The US Navy uses an Xbox 360 controller in active service [0]
Mass market has a lot of R&D to leverage so it makes sense. Nothing to say this is the cause of the fault and probably going to be more reliable than something hand rolled.
I personally believe using mass market makes sense. I don't understand the criticism I've seen on this website for using off the shelf controllers or camping lights (what do you expect, an LED strip magically engineered by a large aeronautics firm specifically for the sub? and what would that change?).
That being said, the difference between a Microsoft controller and a third party is that Microsoft very certainly did a tons of reliability and durability testing on their controllers (and it shows). You don't get that with a cheap third party.
So I can understand to a degree why people are questioning the decision to not pay the extra 20 bucks and get microsoft gear.
There's a middle ground between "hardware store crap" and "custom." The aviation industry has plenty of standard interior lighting and environmental control system that's known not to light people on fire or short out or otherwise fail and kill somebody.
Absolutely. Former avionics company employee here - not only do companies like Collins have COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) products to buy, but they themselves are frequently made of at least some COTS components. So each of those components have been tested and put into production by a company who's laser focused on the safety and reliability of that part.
You only need to spend a little time with a reliability engineer and see some of the calculations they do to start realizing how when even one or two components in a system have little corners cut, how it can drastically impact the overall safety of the system.
With the amount of corners cut on this submarine, I am unfortunately less than surprised at both the failure in the article and the crisis happening to it right now.
I hope all the souls aboard can somehow get home safe, and I hope the people who put them into this seemingly corners-cut vessel do not get to float any more craft, and that they didn't undersell the riskiness of this venture... although I'm unfortunately not optimistic about any of that.
The general public does, for those in the respective fields those safety lessons are ingrained in proper procedures and constititional knowledge. That's why start-ups in those fields are risky, usually their founders have never witnessed said procedures and knowledge at work, never worked under those procedures. Employees, especially early on, tend to be young an inexperienced as well. As a result, those companies neither have the constitiational knowledge nor the processes of their more mature counter part. Some try up make for this with "hacker" culture...
Those things are valid for everything from med tech to aerospace and, yes, cars. The dangerous thing so, and I saw that in real life, is when that culture spreads. Usually through juniors who gained their first experience in said start-ups, and not one of those legacy shops.
Edit: None of what I wrote prevents legacy giants from cutting corners themselves, the B737 MAX showed us as much.
> The aviation industry has plenty of standard interior lighting and environmental control system that's known not to light people on fire or short out or otherwise fail and kill somebody.
I am pretty sure the camper's equipment industry too. I haven't seen many occurence of campers burning out and in most case it was caused by people smoking in their camper or forgetting to turn off gas stove.
Defined and validated environmentals (temperature, voltage, and in this case pressure).
Qualified components — capacitors chosen for lifetime rather than shaving a cent, perhaps avoidance of MEMS oscillators with helium sensitivity.
Failure analysis. Low and understood probability of fail-unsafe conditions (short circuit), mitigation for those risks, fume-proof and fire-proof PCB materials to protect the sealed environment in case of failure.
Redundancy to handle failures anyway. Multiple independent strings so that single-point failure lead to partial loss of lighting, not all of it.
Load ahedding, eg dropping all but one string at a known voltage above minimum voltage, to save power for other more critical loads during system failure scenarios.
Yes, if one had the budget to do all those things, from scratch, better than an existing component manufacturer.
Not many companies have NASA levels of "throw money at it until it works, and every part has been signed off on five times."
Absent that, I'm having trouble seeing how custom > COTS.
In all probability, anything in-house would have been worse and added new failure modes.
Better to buy, analyze, and adapt as needed.
And if it turns out you don't need to adapt, because failure modes aren't safety-critical or components are viable in the environment, then spend your time on something more useful.
> That's an awful lot of keyboard engineering, given nobody knows what happened yet.
Unless I'm mistaken, the subject article starts with the words "Submarine missing". The fact that the whole thing was jury rigged and double checked by nobody with certifications is enough to start pointing fingers at the engineers.
This isn't the company's first trip either. They've taken multiple trips down and have almost lost the submarine multiple times. This time they actually managed to lose it for good.
The reason people are mad at the company is because their negligence killed 4 people for no good reason.
I thought about this, and came to the conclusion that the coastguard and especially military see it as a good opportunity to test their equipment and procedures for real.
And seafarers have a strong code of ethics about helping other seafarers.
Budgets are unfortunately a zero sum game, and I have to wonder if there are much more obvious ways to save lives more efficiently with the amount of money it’s costing the US government to undertake a massive and technically complex search for 5 people.
If a Coast Guard ship heads out of St. John's or a Navy aircraft/ship/submarine transits to the area, they burn fuel but already existed with all their trained personnel.
So most of the cost is moving things into position. Expensive, but the asset probably would have been moving somewhere anyway.
He's representing a company that took safety shortcuts because government regulations slow innovation, but is also complaining that the government isn't helping them quickly enough in this search.
He thanks the governments, but says they need to move faster. As an adviser, he should be telling this company to have a better emergency plan.
Assuming it sunk, it'll be order of week before it's found. It'll be order of month before it's raised, if it can be. And then after analysis we might know why it sunk.
+60 hours after lost contact, while there are possibly still people alive inside the vehicle, seems premature and crass to be casting accusations for internet points.
They claim the vehicle has consumables to last 4 days, so while it’s a little premature at 3 days in to declare it’s over, if you have an injured person that requires an EMT and the ambulance won’t get there until the situation devolves…
In these situations you don’t do everything you can because it will change the outcome. You do everything you can so that someday soon you’ll be able to look at yourself in the mirror while you brush your teeth. So you can sleep at night.
I haven’t been in this bad of a situation, but I’ve been in plenty where people second guessed themselves or someone else for years even decades after. Everyone has to get to “enough” on their own terms or it festers.
So we are letting a bunch of people figure it out. If a miracle happens, awesome. But unless they’re all trance meditating down there and have Wim Hoff hypothermia training it’s not good.
The fact that they can’t even find it is in part because they didn’t outfit it with any capability to send a distress signal. They lost it multiple times but never added a radio beacon or anything.
It's possible that it's floating just under the surface, in which case the radar reflectors won't help. Radar also isn't necessarily _great_ at finding anything bobbing in waves, as water will itself reflect radar.
Additionally, if the problem was a power outage then the radio also might not work unless it had a separate power supply.
Emergency beacons cost a few hundred dollars and are designed for this purpose, not having one is pure negligence.
If they're on the bottom of the ocean then even if they're found a rescue is unlikely to happen in time.
>Everyone involved knew what they were getting into.
Not necessarily. For extreme sports like skydiving, bungee jumping, hang-gliding scuba and the like customers still expect a high level of adherence to safety and quality products and certifications exist. Would you want to parachute off an uncertified plane with an un-licensed pilot and inexperienced jumper?
>> OceanGate says it is an experimental vessel, and when CBS travelled onboard the correspondent had to sign a waiver accepting that it "has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death".
When I go scuba diving I also need to sign a waiver and acknowledge the inherent risk of the activity.
It doesn't mean that the regulator provided by the dive center is McGivered with duct tape and chewing gum. Which seems like the equivalent of the construction and the components quality of that vessel.
I had a colleague who went scuba diving in Los Angeles. Newly wed. Husband and Wife, decide to spend their 4th of July weekend doing water sports.
So they go scuba diving, the wife's mask breaks down, he comes up, she panics she doesn't. She died by drowning. He was totally broken, the wife knew the risks and he knew it too. Nevertheless he wanted her to try because he thought it was fun. He lived with the trauma for years. Probably now as well.
People don't know how bad these things can get. This sort of fun, is definitely not worth anyones life. Just go sight seeing, and have Sundae at Ghirardelli. There are many safe ways of having fun, that don't involve death as a risk factor.
Was he just taking his wife down without training and certification?
This just seems insane.
While losing a mask or having it break down is very inconvenient that's exactly one of the scenarios you train for.
Even when doing the Open Water certification one of the skills you must do to get certified is to remove your mask, put it on again and remove the water from it.
> This sort of fun, is definitely not worth anyones life.
I agree. And that's the exact reason why you train for extraordinary situations and get certified.
Scuba diving is a safe sport as long you adhere to the rules and your personal limitations.
As a certified diver, this is very hard to accept. Others have written about losing the mask as being exactly one of the things you train for, and that's true, but in addition to that.... where the hell was the husband while she was struggling???? was he also completely untrained? wasn't there at least one instructor or at least a certified diver with them, if the husband wasn't?
Every place I have ever been to wants to see my certification before allowing me to rent gear, I guess for insurance and legal liability purposes.
Your story is probably incomplete. I am no scuba diving expert but I know people who do it regularly. You never do it alone. And you constantly check others in case they need help. There's a whole sign language around just checking status. And protocols for things like sharing oxygen etc.
And there's a whole certification process around it too. I wonder how they got their gear and if they had a guide/instructor. Those are the more pertinent points of the story when trying to relate it to the sub story.
I've experienced dive shops, which were rather flexible with their approach to paperwork and certification (learn diving! no swimming required! is a giveaway).
But since this trategy apparently happened in LA that's just unfathomable.
nobody wants to die ('cept for people looking to suicide). The waiver is an acknowledgement that what they're doing is dangerous, and could cause them to die. As an adult, you have the right to accept this risk, if the reward for doing so is worth it in your eyes.
Unless, of course, if those signing the waivers were mislead.
Actually there's a huge backlash to guided "adventure" tours bringing rich tourists who have zero business being above 7000m into the death zone. Everest was bad enough (it's at least not a technically difficult climb) but now they've expanded to K2, which is absolutely insane to send an amateur to.
There's a difference between a well prepared Everest expedition and someone selling a submarine experience in a poorly designed craft. There is a difference between inherently dangerous activity and wanton stupidity.
>>Because these are inherently lethal activities, that a reasonable participant engages in despite knowing the risks.
One can as far as say they indulge in it for the 'kick' this sort of risk brings. The ordinary is boring for most of these people. They don't want to have fun the same some one making $90K/yr does.
my guess is no. purely speculation on my part, but my suspicion is that the dangers were downplayed and the sales/marketing people paid the bare minimum attention to how close this was to a backyard project.
“we wouldn’t charge you $250,000 if we weren’t serious.”
What these people did, is like if you climbwd mound everest and died because they forgot to pack any food, you oxygen doesnt work becauae it's a $10 canister from best-buy, and your tent has holes in it.
Not all COTS are equal. There are plenty of off the shelf controllers built for boats that are designed to handle wet environments such as might be found in an enclosed space where people are exhaling water vapor etc. They don’t however cost 30$ nor do they cost anything close to the R&D required to make an equivalent product.
Of note they might not have condensation in normal conditions, but condensation is exactly the kind of thing that results in cascading failures when just one seemingly minor thing fails.
Not doubting you, but how is that possible? (A quick, unverified Google throws back "A standard Panamax containership has operational costs of about $9 million per year")
I get using COTS but the decisions for this submarine would indicate that they have no grasp of the concept of failure modes.
Decisions like using a 3rd party controller (known to be terrible), a wireless controller (introducing a lot of extra risk from batteries to connection problems), and a door that cannot be opened from the inside (what if they get lost but manage to surface?) are all very sus.
NASA isn't producing in-house, they still source from third parties. So, if you want, or need, something from scratch, you pay for the development and industrialisation and then for the parts. And those suppliers are quote often the same ones as they are for the COTS stuff.
It many companies are going places NASA fears to tread. 12000 feet is pretty fucking deep. That’s why the wreck took so long to find in the first place.
Logitech has orders of magnitude more experience in manufacturing peripherals than Microsoft. That said, Logitech does make products in a wide price range and the low end isn't competitive with their own high end.
"Low end" and "high end" in the gaming market doesn't necessarily equate to "reliability," however. "Style" and "customizability" are very high on the differentiators between low/high for gaming peripherals, neither of which are necessary on a sub.
The reviews for the controller (mentioned by name in the article, so easy to look up) are generally great (4.2/5 with thousands of reviews), and the 1/2-star reviews are as frequently about ergonomic issues as they are about reliability. Every batch of controllers is going to have some unreliable ones, so the fact that that doesn't stand out as the common complaint dragging the reviews down says something.
A lot of the rest of the choices for the sub sound sus, but not bothering to splurge on a game controller that cycles RGB is not worthy of a headline, IMO.
It’s not about having a RGB controller, it’s the fact you can get a COTS controller built for boats which is vastly less likely to crap out unexpectedly due to say condensation in an enclosed environment where people are exhaling water vapor.
You might generally be fine, but many crash investigation involved some cheap component failing as part of a longer sequence. Ie something fails and humidity increases then XYZ fails until eventually your margin of safety is gone and everyone dies.
The bigger issue is that it's a handheld controller, and looks wireless.
What happens if you drop it, it lands sticks-down, giving a sudden large control input to the thrusters? Given those stick extensions (which look 3D printed), the controls must be fairly sensitive?
Or if the wireless connection drops out (or the battery dies) when you're close to a shipwreck or other hazard that you don't want to get entangled in?
Sure, but the headlines are always "$30 video game controller" or "low-end videogame controller", not "videogame controller". I agree that that's the real problem, that using a videogame controller for life-or-death control is a bad idea, but I'm just peeved by the headlines that seem more upset that the videogame controller being used is inexpensive, and seem to insinuate that if they'd used an XBox Elite controller, maaaaybe that'd have been okay.
> Logitech has orders of magnitude more experience in manufacturing peripherals than Microsoft.
You know that saying that anybody can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands? From what I've seen and heard, Logitech has used their experience to make peripherals that barely last longer than the warranty/return period.
FWIW my 22 year old optical intellimouse from Microsoft is still going strong.
I have both a Logitech Gamepad and Logitech headset that are going ~15 years no issues. I wound up setting aside one of the MX mice after like a decade so I could have a mouse that had sensitivity buttons. It's my daily driver on my work system still.
Maybe those changes are recent but IME you've always had to figure out which are the quality lines of product from any peripheral manufacturer. I've seen dozens of the cheapo Logitech headsets broken and tossed over the years both at work and among friends. Meanwhile my G35 headset bought in 2009 has required two sets of replacement cushions in that time and still works great.
Even MS back in the Sidewinder days had their warts -- their gamepad was complete garbage while their Joystick was awesome (I still have mine).
I think GP's overall point though that peripherals like this aren't exactly unsuitable shouldn't be ignored. There's a huge advantage to something inexpensive that you can cheaply carry replacement parts for or whole replacement devices for. Once you go fly by wire (or dive by wire I guess in this case) it's not clear to me what advantage there is in designing your own bespoke system.
there’s a logitech bluetooth silent mouse i really like and would carry it on my laptop at work from meeting room to meeting room. i had 3 in 2 years, dropped each once, they were all broken on the first fall.
kinda wish they were able to withstand falls onto hard surfaces but it’s also a) my fault, and b) not an expectation i have of a mouse in general.
but it’s also a good reason to not just take any consumer device onto a sub, because functioning after a drop would absolutely be a requirement.
Logitech has a lot of experience, i give you that. My MX518 lasted over 10 years, many other owners reported the same. More recent products by them die often before five years of use. Perverse incentives, news at 11. Sorry for the snark.
I've replaced the 518 with a g300 (I think) and while it was a good mouse, it broke down way too quick for my liking. Now a happy user of a deathadder hyperspeed.
The article mentions that this gamepad was released in 2010, but also it's just a slight iteration on Logitech's Wireless RumblePad 2, a wireless version of the RumblePad 2 released around 2004.
The newer models just add X-input, change the button faces from 1234 to ABXY, and made the wireless receiver smaller.
Yeah, the wireless is not good. My initial thought on the headline was Logitech's F310 controller which is wired and missing rumble, but besides that basically identical.
Even high end Logitech peripherals aren't exactly great. I bought a Logitech wireless keyboard with backlighting a few years ago. It was nice but there was some hardware bug and when not in use the lights would be flashing all day and night until the batteries run out [0]. I certainly hope their gamepads are more energy efficient than that!
I have the same keyboard (MX Keys). I didn't have the flashing-light problem, but the lights nevertheless would constantly turn themselves off, after a very short (~5s?) period of inactivity.
I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to find a fix, including removing an internal cable and putting electrical tape over the top. Nothing worked. The closest I got was keeping the wireless keyboard plugged into its USB-C charger so that the timeout period before shutoff was longer than it was in battery-only mode.
