

Sorry for swearing, but I too can't believe that there's a problem in setting this thing to auto-dive 3 or 4 kilometers and then pulling it up via an f-ing tether.

I understand why you wouldn't tether the sub when floating into the titanic wreck. But test-diving? come on...

How much market is there for unmanned trips?

The amount of equipment you could fit inside this sub is incredible. Probably unparalleled. I can't believe there isn't enough market to be profitable while you test the experimental hull.

> Probably unparalleled.

I believe the Aluminaut had a larger internal volume; at least it could carry more people. Up to 7 vs 5 in the Titan. It had a deeper test depth too, and like the Titan, didn't need syntactic foam for bouyancy.

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

I only learned about this DSV a few days ago but it was really neat. It seems like the design OceanGate should have used.

Of course, Aluminaut was also built by Electric Boat, a major military contractor specializing in submarines.

What exactly would they bring though? Anything inside the sub could not be dropped off anywhere. Maybe they could have collected research data to sell to certain scientific institutes, but that doesn't sound like it would recoup much of the costs

Probably, lights and a good camera.

The goal is just to run on the blue, so that they are not pressured to finish their testing earlier. I can't imagine there isn't enough to film at that depth so that they can't find people willing to pay for the operational costs.

Or building the inspection equipment that could determine if my new hull material was breaking down with every dive towards an inevitable disaster I've been warned about by many different people.

I suggest watching this doc on a sub build for "challenger deep". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5j9oeZCm0

The hull was pressure tested in Russia. The amount of engineering was just immense compared to Titan.

It's incredible seeing the late CEO talking so much about how this and other super deep subs were built by amateurs as the reason he could conceivably safely build the Titan. Completely ignoring testing like this or that the Chinese sub was built by a government design bureau. They were projects headed by excited amateurs for sure but they were going to exceptionally traditional engineers to implement their ideas.

But the other cost of pressure tests is stress to the hull of the pressure hull; To know its failure point, you have to see it fail, in which case you have to build a second one.

Yes, and that's cheap compared to loss of life. You may even want to destroy several of them to get a better statistical base. Essentially they are a consumable in this design.

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