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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

If a hardened camera can survive, I'm surprised subs don't have a floating black box that can survive an implosion and then float to the surface and begin emitting a radio signal.

I guess the trick would be finding a way to securely attach the black box in a way that would ensure its release in a catastrophic disaster.

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The ones that aren’t accompanied by a surface ship are military, and they really don’t want anything that might automatically deploy at the wrong moment.

This was part of what complicated the response to the Kursk disaster - they had a rescue buoy but it was welded in place so it couldn't deploy.

I'm not aware of anything quite like that, but most submarines have something like a Rescue Buoy [0], Submarine Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon (SEPIRB) or Submarine Emergency Communications Transmitter (SECT). I think those might differ based on whether they're attached by a cable and allow communicating to the submarine, or just broadcast a distress signal with the position. In any case, they're designed to be automatically deployed in the event of an emergency or catastrophic event, and based on this Quora answer [1] they're attached by an independent mechanism with a timer which has to be regularly reset to stop it deploying. I think it might be a clockwork mechanism, with an electronic alarm when it's about to go off to remind the crew to wind it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_buoy_(submarine)

[1]: https://www.quora.com/Don%E2%80%99t-submarines-have-communic...

There are a zillion applications for black-boxes, so why not start somewhere more accessible and with more impact? Your own house, car, and person, for instance. Think of how many elderly people die at home and nobody knows the details leading up to it. I'm being a bit facetious here - perhaps we don't need to know in those cases, nor in the Titan case. It's not as if there could be any data there which advances submarine safety - unless somebody is planning to build a Titan v2 with the same technology, marginally improved safety, and similar lack of testing?

Just fyi - if your car has been manufactured in the last 10 years by a modern corporation(ie - not a Lada) it will have a black box already that records everything about the car's systems. They don't record sound from the cabin, but your speed, throttle position, movement of the steering wheel - it's all recorded.

In my country, people call dashcams "black boxes". They can be quite useful if you also want audio and video.

I mean I have them in both of my cars, but in some places like Austria it's straight up illegal to have them in your car. And in some others like Germany you can have it but the footage is inadmissable in court because the other person never agreed to be recorded. The built in telemetry recording is legal everywhere though.

Probably commerical subs aren't a common thing with lots of regulation.

Just guessing here? :)

I guess he wasn’t planning for a catastrophic failure ?

He ridiculed anyone who told him he should, taking it as evidence that he was disrupting an industry.

There is something slightly romantic about dying in such a way that his body turned to mist and floated away in the current. A bit like having your ashes spread at sea. With fewer steps.

I keep thinking about the teenager.

Who didn't want to go and didn't feel safe, but who was pushed to come along by his father because it was his father's birthday.

Super tragic that one.

> There is something slightly romantic…

if he was alone i would absolutely agree with you full stop.

but it looks like they may have been entirely underselling just how backyard amateur their company was just to get people to give them money.

i totally adore books and documentaries and tales of explorer types pushing their ideas to the limit but it quickly crosses a line when they:

a) downplay dangers to innocent people, and

b) refuse to understand their own ignorance and believe the people who have already literally done their idea are somehow “fools”

the person who is trying to “disrupt” but doesn’t have a deep understanding of the often very good reasons why an industry may do things a certain way is the fool. not the ones who already repeatedly make it work.

we need to encourage adventurousness but also wisdom.

There were glass spheres outside the main pressure vessel containing electronics and filled with mineral oil that were damaged during the implosion, but the electronics survived mostly intact. This probably would have been a good option for a "black box" recorder. Scott Manley discusses the spheres in his video.

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