All of which is annoying, because it's not cheap (>$100), and the fix is so stupefyingly simple - an addition of one or two settings in the configuration software. And, yes, countless people have reported this to Logitech and their 'support' consists, at best, of saying "I'll pass this on to The Team".
Never have I been more tempted to go all-in and become a firmware hacker, though the feasibility in time and probability of success are both quite low.
The thermals weren't misdesigned exactly, but the solder was below expected performance in several key attributes. It is not the only product that got screwed by new leadfree solder being not the best at the time.
This type/class of wireless controllers are noticeably less dense and flimsier. They are not necessarily built worse, but this is "get what you pay for" product, which is to say it's great for undergraduate robotics projects that Microsoft or Sony designs at ~$65 is either an overkill or too complicated to interface with.
My work Logitech G502 wired mouse is in its 7th month of light use (only used on in-office days) and the cable has already split where it connects to the mouse.
Mass manufactured devices - particularly when they're mature - have the costs squeezed out of them to maximize profit. That means they ride the line close to failure to end of warranty.
The Xbox Elite 2 controller costs $150 and is a reliability nightmare. It has the look and feel of a premium product, but there are at least three components that are commonly reported breaking after fairly light use (like, after 100 hours of gaming). Analog stick drift, shoulder buttons that register duplicate presses, and face buttons (usually the A) that stop registering presses. All of these issues are still unfixed years after release.
Given that's what their flagship controller is like, they either don't do a lot of reliability testing or are ignoring the results.
>Microsoft very certainly did a tons of reliability and durability testing on their controllers (and it shows).
my xbox elite controller didn't even last a year (usb port died)... now tbf the x button on the replacement razer controller i got also died in the same time frame.
to be more fair though the wired xbox 360 controller i got with my original xbox back in ~2007 has never let me down.
> I personally believe using mass market makes sense. I don't understand the criticism I've seen on this website for using off the shelf controllers or camping lights (what do you expect, an LED strip magically engineered by a large aeronautics firm specifically for the sub? and what would that change?).
Using something off the shelf is completely fine, but it doesn't get you off the hook from doing the work of certifying that it's safe and fit for purpose. If you've ever used a modern game controller (even ones made by Microsoft), many of them are prone to issues with the potentiometer which causes the joysticks to drift subtly in one or more directions. Not ideal for controlling life critical systems.
I like MS hardware, but my goodness, calling Logitech that is clearly missing something in the accuracy department. Logitech is way more experienced at making and selling input devices than MS.
I agree with you in principle on your defense of Logitech, but if there’s a company that can give Logitech a run for their money in terms of designing and selling input peripherals, it probably is Microsoft. There are very few extant input peripheral manufacturers that have been doing it as long or longer than Microsoft has, so it would be an overstatement to say they’re way more experienced”. Logitech has released to market more peripherals overall though since that’s pretty much their entire business.
As an amateur EE, using mass market is a braindead idea in this case.
The controller is not built to deal with high humidity which I assume is a given in this kind of sub.
Another reason is that these devices are built out of very cheap components and are not at all designed to be reliable. You can easily design a controller that is much more reliable.
Having your multi million dollar sub grounded because you allowed a cheap component on board is pretty stupid imo.
I mostly agree but my knee-jerk concern is mostly what's not the controller. The USB port, the driver, the operating system, and the computer.
All of that worries me at a glance, but I absolutely have no awareness of the options in this space or what can be done to mitigate risks re: reliability.
Also assuming that weight isn't an issue, the controller being $30 makes redundancy easy. Just like every other kid playing video games, simply have a second one in case the first one fails.
The Xbox controllers are used to control the periscope which is not a safety critical device. Regardless, the navy uses wired controllers and did extensive testing and verification. This outfit didn't do anything like that; in one video with a journalist the bluetooth controller was a 'feature' because they could pass it around the sub.
The testing and verification is key. It might even be they were trying to lean on some work done by the navy on the Xbox 360 controller and that got switched along the line for the Logitech, losing one of the main reasons for using the original choice.
In any case, I would hope they brought a spare (or had an alternative method to drive, even if cumbersome), as easy spares is one of the selling points of COTS parts (and long as you verify it's the real part and isn't a revision that looks the same invalidating your testing).
I wonder if using an XInput controller has a perk in that it’s relatively straightforward to find a second source if needed. Or, if one manufacturer isn’t working for them, they have a specification for controlling the periscope.
I'm just imagining it running out of batteries. Then the user non-chalantly asks the pilot/guide for the spares. But they get a blank look. They repeat themselves. They must not have heard. They get a grimace this time and they suddenly realize what a precarious situation they were in all along.
They had spare controllers. Part of the idea of using off the shelf components like this, is the ease of replacement. If you have a 100k controller, and it fails, you need to think how to fix it. If your controller costs 30 bucks, throw it away and change for a new one.
Do they have spare batteries? Have the batteries been stored in an environment where they won't degrade? Are they rechargeable? If so, has their state of charge been confirmed before sailing, etc., etc., etc.
COTS stuff is awesome, but it doesn't absolve you from having proper procedures in place and knowing what those procedures should be in the first place.
but does a controller fail recoverably? Does the computer recieve old input (up/down) forever untill new controller is pligged in? how long does pairong proceas take? What if it fails at a critical moment?
In a 2022 interview with CBC, Rush added the Bluetooth game controllers were durable — “it’s meant for a 16 year old to throw it around,” he said, tossing the controller to the floor — and that they kept spares on board “just in case.”
Also, the controllers appear to be only to control the periscope. Which is not a critical component of this submarine. Everybody is fixating on them, but that's not what caused them to sink/get lost. It was probably the rest of the shoddy engineering.
Having spares is one thing. The question is do they test spares on a regular basis, make sure they have been charged between every mission and rotate them to test battery life?
Edit: consumer joysticks normally use potentiometers, which aren't great for deadzones/drift. For things like dust incursion reasons along it would make sense for any industrial/military device to be using hall effect based joysticks.
Periscopes haven't been combat critical on submarines since slightly after WW2. They rely mostly on sonar to detect enemies, not vision - and of course they would. Periscopes are useless against submarines, and if an anti-submarine ship is nearby, you wouldn't go to periscope depth putting the submarine in a perilous position, and showing it off at that.
It's something that can be quickly swapped out if it does fail though being a wired controller, I'd put decent odds on this company not bothering to put a backup controller in their death tube. Also a periscope is less critical to combat in the age of sonar that can tell you bearing, heading and what type of ship often without the risk of surfacing and getting lit up on radar. Modern subs basically never want to surface in combat there's no need to take the added risk.
> this company not bothering to put a backup controller in their death tube
the really strange part of that, is that the pilot was the CEO of the company. Like the Norfolk Southern CEO would never in a million years set foot on one of their trains of death.
Anyhow they now heard sounds in 30minute intervals, so looks like they are still alive down there.
I saw the same thing but some of the groups searching haven't heard that pounding since Monday from the places I read. Does imply it might not have been a catastrophic implosion but honestly that's one of the better ways to go in a submarine. Also there's a lot of noise in the ocean on some other sub rescues they thought they heard noises from the crashed sub but it was just from the boats looking for them.
Quick replace is a fair point. Sonar completely superseding periscope is not quite as sonic countermeasures have been in use for decades. Also periscope depth is not surfacing.
They have a couple of pretty good shots of the controller, and I don't see a wire. Also, the marketing image they include for the controller is clearly labeled as wireless.
I think by "the article" they mean the one linked at the top of this subthread, which is about the Navy and shows a sailor using a wired Xbox 360 controller.
The one used on the missing submersible does use Bluetooth.
I mean the xbox and Playstation controllers are both actually really good, sturdy, reliable controllers; I'm sure a contractor could do "better" for whatever meaning of the word better for specialist cases like the military, but... why? If an xbox controller breaks, they can just pull out a new one.
War is as much about cost as it is about effective means of killing others. I can't say how much it's used because of a confirmation / media bias, but cheap drones are used effectively in Ukraine, plain commercial off the shelf drones (with matching controllers) with a bomb strapped to them taking out tanks and crews (who often leave their hatch open in the clips I've seen).
A few hundred bucks to take out a multi million tank sounds like a really good exchange.
> I mean the xbox and Playstation controllers are both actually really good, sturdy, reliable controllers
In point of fact they are not. The PS5 controller has poor battery life and both have stick drift issues because they use cheap analogue sensors. The current generation of Nintendo controllers are similar: stick drift and battery issues are common. And then there are issues with wireless interference which can be a serious problem and, when it is, difficult to diagnose and fix. I don't think the Logitech controller in question even has wired as an option though of course I have no idea if that's relevant to the incident at all.
Yeah, I'm not convinced this is in any way related to the issues. I'm far more concerned with the system that such a controller was plugged into than the controller itself.
Commercial off the shelf pc? What kind of redundancy? How was power and power backup managed?
The guidance and control system seems to run on a GTK (?) app running on what looks like Ubuntu 10.04. An HDMI cable can be seen running to the monitor.
If I had to take a random guess, this system is probably some form of an embedded Atom/Geode type device (if not just a notebook PC) with some CAN or RS485/422/232 interfaces attached via USB.
It turns out it wasn't Bluetooth - it was one of those proprietary radios with a USB dongle which should be a lot more reliable. But still... it doesn't sound like they had any kind of backup at all. Maybe they just didn't talk about the backups?
wifi dongles aren't exactly bullet proof. For example if you use a cycling turbo trainer with a power meter, a macbook and an ANT+ (2.4ghz) dongle there's a good chance you've had to buy a 6 foot extender cable so get the dongle far enough away from the macbook because something about the macbook itself interferes with the signal. It's a known thing among home training cyclists.
I saw a video about that earlier. I think that part surprised me more than anything else. I was also surprised at just how close they would come to objects.
It sounds like the screens could be used as backup control mechanisms, but I wonder how much time they'd lose making that transition.
The YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay was invited to film on an Ohio class nuclear submarine training in the Arctic. [0] You can see how many of the system are mechanical and not electronic in the demonstration especially the ballast controls. Most if not all boats and ships can control the throttle mechanically so if the boat loses its electronics such as a wave smashing the windshield in, it is still possible to control the rudder and throttles. I was very surprised at the lack if mechanical controls on the recreational submarine.
I trust an Xbox 360 controller a whole lot more than I trust a Logitech controller. First party game console controllers are generally very robust and the 360 one is a classic. Third party are hit or miss but usually miss.
The issue most people on Reddit were discussing is that it’s a cheap off brand controller, rather than a higher quality name brand controller (from Sony or Microsoft)
Their controllers are well known for being garbage. People that take video games seriously can tell you all of the different reasons why they "feel worse" or are just less reliable than OEM. It's a $30 controller where the "standard" option is around $60. The "premium" market where they are custom made for important use cases (ie, competitive Melee tournament) can easily reach into multiple hundreds of dollars, using components like hall effect sensors instead of resistive potentiometers that will lose accuracy over time.
Most people would refuse to play a video game with this controller, let alone use it as a critical component in a vehicle. Joystick drift in a videogame is frustrating. Joystick drift in a fucking submarine is a disaster waiting to happen.
I have the wired version of the controller in the article and actually like it quite a bit, but it definitely isn't as rugged as an official Xbox controller would be. The main features I like on it are a way to switch between DirectInput and XInput modes and the ability to swap the left thumbstick and dpad.
Definitely wouldn't trust it for a submarine though.
Their game controllers are low quality. For example, home and professional desktop flight simulators prefer to use VKB or Virpil joysticks instead of Logitech or Thrustmaster.
I’ve owned and used Virpil and VKB, and they’re both terrific (Virpil is just insanely over the top good, though), but I wouldn’t even think to put them in the same sentence as Logitech. And I think Logitech makes pretty good peripherals generally! But that enthusiast sim stuff is just in a different realm.
Anyway, my point is, I wouldn’t necessarily look down on a Logitech controller. Now if it were MadCatz….
The X56 can't be compared to the VKB Gladiator. The X56 is full HOTAS with split throttle and an twist axis on the stick itself. The VKB Gladiator needs to purchase an additional module for twist and VKB doesn't even have a split throttle.
Also keep in mind that the X56, X52 Pro, and X52 weren't Logitech either. Logitech bought out Saitek which was the original vendor and at least at first glance they haven't updated the designs in over a decade.
Huh. Gladiator is way cheaper than I remember. Would still be a bargain at twice the price.
At this point, I probably have about $900 sunk into Virpil controls. The Alpha grip and base, the Mongoose throttle and an extra control panel I just ordered. Just absolutely love the feel and functionality.
I doubt anyone thinks this is why the sub went missing.
It's just funny that the submarine, which went missing, and is now notorious for skimping on safety, went with a generic "third party" controller instead of something higher quality, like a genuine Xbox controller from Microsoft.
> Nothing to say this is the cause of the fault and probably going to be more reliable than something hand rolled.
Also, COTS gear that's designed with a standard interface is by design trivial to replace even through hot swapping, which automatically means resilience against errors.
Not just video games, video games that intentionally mimic the job they're performing. The only real difference is that you don't get achievement pop-ups or announcements. And, of course, that you kill or maim human beings in the process, but that is intentional.
Logitech F710 has been the least reliable controller I have ever used. Connectivity and driver issues all over the place across all Windows OS's I have ever had the displeasure of using it with. Once I switched to Xbox controllers on my Win machine those issues were a thing of the past.
I once spole to a team thay used a wireless controller to control a robot. If that particular wireless controller ran out of battery or lost sognal for any reason, the dongle in the PC kept the command, i.e. move forward, forever. You'd have to chase the robot around.
xbox 360 controllers last only 6 months to a couple years with various failures that don't matter when you're playing a video game with them but can actually get you killed if they fail when you're in deep ocean. These are not ok for controls in vehicles where failure can mean everyone onboard dies. The navy does not use these for critical system controls. They were never built or tested for that.
I have thousands of hours of playtime on CoD4, MW2, and countless PC games over the course of about 15 years on my 360 controller I've had since I was a teenager. I've had to replace the joysticks a couple of times, and opened it up to clean it a few more times than that. wth are you doing to your controllers that they die in 6 months?
> Mass market has a lot of R&D to leverage so it makes sense. Nothing to say this is the cause of the fault and probably going to be more reliable than something hand rolled.
Consumer grade products aren't built to last, they are built to be cheap so they can sell them to actual consumers
We all know how the military ends up using these consumer grade products; lobbying, aka deep state corruption "if that happens in a foreign country"
Hololens didn't find commercial success, yet ended up with the military, soldiers weren't happy when it was time to use the actual consumer grade product ;)
> Consumer grade products aren't built to last, they are built to be cheap so they can sell them to actual consumers
Video game gamepads are probably some of the most well designed pieces of equipment I know of, with each part having a guaranteed lifetime of clicks and/or swipes, and other such details.
Video gamers are really obsessive over these details. It wouldn't be surprising to me if the latest hall-effect sensor joypads are the best durability in the world for thumbpads.
That being said: a cheap Logitech controller would be an old potentiometer-based controller with far less durability. I'm sure if I asked around, someone out there knows the specifications and would know when to regularly replace that gamepad after X-hours of use (and I'd expect X-hours to be in excess of 1000 hours, maybe even 10,000+ hours, even for a gamepad like that)
----------
I think where video gamers are getting wow'd is that... they weren't using like a brand-name controller here. $30 Logitech is low-end. Video gamers know which controllers to rely upon.
Bottom of the barrel $30 Logitech is barely something I feel good about giving to a friend during a gaming session, let alone a life-or-death equipment choice for steering a submarine. You get far more reliable, higher-quality gamepads at the $50 or even $80 levels.
I don't think video gamers would be hating on these guys if they used... I dunno... an 8bitdo + GuliKit Hall Effect controller. We'd all be like "Oh yeah, that's quality stuff" (the Bluetooth is unreliable but I assume some kind of wired version is available somewhere...)
The top end joysticks used in video game tournaments for maximum reliability are easily $200+.
or you are feet away from 50 foot section of the rusted Titanic and you drift into causing it to crash on top of your sub, or worst cracking the front window barely rated for 1/4 of the depth you are at.
as he pilots the missile guided nuclear warhead with his $30 joystick, Sgt James's controller's joystick drifts and hit New York by accident!.. the city is gone.. he could have avoided this issue, but unfortunately, the buttons were stuck because it's raining and the controller is not water proof, it's unfortunate to loose the WW3 due to this $30 mistake!
