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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand the lack of a backup here. I understand they had a budget, but that budget couldn't include a spare battery or two? They also didn't appear to test the batteries at all before going down? My high school robotics team had more redundancy than this sub did.

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The report is that college interns designed the electronics. People with no experience in building reliable systems with redundancy. It was basically all hobbyist SBCs with zero professional design features.

At what point do we start taking the "talking points" from the so called conspiracy theorists seriously? For all we know they did hire sub par individuals and because it was under the guise of DEI or ageism no one wants to touch it with a 10 ft pole.

The impulse to bring "DEI" into this. Sigh.

The kind of people who think to add a backup aren't inspirational: https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/why-stockton-rush-didnt-hire-5...

This is such obvious PR spin from a guy who was just looking to save a buck, but the "anti-woke" crowd is eating it right up.

Then let's find these employees and audit their credentials. Let's see all oceangate emails. Let's check all their internal testing reports and every single document. Let's pick it apart in the open.

If it's PR spin and fake outrage, then it'll be obvious.

It's obvious even from the facts that we already have: long before he claimed to hire young people for being "inspirational," he'd already tried to recruit plenty of older, experienced men, and only rejected (or, more accurately, was rejected by) the ones who told him he was going to kill someone. Paul-Henri Nargeolet hardly qualifies as a DEI selection, he was just ok with dying at the bottom of the ocean. https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-titan...

I don't feel any need to at all, in fact, I think the way you're doing the burden of proof here absolutely sucks and is part of the problem.

Which is today, it's very obvious to me that idiot rich dudes are very capable of doing idiot rich dude things without the "help" of theoretically incompetent minorities.

I'm very comfortable assuming the idiocy is coming from there. I demand proof in the other direction. It was probably rich white guy idiots. Prove to me otherwise.

The world makes a little more sense when you consider just how prolific the worship of rich white idiot guys has always been. What we’re seeing is almost business as normal. Just can’t forget to shift the blame to a boogeyman and we’re golden, apparently.

I'm referring to the reporting making the outrage rounds that cited DEI comments by the CEO. I'm not trying to bring it in, but comments here are saying stuff that really makes it hard for me to ignore that these people were, to put it nicely, doing sub par work.

People (including a now-dead comment) are trying to blame this on "wokeness" due to a fluffy statement about hiring "inspirational" young people, ignoring the facts that a) he was trying to cut costs wherever possible, and b) he did try to recruit experienced "old white guys," but most of them told him he was going to kill somebody: https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-titan...

He fired the engineer that told him it was unsafe (circa 5yrs ago) and need more testing. He gave that engineer ultimatum to sign it as safe or be fired. Rush fired that engineer on that refusal-to-lie-unsafe ground. He never had the intention to hire "old white guys" because of lacking budget to hire but simply prefer no one qiestion his lacknof sub experience and decision making. As for no money, it is CEO job to ensure enough funding coming in to make the venture profitable. It is HR and COO to ensure they got the right people to operate. He overstep his duty boundary in a very inexperience and lack of good business sense. Meanwhile Cameron a film director descended twice deeper than Rush EVER could while making profit and still growing his submersible company. If it is incompetent say it so. Cutting cost to the point plane felling from the sky is no excuse.

There was a backup. Weights on a tether that would dissolve and force the sub to surface in 24 hours with no power at all.

Wouldnt the ascent decompression kill the occupants anyways? Getting them up to surface isn't the saving grace to something like a battery failing. Maybe I'm missing something?

Edit. Thank you for the responses people, I learned something new today!

There's no decompression sickness on those subs. The inside is kept at a similar pressure as the surface.

the whole point of the pressure chamber is that it remained at 1 atmosphere. until it failed.

No. Subs are different from scuba. They are kept at atmospheric pressure.

For scuba, you are breathing pressurized gasses much higher than 1atm at depth, which causes decompression issues.

That's not a backup, that's a contingency. I'm saying why not put another fully charged battery in the sub so it would be less likely to be completely unpowered at some point.

I don't know anything about submarines, but it doesn't seem crazy. Maybe they figure the battery has a 1 in 100 chance of failure and the sub can only make 50 trips in it's lifetime and it wasn't worth it considering the other systems like the weights and the hydrolic something or other that they actually used to get to the surface. Everything is a trade off and the extra battery would have cost money, take up space, could catch on fire, etc.

> explained that one of the batteries went kaput

The article does mention "one" of them went out, implying they had more than one.

As to why that was not sufficient to release the balast, that's another question.

>I understand they had a budget, but that budget couldn't include a spare battery or two?

Everything is a tradeoff. Why not 20 spare batteries? Because it's too heavy.

complex systems don't always get more reliable by adding failsafes, there is a complexity wall of systemic failure.

Having an identical, unplugged, fully charged battery with a transfer switch, doesn't really add much complexity.

That depends on where the batteries are located. In this case they are on the other side of the pressure hull. You then get to decide if you want your transfer switch to sit on this side or the other and how you get to pass the signal to switch over from the one to the other (maybe you could automate that). In a design such as this one nothing is really simple and even a silly switch or relay can add quite a bit of complexity. The pressures you are dealing with are immense, it's not as if you're going to run an extra wire with a grommet through the pressure hull on a moments notice. If the cable duct has already been sealed then you're out of luck unless you added spare wiring and even that isn't trivial with this much pressure on the other side of it.

Who said anything about retrofit? This should have been done from the very beginning. I still can't believe they never tested a round trip without people to the depth they were going.

Ah, I interpreted the 'add' as 'after the fact'. My bad, apologies.

Sign me up, how much for a tour to the titanic with your high school robotics team? :)

One way trip, a $5000 donation.

Our team could use swerve drive and that’ll cover the parts.

Finally, the water game.

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