> Bottom of the barrel $30 Logitech is barely something I feel good about giving to a friend during a gaming session, let alone a life-or-death equipment choice for steering a submarine.
I wish my friend whose mom bought him MadCatz controllers had your manners and sense of propriety.
One shall not obsess with the game controller they use, I suppose, in their analysis, failing the controller wouldn't prevent the sub from resurfacing... It is symptomatic, however. The whole Silicon Valley is like that. You have the old guard, NASA, millions for fault analysis, rumors go the C code on some NASA rocket was certified at $1000 per line---human eyeballs reading it...
All those start-ups and unicorns, though. Just do it, when to be a hacker became an honorific, a title... Code your stuff, design your mechanics at Starbucks, who needs mathematics and physics when we can have s*t done instead. Who needs signing-off when we can have a carate-belt meeting standing on bouncing balls instead...
I don't want to be the dean of the faculty of prophecy but this is only the beginning. Wait until those autopilots starts using ChatGPT/Stack Overflow/copy/pasted code...
The use of the controller is symptomatic of their attitude, but I agree that it's probably not as relevant as, say, using an untested (and apparently untestable) carbon fiber hull:
> Lochridge’s concerns mainly focused on the company’s decision to rely on sensitive acoustic monitoring – cracking or popping sounds made by the hull under pressure – to detect flaws, rather than a scan of the hull.
Lochridge said the company told him no equipment existed that could perform such a test on the 5in-thick (12.7cm-thick) carbon-fiber hull.
“This was problematic because this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail – often milliseconds before an implosion – and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure on to the hull,” Lochridge’s counterclaim said.
Interesting... This is similar to the concerns that Vince Weldon, the Boeing engineer had over the 787 Dreamliner hull made of composites: that flaws could not be found by a visual scan.
I have a carbon fibre fork on my bike. I had a low-speed accident a few years ago, and took the bike to a mechanic to get it checked out afterwards. He said he'd checked everything, and it was fine - except the fork, which he had no way of telling if was undamaged or about to fail. I think i'll get steel next time.
this isn't true anymore. you can get carbon bikes scanned after and accident to find any internal damage. Ruckus in Portland, OR is where i've shipped to before with luck, but there's a lot more local options now depending on the scene
Ouch! Folks across the street own a bike shop and sponsor an annual criteruim. Last year there was a crash right in front of our house - touch of wheels I suppose. There's a slight hill at the end of the street and I guess the riders could have been going in excess of 30 mph or more. No one badly hurt AFAIK but one bike had a broken frame. In this case no fancy equipment was required to detect the flaw. :-/
You may be interested in having a look at this relevant and interesting article "Nanoscopic origin of cracks in carbon fibre-reinforced plastic composites":
Xbox controllers are way ahead of low-end logitech controllers though, so the point stands: If you want to control the device using a controller, might as well pick a good reliable one instead of the cheapest option available.
I worked for a defense contractor, and we had initial plans for a contractor to build us a wireless controller. Their controller was an ugly box-shaped controller that they wanted to charge us 200k. I redesigned the architecture of our system so that we could use an Xbox controller instead.
There is no reason why these controllers can't be used over some other "industrial" controller, as long as you design the system appropriately to account for failures, which you should be doing regardless of what controller you select.
I’ve always hated this aspect of journalism- news stories latching on to an innocuous detail and then playing it up to make the whole operation seem like a circus. It plays to the Dunning-Krueger effect so hard.
Nothing is untestable. If validation results in destruction, then destructive testing is how this is done.
Failing to test is a choice, similar to the choice made by a software engineer who determines, without testing, that their production service has no bugs.
If a component's flaw can only be detected right before a failure, we need statistical analysis of multiple such failures being intentionally induced to estimate the component's limits.
Not finding or knowing about existing limits or flaws is the direct result of not looking for them.
As a Quality Assurance person, this is what drives me up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the other wall.
You can always do a test run. Not doing that test run is essentially saying every person you subject to that system is not worth the trouble of doing the test.
No one was claiming that it was untestable, the company did decide to go with an acoustic monitoring, which is a destructive test, instead of a scan, which is a nondestructive test. The company claimed there was no non-destructive test that could be done. The issue is that when you're dealing with short run custom components, like the hull of a submarine, just because one passes a destructive test doesn't mean the others are free of manufacturing defects. You can't do useful statistical analysis when your sample size is small.
The details about the single window on the craft is also pretty damning:
>Further, the craft was designed to reach depths of 4,000 meters (13,123ft), where the Titanic rested. But, according to Lochridge, the passenger viewport was only certified for depths of up to 1,300 metres (4,265ft), and OceanGate would not pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport certified for 4,000 metres.
I read about the huge lack of safety measures on the submarine, and now this. I am beginning to think that perhaps the CEO of the company has voluntarily decided to die with his unfortunate fellow passengers. I know mine is big speculation, but taking the glass viewport to 300% of its certified maximum strength in an environment where the slightest setback can be fatal can no longer even be considered as "taking risks."
He says that testing of the composite materials is really difficult in comparison with metal. As they fail catastrophically without material stress.
Quotes like: "Lochridge’s concerns mainly focused on the company’s decision to rely on sensitive acoustic monitoring – cracking or popping sounds made by the hull under pressure – to detect flaws, rather than a scan of the hull."
For the most part (so no self-driving cars), startups are in a low-stakes game, so it makes sense to hack away, and it nas nothing to do with an "old guard." Google (or any other tech company) outages aren't particularly memorable unless you were an engineer involved in it. The space shuttle accidents were labeled "disasters."
> Theranos is an outright fraud. Not the product of getting things done on fast track
Theranos is product of the same culture. Company founder chases a goal they do not understand, and convinces investors its right around the corner. In actuality they have no clue.
There is no foundamental difference between theranos diagnosis and tesla autopilot.
The only reason we call theranos fraud is that we know conclusively that their goal is impossible. We have not yet accepted that autopilot is.
Elizabeth Holmes was not convicted of fraud and sentenced to eleven and a quarter years in prison because her company was a bad investment, no matter how much tech "journalists" want you to believe. She's going to prison because she committed boring financial fraud. If she was truthful to investors about the state of her company and her technology, she never would have received funding. Claiming that your technology will totally be ready in 6 months and will change the world is one thing, saying that it's in secret use by the US Military in Afghanistan onboard medevac helicopters is another.
> we know conclusively that their goal is impossible
No we only know that their approach was wrong. Here is a preprint of a paper describing detection of 12 different types of cancer from a single drop of blood:
The problem isn’t the volume of blood, it’s that blood drawn from finger capillaries is not a representative sample for diagnostic purposes. There are plenty of tests that are even more sensitive, but they require a proper sample drawn directly from a vein or artery.
Really? Think another way: MVP. MVP is a big in the startup scene. No startup tells you how they made there MVP. Most of them think, if I get enough investment, if I get enough customers, then I will make it better. But until now the other way is just enough for my MVP.
So some would call it MVP and others would call it fraud. Until it is really being implemented as advertised.
I agree. With software being ever more embedded in our daily lives and ability to function in society, the stakes are very high, even in domains outside of physical products.
Social media has shown to be pretty destructive. I don’t think there are many low stakes areas for software. It’s all impactful and potentially harmful at scale.
As far as I remember the Theranos people used standard commercial tests, and sold the results as coming from their magic device. So the results were solid - the fraud was elsewhere. I might be remembering this wrong.
No expert, but as I have read and understand, theres a catch. Theranos promised all kinds of tests drawing minimal blood, and they performed the tests using commercial equipment but with less blood than what these equipment is meant to use. So the results were not actually solid.
Like the video [1] mentions, they were only improvising on things (including the controller) that would not pose a safety hazard if they failed. The critical components like the capsule were designed alongside NASA and others. People aren't just tossing safety to the wind, but trying to create a better balance. NASA does spend a extreme amount of money on compliance and safety - yet that doesn't prevent them from doing things like blowing up $600 million Mars probes because of a mismatch between Imperial and Metric units. [2]
Basically you cannot, no matter how much money you spend, prevent every possible mistake, or even every "obvious" mistake, because "obvious" is often only obvious in hindsight. And going too far on the side of risk avoidance leaves you frozen in time, unable to progress, even as you continue to make mistakes - which drives you even further into extremes of risk avoidance. Of course on the other end being completely cavalier about safety leaves you making mistakes you both can and should have foreseen.
So I suppose we'll just get to see which this was. If anything my prediction here would be that they started becoming so comfortable with these dives that they impacted the Titanic, going for that epic view, resulting in a cascade of system failures or even a breach, bearing in mind you're already going to be near critical pressure thresholds. Absolutely zero basis for my prediction, but I think it's much more probable than a controller failure. They had redundancies on the controllers, and could surface without them. But human hubris has no such constraints.
He told CBS News: "You know, there's a limit. At some point safety just is pure waste. I mean if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed.
Don't get in your car. Don't do anything. At some point, you're going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules."
I’ve know mountain climbers, hang glider/paraglider pilots, scuba divers, sky divers, and more and we pretty much say that exact thing. I’ve been casual acquaintances with people who have died doing extreme sports.
Usually, the people in these sports say if the worst were to happen to them, they accept that risk and wouldn’t want their fate to stop other people from following their passions. That the feeling of being alive chasing these dreams fulfills a part of them, and they would be lost without that fulfillment.
We all do take risks for our own happiness, different people just want different things from life and will drawn that line in different places.
My guess is the five people on the sub would not want this incident to stop people from attempting to visit the Titanic.
...Yes, you're going to take risks. Got it. This risk in particular ends up with you as chunky salsa 4 kilometers under the water, because you couldn't be bothered to sink a copy of the bloody thing with no one in it first.
If it's worth making, make 2 or 3 of with at least one slated for being destroyed at one point.
Space Shuttle Enterprise never saw Space or the launch pad. It was still made and flown.
There's a spectrum of risk comfort in mountaineering though.
At the end of the day if there's a rockslide, there's nothing you can do, so you have to be willing to accept some level of risk.
But at the same time, the majority of mountaineering deaths are due to people taking unnecessary risks (for the sport). Being poorly prepared in terms of gear, or making poor decisions, or not being educated enough in climbing, safety assessment, and rescue techniques.
There's absolutely a lot you can do to mitigate the risk, and I think even the experienced mountaineers who choose to take more risk (say, traveling lighter and placing less protection in order to cover more ground in a day) don't advocate for that as the standard way to practice the sport.
I'll be honest, I've had a few close calls myself, but I've taken those as lessons in how to do things more safely going forward, because I value doing things safely more than "bagging more peaks".
I guess if your dream is something like "climb every mountain" accepting more risk is necessary.
But I don't see why the people on this Titanic expedition couldn't have achieved their goals while spending a bit more time on R&D + QA.
Also, people should be making these risk decisions for themselves, not others. The CEO may have had it coming to him, but I feel bad for the other crew on board if they weren't able to decline the expedition, or weren't provided adequate information about the testing that had been done.
This is not true, the maker of this sub compromised substantially on safety and did not have it certified by an independent body like most other builders of deep sea submarines do. In fact, members of the small deep sea submarine community wrote a letter to the company warning them about the safety hazards and the lack of certification. Source: Today's interview with a deep sea exploration submarine commander on German TV (ARD Tagesschau).
In particular, this company used carbon fiber materials that were neither tested nor certified for the intended operational depth, and they also did not do extensive testing like you do when you certify a craft.
As it's explained in another comment - the CEO wanted it tested but there isn't a facility anywhere on earth equipped to test it. Perhaps the argument then is that part of the company funding should have been building a custom rig designed for testing this highly custom 5 inch thick carbon fibre shell - but it's not like options to test it were available and were ignored.
This is not true either. As the submarine commander interviewed lays out, the testing is done by actual dives, and there is a certification body for it. Almost every other deep sea exploration submarine is certified. However, getting certified is voluntary.
Of course, certifying it just means that independent experts take a look at the design and use sensors during dives. All of these vehicles are experimental. But not even trying is negligent.
> the CEO wanted it tested but there isn't a facility anywhere on earth equipped to test it.
They could have dropped it to the bottom of the sea with weights, have a timer release the weights and hauled it back up. Cheaper than renting any testing facility on earth.
They could have done this multiple times on the same hull until it imploded. If a month of dropping it and retrieving it doesn't result in implosion, then it's probably safe enough to put people into it.
There was no need to make its first test of that pressure with people in it.
A lot of things that we use all the time couldn't be reasonably tested in operational scenario in any other way than by just using them(most planes are in that category - you can test a lot of things on test benches but there isn't a way to test an airliner at operational speed an altitude other than actually flying it)
I think if SpaceX can send 15 robotic rockets into space to test them, this lot could've sunk a prototype to high pressure and got a diver to go down and smack the hull with a wrench for a while.
>Like the video [1] mentions, they were only improvising on things (including the controller) that would not pose a safety hazard if they failed.
This is an extremely dangerous attitude though (obviously). In the BBC documentary, the thrusters are out of orientation and they just solve it by saying 'turn the controller, since right is your new forward.'
In the documentary it's played off as fun, but there's a non-zero chance the sub is currently stuck within seafloor wreckage and it could 100% be the fault of the controller.
Bad steering certainly wouldn't prevent them from dropping ballast (which they imply is the ultimate failsafe), but it is not a zero-failure-risk system.
The critical components like the capsule were designed alongside NASA
I saw that claim, and wondered what it entailed. The founder is clearly in the mold of testing mission-critical/life or death systems in production, while skirting or floating the rules. Such a claim is like one of those logos you see on the front of software start ups home pages, claiming some usage by Google, MIT, or CERN, without any verification or context.
Their release is here [1]. The NASA tracking number is SAA8-2031655. The agreement started in 2020, and concluded in 2022. One of the guys on board the sub is Stockton Rush, the founder/owner of the company. He clearly believes (or believed as it may ultimately be) in the product they created, and wasn't just casually playing games for bucks.
I would largely tune the media out on this. They have no more special insight than you or I. All that's known is that a sub has gone dark; everything else is speculation. Within 3 days we'll know for certain whether the people on the ship have been rescued, or are dead. In case it's the latter, we won't have any realistic idea of what happened until the sub, or its remains, are recovered. And that may simply not happen.
Why is the capsule considered the only critical safety component?
If everything else fails wouldn't it just fall to the bottom of the ocean? Even if it can survive that depth that only sounds good on paper. Nobody could get to you.
Because an implosion is a single point of failure leading to instant death. Anything else can be salvaged by staying calm and using one of multiple ways to resurface.
Subs will always have 1000 ways to kill you and most of them are catastrophic. You're pretty much boned if anything goes wrong especially with so few crew members, lack of compartments, backup propulsion, etc.
The reason NASA did that is because the stakes were so high. They couldn’t send a firmware update in the middle of a journey and the reputation of America hinged on the success of NASA.
If you are under that level of pressure, you make sure you dot your i’s and cross your t’s.
I'm really frustrated by anyone that poo-poos this specific issue. One shall absolutely fucking obsess, me for instance about the game controller they used. Look at this.
So the F710 Logitech gamepad was something I wouldn't even trust as a teenager to let me play emulated retro games accurately. It has a hardware switch to toggle between DirectInput (an ancient input technology within Microsoft stack), and XInput which is a non-trivial third-party software to map controllers to do things on your computer. Complaints range from 'the input switch was finicky and I had to tape it down' to 'you had to insert the USB dongle into the computer carefully like trying to get a Nintendo cartridge to work'. In this case, it was the main navigation control on a submersible far exceeding its safety buffer by orders of magnitude.
Sure, military applications have found use for XBox and other controllers as system inputs because generations of those serving are used to that interface. The differences are not subtle:
1. There had to be a certification process to use the controller, including risk analysis which would absolutely deny any attempt to use wireless controllers to operate any piece of equipment, no less anything that was weapon or safety critical. The military doesn't drive boats with XBox controllers.
2. XBox controllers are well designed and reliable, at an order of magnitude of this one. THEY ALSO COME IN A WIRED VERSION.
3. They decided to further mod the controller for no reason with longer sticks, maybe to make it look less like the toy it is which actually reduces the dead spot response of an analog joystick. Why? What the fuck.
The reason for the photo above is to show what I've seen in every media piece where they talk about it: It is NEVER wired in any video or photo. In one video, which I can't dig up right now, the CEO actually tosses the controller carelessly on the ground and quips that "these things are designed for 16 year olds to throw them around".
Edit: The bit mentioned above is at 0:37 in this video: https://youtu.be/ClkytJa0ghc?t=37 - "we keep a couple of spares on board just in case", that's great but I'm wondering who in that sub knows how to pair an ancient Logitech gamepad and remap XInput like a kid playing Diablo.
That is on video and a joke during the interview, forget for a second that they're using a controller from 2005-era for a moment; at that point on something like an airplane or a battleship, you just caused an incident that requires maintenance testing to make sure you didn't just disable the fucking vehicle by throwing the controls around for fun.
No. Don't disregard this specific reckless decision even though it likely had nothing to do with whatever went wrong in this situation. The CEO of the company from the get-go abandoned any semblance of basic safety in engineering, and fired/sued the guy in charge of safety when he called it out. This controller is a metaphor for something that needs to immediately be regulated so that people like this can never get away with it again.
. Edit: The bit mentioned above is at 0:37 in this video: https://youtu.be/ClkytJa0ghc?t=37 - "we keep a couple of spares on board just in case", that's great but I'm wondering who in that sub knows how to pair an ancient Logitech gamepad and remap XInput like a kid playing Diablo.
They don't, in the BBC Travel episode "Take Me to Titanic" about this team and their sub, they did a dive with customers and almost had to abort because the controllers stopped working.
Then, when they reached the bottom of the sea, they were stuck going around in circles on the sea floor because the keymappings on the controllers stopped working. They almost had to abort the dive until someone on the surface had troubleshooted the issue and found out that the keys were incorrectly mapped to the sub's controls.
It turned out that the 'left' direction key on the gamepad actually mapped to the 'forward' motion of the submarine, and all of the gamepad controls were incorrectly mapped.
They only found out about the incorrect mapping after a dozen hours underwater and once they reached the seafloor.
That's just the insanity that happened with the gamepad, the entire dive experience was littered with potential and actual emergencies that were only averted due to luck.
To find their way around, they were literally dead reckoning on the bottom of the seafloor without any navigation systems. They had no voice or video communications with their team on the surface, and they relied on that team's text messages to help them adjust their dead reckoned position.
Watched this too. I am alarmed by the CEO's assertion in the CBS video segment that only the hull was critical, everything else could break and you'd be safe. We know for a fact that other submersibles have gotten caught in wreckage down at the site. Being able to control your thrusters and steer could be the difference between life and death.
I'll admit I absolutely don't have this adventurous spirit, and I admire those who do. I'm sincerely praying for their successful rescue. But some of this does seem careless and possibly negligent.
> This controller is a metaphor for something that needs to immediately be regulated so that people like this can never get away with it again.
There is something to be said for protecting people who would sign up for such an experience while misjudging the risk, or assuming that some government agency does provide oversight. Though, customers seem to have been informed that this is not the case: https://twitter.com/FridaGhitis/status/1671120043126423553
But apart from that, if someone wants to build a lego submarine and use it to dive to the Titanic, they should have every right to do so. It is their risk to take. Asking others to pay to join does not change this moral calculus. And yes, the people left on the surface have an ethical responsibility to not unreasonably refuse to rescue them when things to awry.
Sorry but that doesn't work in a reasonable society. You can't let just anyone do anything they want with the repercussions being 'they don't get rescued'. A few points:
* You can't let rescue services decide who deserves to be rescued -- for so many obvious reasons it would be patronizing to list them
* People with a lot of money and no sense can fuck things up on a massive scale if we let them do whatever they wanted
* Human society is not a free-for-all. As much as the civil libertarian tendencies in me want to say 'sure, do whatever you want, just don't mess with anyone else's stuff', it really isn't that simple
Shame and societal norms are a big deal in keeping people in check. Just getting yelled at in public for doing something objectionable is enough to keep most people from spitting indoors or pissing on crowded subway platform or what-have-you.
When shame doesn't work we rely on laws. Laws must be universally enforced and they must be fairly enforced and they must be seen to be enforced.
If we allow idiots with stupid ideas to get lucky enough times then they become looked up to and the shame goes away.
To the same end if the shame doesn't stop them we need to physically stop them or take away their ability to do the societally harmful thing they want to do.
People need to re-learn that you should be embarrassed for failing when what you strove to do was stupid and destructive.
In the general case that is more or less accurate. There are however a bunch of exceptions in the extreme case.
Rescue services do have a point where they will decide not to continue. During the Tham Luang cave rescue (the thai football boys that got stuck in a cave) there was a period where the rescue services decided that continuing was just too dangerous. It was only because of a handful private cave divers was crazy enough to try a exceptional dangerous idea that those children got out there alive, and had it failed then those cave divers would have basically received all the blame.
The case do illustrate how far into the extreme we have to go. The local rescue services gave up and gave the job to nation service. The national service gave up and gave it to the military (with international support). The military gave up, and then through almost a backdoor, a few individuals tried a Hail Mary attempt which against all odds worked well enough to get everyone home.
There are activities where people has to accept that rescue is limited or zero. If you go hiking in no man land then there is a real risk of rescue service not being able to locate you. People who attempt sailing around the world has the risk of being "lost to sea". Cave explorers both dry and wet has to accept that rescue attempts are done based on what is feasible. Same goes for wreck divers.
We could argue that those risky activities should be illegal (or shamed), but the counter argument is that a lot of activities are just inherently risky. Sports generate a huge amount of injuries. Motorcycles are viewed by health professionals as organ donor generators. Extreme sports are extreme, but they tend to also follow more rigorous training and certification in order to address those risk.
> We could argue that those risky activities should be illegal (or shamed), but the counter argument is that a lot of activities are just inherently risky.
There are always going to be distinctions. We allow motorcycles but we don't allow motorized wheelbarrows, or unicycles that can go 60mph. Why? History and tradition, practicality -- whatever the reason, it doesn't necessarily have to make sense and it surely wasn't designed that way. No one makes the standards to which we hold people -- but we are allowed to complain when we don't feel they are in line with a healthy society.
A hand-guided mecha-wheelbarrow would be incredibly helpful for people who would like to do more of their own gardening and landscaping but who don't have the physique for it. I'm now going to spend half a day thinking about how something like that could be built to work reliably, economically, and safely, while other people on HN have probably already spent half a day thinking about how to prohibit it.
Then, back to that unicycle thing. Your "bad ideas" make fascinating engineering challenges. Gotta give credit where it's due.
You obviously weren't paying attention to anything I wrote besides looking for things to criticize. I was saying that those things are all bad ideas but we allow some and not others for reasons that go beyond 'bad' and it is not for us to judge or change.
It doesn't seem that difficult. Get an electronic speed controller and a hub motor from a trashed e-scooter (10" wheels should work?) put a battery pack on it and rig the throttle to a cable on the handle.
I suspect this loss will be as effective as any regulation. Nobody will get on board one of these subs without doing a lot more due diligence than the present customers did. And if they do, well, that's on them.
Believe it or not, new laws aren't always the answer. You can't bubble-wrap the world and you will make it a worse place for everyone if you try.
I didn't say anything about making new laws. I am proposing that our society is heading in the wrong direction by lionizing people who take stupid risks and win.
Yeah, I'm mostly addressing truemotive's knee-jerk post above.
Let's at least wait for the failure analysis reports before calling for congressional hearings. In other words, don't send a lawyer to do an engineer's job.
Life is becoming very safe, but we evolved under conditions of deadly risks around every corner. What we can and should ask is that the risk takers only jeopardize their own lives.
That’s nonsense. “Reasonable society” has been building and using commercial submersibles going on nearly a century and suddenly, after less than half a dozen people die in a dumb vanity stunt, we suddenly need to create a suite of brand new regulations? Our legislators and regulators have much better things to spend their bandwidth on.
What’s next? Are we going to start patrolling for DSVUIs, breathalyzing submarine captains at random?
I'm saying it can be enforced the same way it is in most industries that rely on dangerous equipment: via insurance policies, civil lawsuit, and criminal prosecution for negligence.
We don't breathalyze pilots when they board the plane, despite them being responsible for hundreds of people at a time, and millions of flights complete every year just fine.
No one suggested doing mandatory DUI checks except you, in order that you can argue against regulation. Regulation is requiring the pilot to be sober. Mandatory breathalyzer checking would be an example of a type of enforcement (which no one is arguing for).
They decided to further mod the controller for no reason with longer sticks, maybe to make it look less like the toy it is which actually reduces the dead spot response of an analog joystick. Why? What the fuck.
I would assume to allow more precise control - longer sticks will give you a smaller input for the same amount of travel and require more travel to achieve the same input.
Yeah, I don't get the "eh, it's not that big a deal" reaction.
That it was a game controller? OK, not necessarily a big deal. Hopefully they'd take two of them just in case, even with a high-quality game controller, but still, might be OK.
That it was a game controller not from one of the major console manufacturers? And a cheap one, at that? I can only assume people not taking that as a serious WTF haven't used many of those lately (by which I mean in the last 15+ years). If you buy from any but a handful of trusted brands, these days—and Logitech ain't one of them, it's almost, but not quite, entirely the three console manufacturers, and the exceptions are not cheap—you can expect the device to suck from day 1 and to die completely within a year, even if subjected to no abuse. You may luck out and it won't, but if you deviate from that guidance, you're very likely buying garbage unsuited even to home use.
If someone told me they bought a $30 Logitech controller for their Playstation emulator box, I'd tell them to buy a Playstation or XBox controller instead when it breaks.
This all will be better discussed after the recovery or memorials or whatever (Godspeed to them, I honestly hope for a miracle)
This metaphor is extremely double edged, especially in Silicon Valley ethos. When it fails, everyone piles on about the game controller and the lack of ‘flight worthiness.’ When it works they are lauded as heroes because of the extreme savings of using proven COTS products. The drone pilots are a great example, some officer got a nutty idea to try a game controller as his command had “more experience” with them and their success rates improved; now we are talking about it.
Space and the deep sea are the extreme limits, I think ‘regulation’ is really difficult because it is risky no matter who does it. In a way, this is the ultimate regulation that is going on here. And we still don’t know what happened or what could have failed yet.
When (most) people talk about the shitty controller, the options in their heads aren't "3rd party Logitech" or "$10,000 bespoke controller". They're "$200 elite OEM controller", "$60 standard OEM controller" or "$30 notoriously bad piece of shit Logitech".
>Space and the deep sea are the extreme limits, I think ‘regulation’ is really difficult because it is risky no matter who does it.
But this is why regulations exist in the first place. That's like saying we shouldn't regulate surgery, because it's always risky.
We should require certain credentials and safety measures for people who want to take civilians to the ocean floor in a tiny sub. I don't think that should be a controversial take.
The onus to make sure that a service they are going to use isn't any more dangerous than it has to be, shouldn't be on the consumer. I don't want to live in a society that thinks it's acceptable to hand-wave death and suffering away as if human lives are acceptable collateral in the "free market" correcting itself.
Customers would still understand that the thing they're going to do is super dangerous, but they should be able to rest easy knowing that the company they're using for this meets some minimal level of safety.
Regulation in areas of extreme innovation is by definition difficult. When you have people onboard any space or deep sea craft, you do have some level of moral obligation.
Whatever you feel about Elon Musk, I appreciate his distinction in approach between crewed and un-crewed craft at SpaceX. I'm paraphrasing but he has said that when something is uncrewed, you can push it to the limit over and over again to push the technology fwd. But the second you have people on board (i.e. Crew Dragon), the margin for error goes down to zero. There are unavoidable risks, but you want to be damn sure you've minimized the avoidable ones. So you can be both -- a fast moving startup, and a "safe" organization.
Obv we still know so little about the Titan, but what upsets me is that the 'uncrewed' extreme testing does not (afaik) seem to have been particularly rigorous.
If I see correctly, the base of the screen is screwed to the hull? At least there is now less than the advertised 12.7 cm of carbon fibre composite at that point.
I had a similar thought. When I saw the monitors, I thought "How are they mounted to the hull? They wouldn't screw them into it...." well, it turns out they did.
Which is a bad idea in any sense. But then, looking at the pictures, I wouldn't dive deeper than a bathtub in that thing, even if I was paid 250k to do so. It looks like a carbon fiber tube with some clued on cameras, lights, propulsion and balast. Which is far, far from being a properly designed and engineered sub. Or boat. Or piece of furniture...
Fixed, thanks. I've had a lot of thoughts about this lately. Here's another fun fact: What's wrong with this picture taken while the submersible is out of operation?
Answer: Look underneath the floor. The Altec Lansing ACS33 PowerCube 2.1 speaker system. $35 used on eBay and again from early 2000s era. -> https://i.imgur.com/fVdQ9Pc.png
Not safety critical, but so extremely indicative of how careless every element of this thing was handled before they started putting rich people in it and sending them 2.5mi underwater. It's as if they put it together by raiding my basement when I was in high school. Unbelievable.
Wow that's bad. Every new detail looks like something out of an undergrad project. It works to hack something like that together as a first prototype, but even a masters student in a decent lab with decent mentors can make something much more professional. It's like they must have actively prevented anyone with any professional experience whatsoever from seeing it.
It's likely that anyone with experience immediately walked away from the project when they saw what was going on. Who would want the reputation hit, the liabilities and the blood on their hands when things went wrong?
I think they did sue some former employee that was publicly calling out some stress detail about some window. So experienced employees did not only walk away but sounded the alarm on the way out.
It has to be hard for non-technical passagerare to judge these things, like the pre-tour disclaimer contract stating risks. I mean almost every house in CA tells you it will give you cancer.
Their customers want an adventure. Making it look like it was put together in a basement probably increases the value to their customers, compared to a 17-speaker Bose system. Of course, you would want it to look cheap but be expensive and safe.
>> You have the old guard, NASA, millions for fault analysis,
Like with most things, extremes in either direction is bad, I think there is a middle ground between using logitech controllers, and being sooo paralyzing on safety (or rather the bureaucracy of "Safety™") that not only do you never really get off the ground, but come full circle and a $0.50 o ring you failed to test in freezing conditions blows up your entire rocket even after you spent millions having human read your C code...
Just a slight correction, the o-ring not being tested in freezing conditions wasn't an oversight that destroyed the challenger; the engineers knew that the o-ring hadn't been tested at that unusually low temperature and even suspected it could fail at those temperatures.
Management at Morton Thiokol and NASA disregarded those concerns because they had already scrubbed the launch several times.
Bureaucracy is forged from the furnace of past adversities.
To further your point, I hope with venture capital funding being far more expensive due to interest rate rise, that these kinds of practices are held back a bit due to money being harder to come by.
Or because investor X wants real assurances that something like the current situation doesn’t occur.
I think a good example of a balanced company in this space, is SpaceX.
They’ve significantly reduced the cost of launching into space, have quite rapid development for their industry, yet they seem to take necessary precautions and safety measures when needed.
They aren’t afraid to test things and have them fail, and been able to not let bad PR (because some conflate successful testing with a successful launch) take them down as a company.
Maybe the “SpaceX” way to have done the sun dive would be to have a test where an automatic diver is used to send the sun down, or some first principles approach is done from the building phase. A Logitech gaming controller is surely a canary for other practices they’ve done
The "whole Silicon Valley" thing is very old guard too. Larry Ellison's first Oracle database would lose customers records randomly and reliability was left for the "future". This submarine, Amazon's Blue Origin and so many others are no exception to this rule.
I thought the latest round of NASA missions were using commodity hardware and taking the fail-early-fail-often approach (at least compared to the old days)? And in doing so have delivered, all failures included, the most bang per buck of any NASA missions?
Not saying I'd trust my life to a gamepad alone, but pragmatism is a virtue in engineering.
I’d trust it to an Xbox, PlayStation controller, they’re some of the most reliability tested input devices ever. Most people are freaking out because it’s some known glitchy budget gamepad.
From a functional safety perspective if you can't verify each step from the initial risk assessment to the final product, you can't prove the overall risk reduction and therefore don't know the overall residual hazard. From that perspective this sub would never have left dry dock (or possibly the CAD model).
In practical terms if push came to shove, an Xbox or PS controller is probably more reliable than most equivalent devices. My stock phrase when comparing normal functions with Safety Instrumented Functions is "I'd trust this with my car, but not my life."
Not quite. They're experimenting with commodity hardware to provide additional experimental functionality on missions, not to replace the core mission hardware.
For instance the mars helicopter, Ingenuity, was effectively an expendable part of the Perseverance rover mission. Even if it never took off they'd still consider the overall mission a success. That it has worked so well despite using commodity hardware has been a nice surprise and might result in NASA using more of it, but the Perseverance rover still used proper rad-hardened chips and other specialised spacecraft components.
They're also definitely not using commodity hardware and fail-fast-fail-often on crewed aircraft.
> OceanGate Inc. is a privately held U.S. company operating out of Everett, Washington, that provides crewed submersibles for industry, research and exploration. The company was founded in 2009 by Stockton Rush.[1]
"Move fast, break things" is a SV mantra. That is ok for entertainment software or social networks but when you apply this to systems where people can die like healthcare, cars, spaceships and submersibles it's a problem,
Well yes, and this enables making all the stuff that we have now like Google, YouTube or ChatGPT. If those things were developed with NASA approach to code quality, we might never have had them.
It's one thing if your favourite video host or chatbot crashes, quite another if it's a self-driven car, airplane control software or, in this case, a submarine.
I'm not saying you should hack a sub from a scrap metal and just use it as is (which seems to have happened here). But you can rapidly iterate on your project to first make it functional and then gradually improve its reliability.
What matters is not the process, but the result. For example, SpaceX are using iterative approach in their design and they now have the most reliable rocket in history.
I'm not sure of your point here. You claim that SpaceX's process was an iterative one which lead to the 'most reliable rocket in history', but state that the process does not matter.
As I see it, there are two approaches: "NASA" approach and "SpaceX" or "Silicon valley" approach. In "NASA" approach you are building the system bottom-up ensuring the reliability on each level. In "SpaceX" approach you build a barely functional system as fast as you can and then iterate to improve reliability (and other characteristics).
The top comment in this thread seems to imply that "NASA" approach is inherently better, especially for safety-critical applications. My view is that from the point of view of safety, the approach doesn't really matter and what matters is the results, i.e. reliability. At the same time from the point of view of development velocity iterative approach is clearly better.
In case of the sunk submarine, it seems that the company followed iterative, "SpaceX" approach, but they didn't actually iterate enough to make their sub seaworthy.
> My view is that from the point of view of safety, the approach doesn't really matter and what matters is the results
But you won't know the 'results' until you have a catastrophe and can do a post-mortem and find out where you went wrong. The approach does matter because one approach is 'let's do everything we can to prevent the catastrophe'. I mean, the approach is safety.
Yeah. IMHO this thing should have gone unmanned to the bottom a gajillion times, and exposed to all variety of stressors, before a paying passenger was on board. Maybe that's not possible? Maybe it was in fact prohibitively expensive? I'd love to hear why I'm wrong, but it seems wild to me that paying passengers are along for a ride after only really a handful of successful trips in this thing, ever.
SpaceX has explicitly very different approaches for crewed and uncrewed crafts. Uncrewed rockets are pushed to the limit over and over and over again, to drive innovation and thoroughly test them. As soon as a single person is on board, their margin for error goes to zero.
I'd argue this is in fact superior to NASA's approach, which rarely allows for uncrewed testing (and spectacular RUDs), leading to technological stagnation and catastrophic organizational risks. (i.e. internal resistance to doing anything about the O-ring problem on Challenger, even though they had been alerted about the potential issue).
Your first examples weren't rockets, but search engines, video hosting platforms and chatbots.
Second, it's all very well "iterating until you succeed" but that's not a good approach when live humans are involved in the iterating. "Move fast and break things" is not the same as "move fast and break people". Space X, after all, had to prove a certain level of reliability before NASA let them fly people to ISS.
If Google or YouTube has an outage people don't instantly die. Likely no one will be harmed by a bug and it can be fixed and deployed. The same isn't true for a spacecraft or submersible.
Google doesn't need belt and suspenders development, human safety systems usually do.
and honestly a lot of it seems quite amateur hour. One of the steering motors was fitted backwards. When they discovered this, at the bottom of the ocean and a few hundred feet from Titanic, the solution they used was to hold the gamepad at right angles to compensate. That time they proceeded with the tour and made it back, but I can see how things could have gone a lot more wrong.
It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard. If they had encountered a program-destroying but non-catastrophic failure earlier on, it is possible we wouldn't be looking at one of the many horrific outcomes that this incident will likely resolve to.
Looking at the accounts reported to date, the OceanGate engineering culture was basically non-existent. Their test program was extremely lightweight to say the least, and the results that came back from what little hull testing they did do were ignored, resulting in the dismissal of an internal whistleblower [1]. We also learned that there were flammable materials within the pressure vessel, no practical contingency plan to speak of, no emergency beacon fitted, the list goes on. The whole thing was just cobbled together, not fully thought out or vetted, and yet the intent was to journey to one of the most unforgiving environments imaginable.
But getting back to the account of the reversed motor above -- it is one of the purest examples I can now think of where life imitates art. Piloting a stolen (but seaworthy) deep-sea submersible to the wreckage of the Titanic -- that was only able to make right-hand turns due to a "sub club" anti-theft device -- was a major plot point in the pilot episode of the TV series "Pinky and the Brain". Narf.
>It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard.
As I get older, I see this sentiment as very naive. The tacit assumption seems to be that there is an agency, a government, an organization, that would review and approve such endeavors. But that's just not how the world works. You can't stop people from going to sea, or sending contraptions to the bottom. It's a very big world, filled with mostly ocean, and plenty of thrill-seekers who will attempt anything half-way reasonable. Even 10% reasonable. You can't stop that, and personally, I don't think its a good idea. To get it you'd need a nanny state that snoops on everyone and steps in to stop you "for your own safety". It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand.
> You can't stop that, and personally, I don't think its a good idea. To get it you'd need a nanny state that snoops on everyone and steps in to stop you "for your own safety". It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand.
Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety. I seriously doubt the passengers onboard were aware of OceanGate’s whistleblower lawsuit or the claim that the viewport is not rated for the depth it is used at. When interviewed by the BBC, the company represented their submersible as very safe, certainly not as something likely to kill its passengers.
How is it a “nanny state” or “snooping” to require businesses to be honest about their service? This isn’t even necessarily an action a government would have to perform - it could be carried out by classification societies [0]. Do whatever you like with your own experimental sub, but don’t misrepresent it as a safe sightseeing trip for tourists.
> It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand.
It’s even easier to imagine scenarios where a business is allowed to sell trips on a vessel with critical safety issues that the company knew of but did not disclose or address.
We have remedies for these real scenarios - they are called laws and regulations.
The founder is likely dead and paid the ultimate price for his negligence. There’s simply not much you can do about people who are willing to die and take other people with them, whether intentionally or negligently. You can’t put a dead person on trial.
I believe that the GP’s point is that there’s no omniscient agency that can preemptively stop people from doing stupid things. There’s not enough resources to watch everything that everybody is doing all the time.
> I believe that the GP’s point is that there’s no omniscient agency that can preemptively stop people from doing stupid things. There’s not enough resources to watch everything that everybody is doing all the time.
I didn’t suggest that this is necessary. It seems like there should be enough resources to look into the construction standards of a tourism company based in the U.S. that has received international press coverage for several years. It is possible to stop a tourism company from operating. This wasn’t a secret deep sea dive that no one could halt - it was the latest in a series of commercial voyages that were covered in the press (a BBC reporter went on one a few years ago, and there is a video tour of the vehicle). This dive was publicly announced.
No one needs to be surveilled 24/7 for regulations to work.
> There’s not enough resources to watch everything that everybody is doing all the time.
Have you ever heard of the name "Edward Snowden"?
What everybody is doing is already literally being watched all the time and it has been that way or at least decades and has gotten worse with technological evolution.
Indexing people's online activity (in order to search for specific kinds of activiy) is a far cry from watching everything everybody is doing, let alone acting on all that information.
When many people make the claim “it hasn’t worked” wrt some intervention they often miss the point: the key question is change relative to the counterfactual; i.e. having done nothing.
So, to evaluate action at t=0, we compare some metric at the real t=1 against the counterfactual at t=1.
It is logically invalid to evaluate the efficacy of an action by only comparing the metric at t=0 and t=1. That kind of reasoning error is incredibly common.
>it could be carried out by classification societies
So everything already worked as intended. The tourists didn't bother to check the classification or if they did, were willing to dive anyways.
The 737 MAX shows that government involvement is not enough. Likewise doping shows that a legal framework is not enough to prevent advanced cheating.
>Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety. I seriously doubt the passengers onboard were aware of OceanGate’s whistleblower lawsuit
Wouldn't it be better to establish a verification culture? There are always businesses that lie. The law only works retroactively while the tourists would be alive if they had checked.
> The tourists didn't bother to check the classification or if they did, were willing to dive anyways.
My comment was suggesting that the U.S. government require that a business has a certification from an approved classification society in order to conduct a submersible tourism business. This does not seem to be the law currently since OceanGate is allowed to operate without any.
> The 737 MAX shows that government involvement is not enough.
No regulations will prevent all accidents, but I would say the rarity of fatal air accidents in the U.S. in recent decades is partly due to the high standards enforced by the FAA.
> Wouldn't it be better to establish a verification culture?
That sounds good too. That doesn’t contradict that regulations should also be in place so these conventions are required.
> The law only works retroactively while the tourists would be alive if they had checked.
Laws and regulations definitely do not only work retroactively. The FAA can ground unsafe planes, food inspectors can shutdown production before rotten food is shipped out, health inspectors can shutdown a restaurant.
Laws can’t protect these passengers, but they should be made to protect all future passengers.
>No regulations will prevent all accidents, but I would say the rarity of fatal air accidents in the U.S. in recent decades is partly due to the high standards enforced by the FAA.
Because the FAA has reporting requirements for any abnormal flight behavior which causes deviation. They literally prevent future accidents by analyzing past behavior.
And there might be more planes that would go down and more cheaters without any regulation. Just because you can't stop everything doesn't mean you shouldn't regulate anything
> Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety.
IANAL. This isn't just your personal opinion. In Common Law jurisdictions, see also: negligence, false advertising, deception, fraud, and misrepresentation. Civil Law jurisdictions have concepts that are comparable.
I agree that there doesn’t currently seem to be regulations governing what OceanGate is doing. My point is that there should be some in the future so this kind of thing doesn’t keep happening.
> But I think GP was just saying that there are no agencies to check rare venture like this.
I think they were making a stronger claim: that there is not only no agency currently doing this, but that it is pointless and impossible to try and regulate this area, which I don’t agree with.
It would of course be possible to regulate OceanGate out of business, and I sympathize with the desire to make sure people are sufficiently informed about the risks, which is hard.
But I agree with GP: there is something off about the calls for regulation here. Fundamentally, people should have the right to risk their lives in crazy expeditions to the bottom of the sea or the top of a mountain, and charging someone else money to be taken along does not change that.
As I have moved through my career and been in charge of larger and larger companies, I continue to be surprised how much of what you would expect is critical infrastructure that affects many people is being "cobbled" together.
I've worked at some companies that manage huge systems that affects tens of millions of people, which cause extremely severe problems if they break, and they are "cobbled" together with a surprising amount of metaphorical bubble gum and duct tape.
Every time I go somewhere new, I assume they have their shit together and I am surprised every time.
So no, it doesn't surprise me that an operation like this was cobbled together in the same fashion.
The difference is that the cobbling together at a large org has generally been battle-tested over time, at scale. The bits that were going to break have already broken and been replaced with something better. While it may seem horrible aesthetically from a developer's perspective, it's nevertheless functional and reliable for its purpose.
But when you use that approach on a new, one-off device with life-threatening consequences for failure, sooner or later you're going to find out that "testing in production" may not always be appropriate.
I didn’t downvote him, but I think it’s a bit dismissive of the original point and kind of falls prey to the no true Scotsman fallacy. antonvs’ point can be summarized as essentially “even though you have firsthand experience running companies with cobbled together critical infrastructure, that’s not actually cobbled together infrastructure.”
I don't agree with your summary. I specifically talked about "the cobbling together at a large org", I didn't say it wasn't actually cobbled together.
The point is just that any system that's being used successfully in production at scale has already been tested, has already broken in myriad ways both in testing and in production, and those issues have been addressed somehow - quite possibly by more cobbling together.
This doesn't somehow make the system "not actually cobbled together" - as I said, the implementation may still seem horrible to engineers. It just means that the points of failure that have actually arisen, whether in testing or production, have been addressed somehow, so that the system is able to function at scale.
A key point in all this is that factors like survivor bias are at play: you're not looking at an org that failed because of their cobbled-together system, you're looking at one that succeeded. Large orgs are also more likely to have more testing to help catch the issues with their cobbled-together systems.
This all means that if you try to use this approach on your experimental submarine that you're selling tickets for, you're trading off the almost certain loss of life of some of your passengers against the short-term time and cost savings achieved by poor engineering practices.
To quote Lord Farquaad, "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."
What antonovs tries to say that larger, older companies will tend to have a collection of modules/components that over the years have been relatively well tested and hardened. While a system may be cobbled together with the metaphorical duct tape, at least the components are sane-ish themselves.
Look at e.g. Kubernetes. You can cobble something together on kubernetes and once you get it limping, the system will be running surprisingly well for being cobbled together, compared to e.g. a system cobbled together from one off bash scripts.
I think that the term 'cobbled together' does injustice to something that's been running in production and is quite stable. It isn't a demo that's been cobbled together at short notice. The former isn't elegant because it doesn't have the clean lines of the original design, and age takes its toll.
Have to share the sentiment. I remember the expectation of great systems engineering I had when I was at the beginning of my career. You know, ”These things must’ve been done well, as thousands/millions people use these daily”. I was enlightened pretty fast by the first couple of years as a consultant.
Nowadays I expect something clumsy and mediocre, regardless of the organization, with very apparent problems and _maybe_ some bright spots somewhere in the system architecture.
Moreover, It's not like they're getting paid in sand dollars or doubloons from the bottom of the sea. The passengers are signing contracts and paying large fees in landlubber currencies. There's a company involved here, a legal entity. The company is based in Washington State.
If this was really not covered by any law in any country with a plausible claim on it, you can bet that people will soon be clamoring for one. Remember that air travel was once entirely unregulated. Now it's one of the most highly controlled activities. A lot of regulation like that happens in response to notable disasters; the regulations are, as they say, "written in blood."
I did not in fact say that. I'm addressing the broader false claim that the ocean is some sort of essentially unregulateable space. Indeed, I think the final paragraph makes clear that I think it's possible that no agency currently has unambiguous authority, but that won't stop people from creating one if enough people die like this.
I also suspect that people with broad authority may investigate this and consider/recommend prosecutions if appropriate. E.g., the Washington State Attorney General, the US Coast Guard, and the Canadian Coast Guard.
It's actually really hard to certify vehicles before use when they're novel vehicles. Try reading vehicle safety standards if you want proof of how complex it gets.
Good regulation balances the need for innovation vs the need for public health and safety. We can argue about the right balancing point all day, and people certainly will. But there's no simple solution on either side.
There’s a difference between Jacques Cousteau building a janky submarine rig for himself vs. Creating a business model of selling tickets to random strangers on that janky submarine.
There is definitely a difference, but it doesn’t really matter philosophically speaking.
If people want to take huge risks, then so be it. Whether they build the sub themselves or pay and give that responsibility to a proxy, it is still up to them to make their own risk assessment.
A “risk assessment” by customers is typically based on attestations to safety made by the company. If the company is hiding or misrepresenting pertinent information then the customers have been denied the opportunity to make a reasonable assessment. At best it’s a case of gaining money by deception. At worst the company principals will be liable for deaths the deaths of those customers.
Remember the proposition: you’re going to dive 2.4 miles underwater, in the middle of the Atlantic.
On a nuclear sub with the best collision avoidance and mapping data available, with highly regimented procedure, this is still a riskier proposition than most people appreciate.
But you’re going to do it in a carbon fiber hull. This is at the very minimum an adventure, with a very high risk of turning into a disaster. You sign the liability waiver and have the balls to get on board the boat, and have the further commitment to board the submersible day-of.
I’m not saying this to blame them or extol their courage. It just is what it is, and sometimes - oftentimes - with adventure sports and tourism, we don’t need to search for bad guys and villains. It’s risky living and this is what it looks like sometimes.
It's one thing for them to take the risk for themselves, but it's a whole other level selling to others. For example, if someone wants to drink a refreshing glass of strychnine soda, it's hard to stop them. But opening a stand and selling at the street corner is a bit different.
The distinction is artificial, both parties paid for either the materials or the final product. Financial gain doesn’t fundamentally change who is responsible, that it just you applying your personal values to the situation.
As an hypothetical would you say that someone should be allowed to sell "mystery drinks" where the customer is told that the ingredients are a secret but the seller knows that it is heavily poisonous?
Indeed. He put his life on the line. I don't know the circumstance that lead to this and I hope everyone gets rescued, though it's looking quite desperate. But, yeah, that's pretty convincing from a marketing point of view.
That’s not how regulation of transportation works.
You can build your own plane and fly it with relatively few restrictions, but as soon as you a) manufacture a plane for sale to someone else, or b) get paid for transporting someone in it, the regulators become much much stricter.
>> There’s a difference between Jacques Cousteau building a janky submarine rig for himself vs. Creating a business model of selling tickets to random strangers on that janky submarine.
> There is definitely a difference, but it doesn’t really matter philosophically speaking.
I'm unconvinced. The phrase "philosophically speaking" is very vague. Which philosoph(y/ies)?
> If people want to take huge risks, then so be it.
You didn't say who is affected by said risks. Only the person taking the huge risk? What about externalities? "Huge" risks would include an existential threat to an individual and thus anyone who knows or depends on them.
> Whether they build the sub themselves or pay and give that responsibility to a proxy, it is still up to them to make their own risk assessment.
Sounds like we're in the domains of legal and/or moral philosophy. The phrase "up to them" suggests a responsibility, a kind of normative claim. Perhaps a responsibility to make wise decisions? Perhaps a responsibility that cannot be transferred or delegated?
Using the phrase "philosophically speaking" invites these kinds of questions, particularly when the underlying philosophy is unsaid and its reasoning unclear.
I admit I didn’t put much effort into that comment. I meant ‘philosophically’ as opposed to legally.
Fundamentally every risky decision is up to the individual. Even trusting the regulator is a decision (I don’t trust some regulators in my country because they have a bad record for competence, so I avoid/minimise using things that they regulate). Therefore the final ‘responsibility’ for your safety is always personal, unless you were forced on board, or lied to about the construction.
Legally it’s anyone’s guess who is responsible, that depends on the polity involved and the political philosophy it uses (libertarianism or authoritarianism being the 2 extremes).
I think we should protect those who truly cannot judge (children and mentally handicapped) but in this case it was grown men taking a risk for the chance of a reward. I hope they are found alive and well but I think they had every right to go aboard.
> Fundamentally every risky decision is up to the individual. Even trusting the regulator is a decision (...). Therefore the final ‘responsibility’ for your safety is always personal, unless you were forced on board, or lied to about the construction.
It seems you are trying to say something along the lines of:
A. In cases where an individual has the freedom to make decisions (i.e. not coerced or manipulated)
B. The individual bears moral responsibility for the consequences of those decisions
To what degree did I convey what you were hoping to convey?
This is an flawed argument for at least two reasons:
1. The consequences flow from many people's actions. Figuring out credit and blame is a hard project in philosophy, even theoretically. In practice, it can often be impossible.
2. Humans have imperfect abilities to predict consequences
Point A does not always hold -- not even most of the time. Individual conscious awareness and volitional control is limited. We are largely driven by subconscious and non-volitional parts of our brains. Not to mention by environmental constraints.
I'm not sure I understand your criticism. In this case, for (1) who else but the individuals decided to go on the expedition? Where is the lack of freedom? And what is the relevance of 2? Are you saying people are not responsible for their actions because they don't have perfect prediction power? Doesn't it follow that no-one is responsible for anything?
Regarding your last two questions: I don’t care for the binary framing. By framing these prescriptive questions as a matter of degree, we can get a lot further. I’d ask it this way:
To what degree is it reasonable to hold people to prescriptive standards given the presence of imperfect conscious awareness, limited volition, and constrained rationality?
When one keep these realities things in mind, it can challenge us to better talk about what we mean wrt accountability.
Some might suggest that “the buck stops” where free will begins. Such a statement requires a lot of unpacking.
I don’t have room to unpack even a small fraction of the ideas in play here. So I think I’ll end with a few things.
1. In the United States popular culture (for example) there is an assumed but unexamined belief in conscious free will. This does not hold up to philosophical nor scientific scrutiny.
2. Unfortunately, simplistic moral claims have a tendency to shift our thinking away from good analysis towards judgmentalism. Many people here on HN know how to reason under uncertainty wrt debugging or attack trees. That same level of rigor needs to be used when analyzing human behavior and ethics.
3. When I say accountability, I think
analyzing it in a consequentialist way might be the most useful.
For example, if someone drives particularly dangerously and puts others at risk, some interventions are justified. The calculus can be very complicated, and some of the key data may not be known with sufficient confidence. But I do think there are core principles that apply. I would say the dangerous driver might “deserve” a license suspension, for example, not because they had the free will to do otherwise, but because of the consequences.
There are lots of interesting ways to understand dangerous driver scenarios.
A. Take the exact same person and compare their behavior while seated in 150 hp vehicle as compared to a 400 hp vehicle. The latter environment provides more temptation and more opportunity for dangerous driving. Is an individual who opts for the quicker car thus morally culpable to some degree? Or does does it depend upon their levelheadedness and driving skills?
B. In some sense, our entire infrastructure in history that led up to incentivizing automobiles is a huge factor in predicting behavior patterns, vehicle and pedestrian accidents and deaths, inefficient land use, and more. How much blame should we “dole out” particular individuals over the course of history that led us here?
C. In some situations, it could be argued that driving is immoral, particularly when you have other options for transportation. This is kind of a raw deal for the individual who had nothing to do with how we got stuck in such a situation. But it also demonstrates that some people may hold individuals morally responsible even though one person are only a tiny part of the situation. This highlights how individualism run amok and unscientific views of free will can sometimes sabotage comprehensive rational thinking about ethics. To speak very loosely when I see an accident on the road, it is easy to point to the proximate causes such as a distracted driver or worn out tires. But we must not overlook the deeper systemic causal factors. If we want to progress as a society, we need to solve problems, not scapegoat.
## My Take
An unexpected benefit of dispensing with free will is that judgmentalism doesn’t get in the way of solving problems.
In this view, we justly lock up criminals not because they could’ve done otherwise. We lock them up for the exact opposite reason: their brains and bodies make the unacceptable behavior a predictable pattern at some level.
I respect the detail you give your answers, but I feel like they are avoiding the essence of the questions I posed.
I didn’t mean to frame them as a binary, I interpreted your premises as binary and just wanted to better understand them.
You say it’s a matter of degree, but I fail to see to what degree you think the individual is ‘responsible.’ You are happy to lock up a criminal because ‘their brain and bodies’ make a predictably bad behaviour, so it seems like you do think the individual is ‘responsible.’ In the same way I think we should allow people’s ‘brain and body’ to put themselves in harms way if it doesn’t predictably harm anyone else, thus we essentially hold them ‘responsible.’ I don’t think this is ‘judgementalism’ but rather just the best way to approach a complex situation (as you have shown). I cannot see any good alternatives.
At some point all this complexity needs to be discarded and we need to make a decision either way. We could write tomes about how complex this all is, but it doesn’t change the simplicity of how those intangible arguments become a tangible policy.
Fundamentally everything is a binary when it comes to behaviour, you either take a risk or you don’t. The complexity is fun to unpack but doesn’t fundamentally matter to what our behaviour is. In this case I think our behaviour should be to allow people to make risky personal decisions and accept the consequences for those decisions. It is unworkable to think society can or should hold everyone’s hand all the time.
> Fundamentally everything is a binary when it comes to behaviour, you either take a risk or you don’t.
You can apply binary categorization if you want, but that’s not what’s happening with the human body acting in the universe. Human actions have many degrees of freedom.
As one example, consider a cop deciding on how to respond to a vehicle stop. There are conservatively dozens of ways in which his response might vary. Does he call in for backup? How does he characterize the situation? How does approach the vehicle? What does he say to the driver? Does he place a hand on his gun? Does he draw a weapon?
As another example, consider a manager breaking some bad news to her employee. The possibilities for the human interaction are vast.
Why is it important to you to frame human actions or risk-taking as binary? Is it necessary for your argument? I struggle to see how.
But I’m also struggling to make sense of the moral philosophy you are outlining.
Aren’t all those things binary? The cop either (calls/doesn’t call) for backup. He says x or doesn’t say x (and says y or doesn’t say y). The whole spectrum is just a superposition of binary decisions.
And my moral philosophy isn’t comprehensive or consistent, essentially I think there are some useful moral standards (eg golden rule) but when it comes to details I’m a relativist, we can choose what we want, there is no true right or wrong.
> And my moral philosophy isn’t comprehensive or consistent, essentially I think there are some useful moral standards (eg golden rule) but when it comes to details I’m a relativist, we can choose what we want, there is no true right or wrong.
Which kind of moral relativism? There is quite a big difference between the various flavors...
> Descriptive moral relativism holds only that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, with no judgment being expressed on the desirability of this.
> Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong.
> Normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, everyone ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when large disagreements about morality exist.
> Said concepts of the different intellectual movements involve considerable nuance and aren't absolute descriptions.
Quotes from Wikipedia [1], even though I prefer the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [2] for more detailed explanations.
I don’t see much practical difference between the different flavours. I think you can judge morals only from the perspective of within a moral system. Thus tolerating other moral systems or not is arbitrarily determined by the moral system you choose.
Your statements about moral relativism are still confusing to me. I can’t tell how your personal preferences, such as valuing the golden rule, interact with some of the relativistic concepts here.
You are technically correct that to apply a set of morals you have to use a set of morals. This tautological reasoning of course is obvious, but this reasoning does not get at the key parts of these different kinds of moral relativism.
Let’s take normative moral relativism. Do you accept this as a valid position? Is it consistent with your beliefs? Why?
…
Thanks for discussing. I think there are probably better forums for us to unpack these ideas. I think we disagree enough to make it interesting yet are clear and patient enough to make discussion possible. LMW if this subject area or another would be something that you would like to unpack further. I’m prototyping some unusual discussion UIs.
So I agree we should tolerate other systems where possible (since none are right or wrong). But our moral system might require us to NOT tolerate aspects of other systems. Therefore we can tolerate them up to a point. We don’t not tolerate them because they are objectively wrong, but because they are wrong from the POV of our own arbitrary moral system.
I’m interested in the discussion UI. For a while I’ve been thinking about how to turn discussions like this into knowledge graphs to make it easy for others to follow and contribute. If you’d like we could set up accounts on one of the philosophy forums to discuss this?
> Aren’t all those things binary? The cop either (calls/doesn’t call) for backup. He says x or doesn’t say x (and says y or doesn’t say y). The whole spectrum is just a superposition of binary decisions.
We can label these actions in many ways, such as analog or discrete.
To revisit my earlier question: Does it matter to your philosophy how we label them? Why?
I guess it doesn’t matter, but it is the simplest way to look at the situation and so most useful. I would say it’s the most accurate for your consequentialist approach: certain binary actions lead to certain binary consequences.
In this case the binary action is getting in the sub or not. The outcome is dying or not. There is no analogue aspect of either. You can’t half enter a submarine or half die.
Decomposing things down to a binary is fundamentally how things work. We can analyse things to death and add our own mental/idealistic layers of continuity (like probabilities of outcomes or degrees of truthiness of statements), but the decisions that come from the analysis are always binary.
Sorry if I didn’t answer your questions, I’ll try again. There’s a chance that I’m not answering the questions in a way you like because I frame the questions differently.
> You are happy to lock up a criminal because ‘their brain and bodies’ make a predictably bad behaviour, so it seems like you do think the individual is ‘responsible.’
I suppose we need to unpack various meaning(s) of “responsible” then.
To clarify, I don’t hold a person ‘responsible’ in the way most people do; e.g. many people will suggest someone deserves a punishment because they had the freedom to do otherwise. I reject the idea that people have conscious free will. The universe just unfolds; individual decisions flow from the laws of the universe.
To clarify my argument: incarceration is just when the other options don’t work; i.e. the consequences are undesirable.
So, for example, if it were possible to take a dangerous person and guarantee that they would not be in an environment or situation where they would be a danger again, I don’t see the point of judging or punishing them based solely on some (mistaken) notion that they could’ve done anything differently.
That said, punishment may be just to the extent that it dissuades future lawbreaking.
Yes, there are consequences to one’s actions, especially in a society that strives for mutual respect and the rule of law. I think this is what you mean by ‘responsibility’?
I don’t care for how many people use ‘responsibility’.
(1) Too often such a meaning is so skewed towards individualism that it almost by definition rules out exploring collective action or systematic failures.
(2) It is easy to find the last proximate thing that “went wrong” and hold the person who did it “responsible”. But what about the more significant factors?
In so many cases, I think people expect people to be ‘responsible’ in ways that defy statistics. We need to stop “blaming” individuals and instead focus on solving problems.
Look at the number of car crashes. Are we really going blame the individuals? It seems awfully predictable that this many people are going to die. I touched on this issue in my above comment. It is much smarter to treat this as a system. Singling out particular people doesn’t solve the problem.
Another example. The phrase “don’t drink and drive” is good advice, but if you look at the number of times that drunk people get behind the wheel, it is clear that we can’t rely on individual responsibility to get the job done. Hence social movements for designated drivers, rules for people who serve alcohol, and more.
Judgmentalism is tricky to pin down. I try to distinguish an assessment from a judgment; an assessment is about facts whereas a judgment is about values. So when I talk about judgmentalism, I’m talking about this tendency of people to look at other people’s mistakes, and say/think “they should have known better and acted differently”.
I think I understand your perspective. Just to check: what is your stance on seatbelt laws and why?
I think it is in society’s interest to dissuade people from doing idiotic things. Of course, there is value in individual freedom too.
How often do completely victimless crimes occur?. The person who doesn’t wear their seatbelt ends up going to the hospital. That requires money and resources. Due to insurance and/or public funding, that person is not going to pay the full cost of that visit. Even if they paid the full cost, it still would have an effect on other people wanting to use the service around the same time.
> In this case I think our behaviour should be to allow people to make risky personal decisions and accept the consequences for those decisions.
Except that society likes having people around that are, well, alive, unmaimed, etc. for many reasons — for intrinsic value and also to contribute to society.
I’m not sure I have a comprehensive theory about the morality protecting people from themselves. But e.g. we know that humans are susceptible to alcoholism, so we try some things. I don’t think anyone thinks it is ethical to just let someone drink themselves to death — at least not until all other feasible options have been exhausted. Defining feasibility is not obvious. At some point we might say that the alcoholic’s life is not worth saving given the treatment cost.
> It is unworkable to think society can or should hold everyone’s hand all the time.
Loaded language again.
This is obvious but narrow. I grant that we don’t have unlimited money to do everything that we might want. But that has no bearing on what we should do with the money we have.
So I would ask you specify a principle that guides you.
When it comes to ethics, many thinkers define one or more or the following: principles, objectives, or ideal future states.
Most sensible ethical systems care about human flourishing and reducing human suffering. To those ends, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with getting help from a friend or a government. Whether or not social programs make sense is a calculation not a statement of first principles.
We should not put individualism on a pedestal. Nor should we put conformity on a pedestal. Human flourishing cannot be maximized by single-mindedly pursuing one narrow -ism.
I think I understand you now, and your position sounds sort of utilitarian / consequentialist? You don’t believe in free will so you don’t want to ‘blame’ or assume the individual is ‘responsible’ in any actionable way.
I agree with seatbelt laws since it is simple to regulate, doesn’t change driving very much and saves a huge number of lives and resources. Most people don’t understand how dangerous driving truly is.
There are a lot of differences between that and the minisub situation. One is scale, this doesn’t harm many people; another is relative danger, submarining is an incredibly dangerous activity (even naval vessels have major accidents). I think the main reason I don’t like suggestions to heavily regulate exploration is that it would basically prevent the activity occurring. We could ban all extreme sports and save many lives, but at what cost? I value the joy and excitement these things bring people, even with the massive danger.
Apologies for the loaded language, it probably doesn’t help the discussion. Sometimes I just can’t help myself (but I’m not responsible :P). Thanks for the interesting discussion.
This is not really how the government operates. If this was operating at scale the government would absolutely be involved. You can't just run cruise ship operations and advertising without government involvement.
I dont see how this is any different. Perhaps you personally have a "so be it" libertarian view but thats not the view the government takes.
Any ship needs to fly the flag of a country. They do so by registering with a country, following the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. By doing so, the ship has to follow the laws of the registered country.
If a ship or submarine does not register to any country, I think most coast guards will assume it to be pirates or drug smugglers. And they will probably surrender and arrest anyone on board or sink you if it comes to that.
Yeah, and there will always be a country willing to let you do anything short of actual piracy under their flag, maybe for a fee. There’s no world government, thank goodness.
A cruise ship is on international water but there are still strict laws about what cruise ships can operate at US ports or can advertise to US consumers.
Oh government likes to step in alright. Doesn't mean they should, or that it helps as much for 'safety' as people would like to believe. Just as often rules can cause safety issues as not. But always more expense.
Libertarian students have a notoriously difficult time in philosophy departments because of these kinds of eager statements.
The question of whether or not organisations, businesses, states, armed forces, educational institutions, self-declared medical providers, and other entities incur some obligation to preserve peoples lives - and if so in which ways and to what extents - are far from settled questions. It helps no one to adopt a hard-libertarian position, omit the framework being employed, and imply the matter is settled.
A fair number of regulatory efforts trace their roots to a groundswell of public distress in the aftermath of preventable deaths; and questions such as "should I, a computer programmer, be undertaking my own untrained risk assessment of the particular type of cladding used in Grenfell tower" are perfectly fair objections to a libertarian free-for-all position.
As you say, these kinds of questions are not ‘settled’ so it’s somewhat up to personal opinion. I think the best policy is to enforce rules only when there are obvious benefits. In the same way that theories should be simple, regulations should be too: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”
I’m not a hard line libertarian, I think regulations are good in many cases. But not in the case of high risk adventuring. If you want to climb Everest, visit the titanic or the stratosphere, then that’s up to you: the state need not hold your hand, the risks are obvious to anyone with eyes.
The fact that libertarians have a difficult time just goes to show how close minded and dogmatic universities are. If all flavours of opinions were respected enough for discussion then I think you would end up with less extremists online and in general.
I think the demarcation problem applies just as well to politics as to science. What is good policy? Impossible to know absolutely, so we must rely on heuristics, judgement and intuition. Claims to truly objective knowledge just don’t hold up. Regulators often fail, and in many cases no regulation is preferable. I can’t prove that, but critics can’t prove otherwise, so we discuss and learn and change our opinions as we go.
The Grenfell tower is good example of failure of regulation. And I think the fundamental problem _is_ over regulation. When regulations become bloated beyond the capacity to enforce them, most of them are ignored and the most obvious ones are the only ones enforced. If the regulation was simpler it would be easier to enforce because you would only focus on _critical_ aspects. Instead of simplifying, people campaign for more regulation, forgetting second order effects that make things less safe.
I totally think it matters, philosophically. Clearly there's a moral difference between risking your own life and profiting off risking other people's lives.
Is it really a good use of our tax money to have (usually equally incompetent) government bureaucrats chasing rich "eccentrics" around and policing how they hurt themselves? Department heads, and chiefs, and comptrollers and TPS reports and meetings to decide the meeting to define the committee to oversee efficiency standards, to go tell millionaires they can't ride in shonky submarines? Not using that on say schools or roads or reducing taxes or paying down government debt or anything?
Seems like a worse deal than the war on drugs. At least you don't get many people breaking into houses or neglecting their children to pay for their next trip to the Titanic.
Let them go nuts. Tax it like you would a commoner with a loaf of bread, bill them in full for any rescue efforts, and let nature take its course.
The thing is loaded with millionaires and billionaires. Pretty sure they can afford the time and money to do basic due diligence, it's not like they're struggling the buy food and need the government to prevent desperation exploiting an asymmetric power relationship.
As I get older, I see this sentiment as very naive. The tacit assumption seems to be that every individual would review and approve every detail of every endeavor that they personally undertake. But that's just not how the world works. There are plenty of everyday people who want to attempt very reasonable and achievably safe things. You can stop people from taking advantage of others, and if there's any constant in history, it is that there are plenty of profit-seekers who will attempt to rip off other people, and we can eliminate a good number of these circumstances, and I think this is a good idea. To get it you need a reasonable society in which checks and balances exist, and it's a society which largely already exists in large parts of the world and has not gotten out of hand.
My concern with some of these endavours is the opportunity cost to rescue services. Obviously, there is no question that if anyone is in danger in a remote location we should try our best to rescue them, but the corollary is that as a responsible citizen you should avoid putting yourself in situations where others have to go to great lengths to rescue you if it can be avoided.
FWIW I read that statement as "I can't believe they didn't flame out before they got this far". Which is also, well, I won't call it naive, but it's wrong for trickier reasons. You can get lucky for a long time before it runs out in a bad situation.
There is a bit of a giant ominous nanny: insurance companies create a lot of the procedures that are practiced around us. And in a world of passing the buck, a lot of people want to insure their civil liabilities, so now our world is directed by people in suits working in high rises.
Yes, 100% agree. What I find unbelievable is how many people casually throw around the idea of approval process to prevent bad thing X that just happened, that few even knew existed.
We have laborious and very expensive approval processes for airplanes, ask the 737 MAX inspector from the FAA how well that guarded against bad engineering.
If even the bad engineering is at fault here (unknown as of writing this).
>We have laborious and very expensive approval processes for airplanes, ask the 737 MAX inspector from the FAA how well that guarded against bad engineering.
Those approval processes don't work when the government regulators allow the company being regulated to "self-regulate". There was no real FAA approval process for the 737MAX: FAA just let Boeing do it themselves. Of course that's going to lead to bad engineering when the sales team and executives make engineering decisions, and no one outside the company knows anything about it.
that’s my point; approval processes are always gamed around because of the cost such processes impose. You can’t just say oh the rules ought to be perfect and perfectly implemented for it to work. That’s not a world in which we live in. In fact, the more thorough the process, the more to gain in working around it.
In the meantime such processes add much to the expense such that only larger well-funded and well-connected people can participate. The ones most likely to game it, btw.
It’s a reason planes basically look the same for many decades too; newer stuff is harder to get through. Also part of why Boeing thought it best to revise an existing design once more, besides designing a new one. The process led to bad design decisions quite directly, though of course everyone blames Boeing (rightly) but not the process the FAA imposed.
>It’s a reason planes basically look the same for many decades too; newer stuff is harder to get through.
Not true. The reason planes look the same is because that's simply the optimal shape and layout, aerodynamically, for carrying passengers in the most fuel-efficient manner. Ask any aerospace engineer.
But there's been some big differences if you look more closely. Engine nacelles are a lot larger than they were 50 years ago, since bigger high-bypass turbofans are more efficient. And winglets are basically standard now. Under the skin there's huge differences: fly-by-wire, composite wings, etc.
>Also part of why Boeing thought it best to revise an existing design once more
Wrong. It's because some customers (cough Southwest cough) would only fly 737s, and because the FAA's broken rules allowed anything called a "737" with a 737 airframe to be flown by any pilot rated for that aircraft, even if they've only flown one from 1969, even though there's big differences between the generations, and because the FAA didn't mandate a more thorough process for this loophole. Boeing was afraid that these 737 users would buy the A320neo instead of a different Boeing plane, if forced into a choice of something new. In reality, the 737 airframe is old and obsolete, and should have been retired ages ago, but is only kept alive because of bad FAA regulations.
>The process led to bad design decisions quite directly, though of course everyone blames Boeing (rightly) but not the process the FAA imposed.
This is correct. The FAA is the root of the problem here. But the problem isn't that "processes can be gamed around", the problem is that this particular regulatory agency was corrupt and failed in its primary duty. Of course regulations can be gamed around; that's why the regulators are supposed to stay on top of that, and continually revise regulations to deal with this. It's a cat-and-mouse game, but here the cat just gave up and let the mouse tell it how to do its job as a cat. The answer to this problem isn't to get rid of cats; it's to euthanize this particular cat and get a better cat.
> the problem is that this particular regulatory agency was corrupt and failed in its primary duty.
What regulatory agency isn't captured?
If you make a regulatory body, you want to staff it with those who 'know' about the subject. That's going to come from the most well-known groups at the time. These are people, and they had lives and friends before in the groups they came from. So, naturally, a lighter touch will be given to some from the same groups, but not to others who are unknown; and that's best case.
Also, I have seen no evidence that any regulatory body has done much to help safety, and they will definitely discourage risk-taking. Planes for instance, were getting better and safer before the FAA arrived. Concern for the environment grew before the EPA, workplace safety increased before OSHA, and so on. All these agencies (because they are staffed again by people, who want to keep their jobs - ask a doctor, he'll say you need a doctor, etc.) will point to the improvements after their inception, and say, "look at the good job we do!". It does not hold though, that these improvements would not have occurred without the agency, and it could very well be the case that improvements come sooner.
For instance, the current basic airframe might be best, but few try other designs, like a lift body, or a flying wing, which might be more efficient. I know the B-2 bomber was based on a flying wing design and does need sophisticated computer control of the control surfaces though, to work without a tail, and that's costly enough to get right. Add the FAA rules on top, and, as has happened, that idea dies early on the vine. You might say that's a good thing, and maybe in this case it was, but it also clearly wasn't tried for very long either, and the attempts would draw greater scrutiny from the FAA.
>Also, I have seen no evidence that any regulatory body has done much to help safety
Stockton Rush, is that you? Aren't you dead? Or are you a big fan of his?
>Concern for the environment grew before the EPA
That sounds like "thoughts and prayers". "Concern" doesn't protect the environment; laws and enforcement does. The EPA was made for a good reason.
>workplace safety increased before OSHA
Some, but not in other places, just like the EPA. OSHA made rules and enforced them, so everyone got workplace safety, not just some places where management cared enough.
>ask a doctor, he'll say you need a doctor
Yes, because everyone eventually gets some illness that requires the services of a doctor. Many illnesses are only detectable with tests.
>For instance, the current basic airframe might be best, but few try other designs, like a lift body, or a flying wing, which might be more efficient.
You can read stuff all over the internet explaining why flying works don't work for passengers; it's not because of "regulation", it's because it's just a bad design for that. It's only used for bombers because it gives them stealth (combined with other design choices), and bombers don't need pressurization. Pressurizing a flying wing adds lots of weight, and to get equivalent internal volume, the design requires a huge wingspan that airports can't handle. It has nothing to do with FAA rules, and everything to do with physics.
It's one thing for people to go out on their own and take risks, but a company selling a catered experience for a lot of money without basic safety practices is very different.
I think the former is totally fine and there's no need for governments to get involved, while the latter is pretty bad and very possible to regulate.
And I can see how patrons might look at their $250k fee (or whatever it was) and assume that price signals an absolutely premium and safe product, where really the bulk of it just signals that it's a difficult, risky, remote and rare expedition.
I'm not sure the average person is in a brilliant position to judge. The explorers would be driven by adventure to overlook some risk, researchers might figure "I get a $250k experience for nothing" and business people tagging along might consider "Well, if the other guys are going along, it must be OK. And what else am I going to do with this money?"
You’d expect companies that sell these kinds of tours for 250k a pop to be vetted though?
If it’s uncle bob in his garage I’d be fine with lack of regulation, but when he starts commercially selling his trips he’d need to pass safety standards.
In such a truly free world, you might have to check every piece of chicken for salmonella contamination. You might have to stop your truck at every turn to see if people are racing from the opposite direction. You might not be very sure that your alcohol is not actually methanol....
Regulations do make our life smooth, even if there is a tendency to go overboard.
It's a "can't have nice things" situation. Some or multiple idiots does something stupid that hurts a bunch of people and the thing gets regulated, like a whole town burning down or a high rise collapsing
No, it is not authoritarian to regulate things like safety for the general public.
It is a necessary component of a complex society.
The main distinction between a self-determined vs authoritarian govt is the independence or lack thereof of all of the govt and society's institutions, including he legislative, executive, & judicial branches of govt, and in general society the press, industry, academy, religious orgs, social orgs, sports, etc. In self-determined societies, these are all quite independent and have a balance of power. In an authoritarian society, the branches of govt and institutions of society are coerced to serve the executive(s) (dictator or oligarchs).
A little bit of regulation does not make a government authoritarian.
This is not the general public, this is a few adventurers. Very different.
Also, desiring to give up power to an authority is authoritarianism (at least according to Oxford):
“ the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.”
>>strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom
And that goal cannot be achieved as long as there is 1) rule of law and 2) broadly independent branches of govt and societal institutions. A wannabe autocrat cannot successfully infringe on personal freedoms if (s)he cannot get the legislature, judiciary, press, etc. to go along with it.
And I totally get adventurism, having been an internal-level alpine ski racer, rock climbing instructor, champion sportscar racer, etc.
The key here is how much these "adventurers" are putting the rest of society at risk. Because, right this minute, you (if you are a US or Canadian resident) and I are paying $$millions for the rescue/recovery of the asshat CEO and his four sucker customers.
I think a better regulatory solution may be to require putting up a bond covering the cost of rescue and/or cleanup if something goes awry, or sign-off that there would be no rescue attempt whatsoever (and a bond to cover cleanup of a historic site). But it is not authoritarian to say that "No, we won't allow such adventures without meeting sound safety and systems standards."
These clowns didn't even want to pay to qualify the window in the sub past 1/3 of the planned operating depth, they had not even an emergency signal buoy, or some way of making/emitting a unique sound so they could be quickly located (Canadian sonobuoys detected some clanging sounds yesterday, but they are still not found).
If society really wants any dolt to fabricate any contraption and expect the rest of society to pay to rescue them, that is a societal decision. But it is also totally ok to say NO to that, or put on some basic requirements.
These are neither slippery slopes nor authoritarianism, and it is wrong to cry "authoritarianism" at any rule you might not like; it can be legitimately discussed without catastrophizing.
Authoritarianism as a political system, as opposed to an abstract concept, is a bit more specific than that. E.g. in Cerutti’s “Conceptualizing Politics: An Introduction to Political Philosophy”, he summarizes common aspects of various definitions as follows:
> “It seems that its main features are the non-acceptance of conflict and plurality as normal elements of politics, the will to preserve the status quo and prevent change by keeping all political dynamics under close control by a strong central power, and lastly, the erosion of the rule of law, the division of powers, and democratic voting procedures.”
Western democracies are not examples of authoritarianism, no matter how much they might interfere with the desire of rich people to prove they’re special.
I’d be interested to see your proposal for ‘basic’ safety regulations for subs. When you get into the weeds of this stuff it is actually very difficult and costly.
We struggle to regulate giant industries, there is no chance we can regulate every crazy idea that someone wants to try out.
To my knowledge DNV certification is part of insurance processes. The crew could have asked for such a certification if they wanted to reduce risk (they definitely had the cash).
It's not different. "OceanGate intends to make underwater exploration cheaper and accessible to private citizens", says Wikipedia. And the people on it look, aside from their wealth, like members of the general public to me. They have no particular knowledge or skill, so I don't think they have an expert's ability to evaluate the risks.
I wouldn't personally propose that, because I'm not an expert. And I'm not sure that would ever be written into regulation; I think the ability to assess the danger may be more relevant for the civil suits that will presumably soon be bankrupting Oceangate.
There exist entire bodies of knowledge about ensuring that equipment meets the physical requirements of the intended use, that the systems are designed to fail in a safe(r) mode and have redundancies in case of failures, that processes are created to operate more accident-free and also recover from accidents, and the ability to manage and mitigate risk in general. These come from centuries of seafaring and aeronautics and decades of spacefaring.
It is all there, and just because you don't know about it and I cannot recite it all off the top of my head does not mean that it doesn't exist and that it could not be implemented. Regulators know how to find the right people to evaluate the risks and set suitable requirements. (That said, in some industries, regulatory capture and corruption is a real problem, but it does not seem to be the case here.)
I didn’t mean to suggest that there are not regulations they could have used, I’m more interested in how the other commenter thinks ‘expertise’ should be judged, especially from the point of view of the passengers.
As someone who has dealt with certification bodies for designs critical to their operators lives I am well aware of the processes involved. In my experience regulators are often the least qualified to determine risks, since the most qualified people make more money on the other side of the fence. So regulators depend on following a rulebook rather than expert judgement. There are definitely rulebooks for submarines, but they are generally for naval applications with billions of resources, not to minisub expeditions.
The company was open that their design was cheap and cheerful and followed no certification or standard. The riders knew this and could have chosen more expensive, safer alternatives. But did they truly ‘know’ how much extra risk they were taking? I don’t think there’s any good way to judge that.
This is an important distinction which I believe was made to thread some legal loopholes. They all signed paperwork that they were participating in the "mission" as a crew member of an experimental vessel.
So literally, it is like, "the four of you's job is to look out this window, make sure it doesn't fog up, my job is to do everything else, alright let's dive"
Many jobs are dangerous and regulated but killing customers is different. somehow it is the insurance companies that are the first line of defense when some conjures up a novel scheme.
This was out in the middle of sea not much jurisdiction. I think the crew would need a labor union and refuse to work to improve the working conditions. Consider the guy was on the sub I'm sure he did everything he could think of.
Even Uncle Bumblefuck alone in his garage need some regulation. Imagine him deciding to build a solid fuel rocket, he might send shrapnel all around the block.
I have a hard time to let people throwing themselves into danger with a "I don't need a nanny" attitude, and then see a state-run, massive and costly rescue effort when things go wrong.
Yes. Thank you. I live in Colorado and people do dumb stuff in the mountains all the time, which ends up being expensive for everyone, not just themselves. And it doesn't work to just not rescue people.
> To get it you'd need a nanny state that snoops on everyone and steps in to stop you "for your own safety". It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand.
A nanny state is telling you how to live your life. An example is when NYC banned large soft drinks or when we listed marijuana as a schedule 1 drug. Registration of a mode of transportation is hardly a nanny state activity because vehicles inherently pose a risk to others whether as a passenger or someone sharing proximity with you.
You can certainly build your own car and register it. They're often called salvage titles; this is true for airplane kits too, but you also have to be able to prove the worthiness of the machine. We have lots of process and administration to take care of this, but for whatever reason it didn't work here.
I don't even think at those levels the government should bother. It is not we are selling a car for thousands of people that we know it occasionally leaks fuel in the engine bay.
People who pay for that kind of trip know the dangers and have money enough to do their own due diligence.
So corporations doing whatever they want with no oversight regardless of the consequences is just fine and dandy? Obviously there's a middle ground between 'nanny state' and 'corporate anarchy' - reality is not so black and white and imagining it to be so is a naive sentiment.
> It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard.
Yes, my impression is that this feels naive, especially if reflects a more general viewpoint of surprise when organizations do negligent things. The law of large numbers combined with human nature seems to statistically all-but guarantee such failures over a few decades.
> ... The tacit assumption seems to be that there is an agency, a government, an organization, that would review and approve such endeavors.
No. You made that tacit assumption, not the commenter before you. This assumption makes it easy to setup a straw man.
> But that's just not how the world works. You can't stop people from going to sea, or sending contraptions to the bottom. It's a very big world, filled with mostly ocean, and plenty of thrill-seekers who will attempt anything half-way reasonable. Even 10% reasonable. You can't stop that...
This is a false dichotomy. A more apropos question is how to reduce undesirable outcomes.
> ... To get it you'd need a nanny state ...
"Nanny state" is loaded language, "... rhetoric used to influence an audience by using words and phrases with strong connotations. This type of language is very often made vague to more effectively invoke an emotional response and/or exploit stereotypes." - Wikipedia
> ... that snoops on everyone ...
More loaded language.
> and steps in to stop you "for your own safety".
More loaded language.
> It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand.
Are you using the slippery slope fallacy? I'm not quite sure.
Regardless, wise public policy is not exclusively based on such an approach of imagining things getting out of hand. There are better ways. To name just one, scenario planning is a powerful way of combining probabilistic decision-making across potential scenarios.
You aren't explicitly stating your political philosophy, but I'd bet it underlies your thinking here. I just hope that you are open to hypothesis-testing and avoiding dogma.
## Useful Responses
There is a wide menu of public responses and/or policy instruments available to reduce undesirable outcomes and promote desirable ones.
It is an interesting question, I think, not one that should be quickly dismissed. Legally, jurisdiction seems to be a good place to start. Culturally and economically, what motivates such negligent underwater attempts? Maybe it isn't the top problem in the world to solve, but I think too many tech people have a huge blind spots and pretend to know more than they actually do. This example is newsworthy, fun, tragic, and not particularly politically charged, best I can tell. So why not use some good reasoning here and discuss it?
The lack of emergency beacon is the real WTF. Not even an inflatable buoy. Using a game pad is probably OK. But no emergency method to mark their last location or even surface?
Seeing that everything stopped at once, I'd bet that is exactly what happened.
Shades of the Thresher disaster. No doubt we'll hear a few months down the track that the Navy's sound receivers did actually pick up the implosion noise.
There was some speculation that any sort of implosion would've been detected by military sonar, and it hasn't been yet. I do not know if that's accurate -- just repeating what I've heard.
why does it need to be off the shelf, their submarine is not off the shelf. If off the shelf stuff odbly does 200 ATM, then limit your depth or mame custom ones.
I wonder how much of this has to do with investors giving them only 18 months of runway and "launch or die" mentality. That mentality is okay for software but this ecosystem is NOT okay when lives are in question. When investors are bickering about shitty terms and being stingy with their aerospace and nautical investments, people die.
There needs to be a system by which any company can ALWAYS be guaranteed some $X for 0% equity if it is going to be used and documented for life safety improvements and tests. That $X can even come from taxes, I'm okay with that.
Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate: "so the pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all because that's where we work with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington. Everything else can fail: your thrusters can go, your lights can go, you're still going to be safe"
> it is possible we wouldn't be looking at one of the many horrific outcomes that this incident will likely resolve to.
The pressure vessel was a titanium hemisphere bonded to a carbon fiber cylinder. It was destined to fail with such a fundamentally compromised design like that.
I don’t know that much about materials science. Why is a “titanium hemisphere bonded to a carbon fiber cylinder” “such a fundamentally compromised design” in this application?
I imagine maybe carbon fiber would be better in tension (e.g. airframes) than in compression (this), perhaps. Or do carbon fiber and titanium not get along somehow?
I mean, it wasn't too long ago we had auto pilot software from a major aerospace engineering company that would literally pitch planes into nosedives when only one of two redundant angle-of-attack sensors misbehaved/failed.
Also there seem to be quite a few train derailments as of late.
Oh and what about that apartment building that just...collapsed in Ohio?
Seems like there have been quite a few cases of safety regulatory failure in recent memory.
Maybe so, but it's easy to say this after the fact. When kludges like this work, we admire "scrappy" and "ingenious" engineers who are finding ways to launch rockets or build submarines or medical devices or whatever for fraction the price.
It's only when it blows up that it turns from "ingenuity" into "amateur hour".
People who participated in this knew the risks. They fucked up. None of us would have designed a better submarine, and I'd wager we're not all that qualified to tell a crappy design from a good one, except - once again - after the fact.
> None of us would have designed a better submarine
I dunno. I would never go with wireless over cabled, certainly not as my primary steering method, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be the only method onboard to control the thing.
Maybe it’s better if these things are build by paranoid instead of adventurous people?
People are latching onto the logitech controller, but I think it's low on my concerns list. Controllers are relatively robust, and they stated they had backups, and could surface without any control input by manually dumping the ballast.
Much more concerning are the potential flaws in the carbon fiber hull, as disclosed during the David Lochridge lawsuit (mentioned in another thread), the rumoured lack of surface radios, the limited communication with the surface, the lack of any exits, and even the use of carbon fiber (which is strong in tension, good for high pressure tanks, but weak in compression -- not what I'd want for a submarine under massive compression)
Actually the wireless controller points to a bigger problem like, I think the underlying reason for using a wireless controller may have been because the computers were inaccessible when the craft was under way. It's not so much the device itself, but if there was a need to use a wireless device that would point to a design flaw.
When you have a fire and need to surface, it's going to do a lot of good. One of the Apollo crews burned alive because the ground crew couldn't unscrew the hatch fast enough during a pre-flight checkout. One of those astronauts, Gus Grisham, nearly died a previous time when the explosive bolts on another capsule fired early which caused the capsule to take on water.
The problems here are just several fold: maybe the door won't help you at depth, but there's a pretty wide envelope of conditions in which a fast escape hatch is the difference between surviving a fire and burning alive.
The CEO of OceanGate said he "learned the lessons of aviation", but this is obviously BS if he's locking himself in a capsule with flammable equipment, piping oxygen in, and just hoping it doesn't burn. That's a recipe for disaster we know how to avoid.
It's pretty easy, just hire one subject matter expert (SME) on submarines and listen to them.
So many problems with this scheme, though. No rigorous test (depth, survival, atmosphere), lack of SMEs, carbon fiber hull, failed to learn lessons from aviation (don't lock people in a room that can burn), lack of ventilation, failure to provide emergency breathing, no voice comms, and finally the comms loss during testing that was normalized as operating procedure.
All you'd have to do is not make one of those mistakes, and you'd be doing a better job. These are all issues that are solved on US Navy subs, where we train hundreds of people every year to work on and retire just as many. You don't need to know all these systems, though, just find a retired sub chief and have them walk you through the safety systems.
One thing I've picked up working in software, is that you can enter new domains with relative ease if you just align yourself with experts, and at least listen to their advice. This isn't something that happened on the sub, and I'd be surprised if it ultimately didn't contribute to the total vehicle loss.
The use of a wireless input is a bit suspect, but the headline seems rather sensational to me. What’s wrong with using an inexpensive logitech component? The critical systems in my car are filled with cheap off-the-shelf components.
Your car is filled with cheap off-the-shelf *car* components. There's far more scrutiny given to car parts, even though they're cheap stuff.
But to get back to the controller, while it's not necessarily the worst problem, it is emblematic. That's why people reduce it to that. It signifies immediately what kind of company they were. Emphasis on were.
I think the claim that you’re getting better safety outcomes from a $2 ISO26262 IC over a $30 ISO9001 piece of consumer hardware is a bit spurious in this case. Especially since the operator could just replace the consumer hardware input device with a spare in a few seconds if they ever needed to. I don’t think this is emblematic of the problems with this company at all, because this specific complaint is simply sensationalised and overblown.
The major difference is serving the public I suppose. I would admire a scrappy vessel for research (SV Seeker for example) but if you are essentially building a transport service for the consumers, you are now being irresponsible.
All credit to SV Seeker, it is a wildly impressive project, but I don't think they would be mad if I suggest they had the resolver spirit while putting that vessel together.
Consumers/the general public are less aware of the risk, and as another reply said more likely to trust a company on it's safety. They aren't marine engineers so they have to. That's why it's a regulated industry.
Researches are making an entirely different risk/benefit calculation and it's useful to society that they can make different risk tradeoffs. Key example, astronauts.
In that is an implication that research is more important to society than a holiday activity.
Researchers are aware of the risks they're taking.
Consumers (who don't really understand the dangers of the environment they're about to enter) just blindly trust that they're in good hands, and in this case it seems like they were deceived about the trustworthiness of this vessel.
If using the term "consumers" broadly speaking, then I would agree that they assume trustworthiness of the vessel. When I drive my car onto one of the Seattle ferries, I pay my ticket and as a consumer I have total trust in the safety of the vessel, that they are following all safety protocols and that it is inheritely safe. I don't know how this thing carries hundreds of passengers and 80 heavy cars across the waters, but I trust that the company I bought the tickets from knows and has taken proper precautions to get me safely to the other side reliably.
But this trip to see the Titanic is completely different. This was an experimental trip on an experimental vessel (they signed specifically to that affect). Anyone who thinks that journeying down to 13,000 feet to see the titanic was going to be as risk free as crossing the Puget sound or going to disney world is crazy. The sheer reason they are paying for this trip is because it has been relatively impossible up to this point. They are breaking new frontiers by doing so which is by its nature inherently risky. There has to be known risk involved here. It isn't a ride at disneyland. This was serious. I am sure they didn't actually expect to die, but they had to know that there was a realistic possibility of that outcome.
Did they? Knowing the risks, imo, requires more than just being aware of the failure scenarios - it also means having an understanding of the probabilities involved. Playing Russian roulette with 1 vs 5 rounds have the same worse case outcomes, but the odds are very different.
Not doing destructive testing, hiding info from the guy who was supposed to look at the ship, etc. that's avoiding getting a handle on risk.
> None of us would have designed a better submarine
Probably not, but otoh, it sounds like they probably could have done so and failed to take the necessary steps to make it happen.
I just designed a better one while talking this through in the room:
Once you realize that ingenuity is not going to be enough to survive: Seal everyone in, then fake the whole experience with a screen built in to the porthole.
I am not a mechanical engineer, so you're right, I wouldn't design a better submarine.
Peers in the industry though have expressed concerns, such as in this 2018 letter:
> This letter is sent on behalf of our industry members who have collectively expressed unanimous concern regarding the development of TITAN and the planned Titanic Expedition. Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.
It’s a relief to see that the Marine Technology Society saw this coming 6 years ago, and did what they could to encourage OceanGate to do the right thing. There are inherent, known risks with deep sea exploration and firms need to be held to a minimum standard of safety out of a basic respect for human life. Being a scrappy startup isn’t a valid excuse for cutting corners when it comes to engineering and qualification of a pressure vessel and its essential components.
I really hope that the foresight of the MTS is recognized amongst the general public, and the DSV space doesn’t suffer a setback in perception and/or funding. At present, it does seem like the general sentiment is that this specific submersible was built to an incredibly poor standard when compared to, say, the famed Alvin or Deepsea Challenger. I hope that sentiment holds.
Scrappy is overcoming adversity by improvising and solving the problem with what you have.
This would have been a scrappy solution for a sub in a pool where there was a chance for help. You don't take paying customers on a scrappy sub to the bottom of the ocean.
So apparently this OceanGate company is a VC-funded startup or some such founded "to make underwater exploration cheaper and accessible to private citizens" (Wikipedia quote). Tells me everything I need to know about how this all came to be.
I don’t think this is (was) a money maker at all. There’s a clip on YouTube where they invited a CBS journalist to join. The CEO, to me, seems like a passionate dreamer who definitely 100% ate his own dog food (ie took huge personal risk). He was onboard this likely final voyage. They didn’t make any profit, at least back then. It’s obviously incredibly expensive and near-impossible to scale such an operation.
Look, I despise VCs as much as the next guy, but this doesn’t smell like a typical cynical VC money grab, like at all. To me it smells like an ultra-extreme sport. To ordinary people, it’s extraordinarily stupid, they’re certainly in over their heads, but nobody casually signs up to go to 4000m depth without being well aware of the risks.
Yeah my understanding is that it was not profitable either. The founder claimed he was losing money and to his credit, he ate the cost on the previous failed missions (of which there are a shockingly high number of).
There was one article I read last year (don't have it here) where he claimed his hard costs were $1M per voyage to cover fuel and consumables. So the $250k buy-in was literally a break-even on his expenses (he carries 4 passengers paying the fee, plus himself in the sub). None of that covers any R&D and he had some very respectable people working for him, including engineers from Boeing, NASA, and Northdrop Grumman. So we can assume those were hefty salaries for his R&D team.
I'm sure they were scrappy too, hence the "cobbled" together nature of things. But it does seem like this was a true startup in ever sense of the word.
Unfortunately it might be leaning closer to the Theranos type of startup where he might have oversold his capabilities to keep the ball rolling and investors happy.
The enormous profiteering of deep ocean exploration is certainly an interesting angle, but I highly doubt it. If you want money from that, I think you’d want to be a military contractor instead, or consult for offshore oil. A $250k “leisure” trip to titanic would be an… unusual anniversary gift.
How is it all that different from companies selling seats on spacecraft to visit ISS? Or just to be in orbit or above the Kármán line and experiencing microgravity?
"This ship is exactly what the Navy needs, when it needs it," agreed EB President John P. Casey, who was on board during the trials. "There is no substitute for the Virginia-class submarine."
They probably aren't allowed to put this in the water of any country that has watercraft rules. The reporter from CBS reads the form he had to sign, at 2:40 in this video: https://youtu.be/29co_Hksk6o
It says something like "this experimental craft has not been certified by any regulatory body". They probably have to be in international waters to put it in water.
It's entirely legal to design and build your own boat and put it in the water pretty much anywhere in the world.
If you want to carry paying passengers then things are different, but that's why they were officially crew.
(Crew members who are paying to be there has a very long history. One of the last lines operating sailing ships, in the 1920s and 30s, made money from merchant marine cadets whose countries still required them to have a certain amount of experience as crew of a sailing vessel to get their ticket.)
My guess is they didn't sent it down 1000 times under robotic controland then tear it all down and look for damage, stress fractures, or to estimate lifetime. I mean why in the hell weren't there multiple and redundant, independently powered, sonar locators for example? You would be truly amazed how far sound can travel in water.
One of the critics said that the pressure vessel is subject to fatigue and is not inspectable, so even testing the final article is not going to help. They are not facing small engineering issues, and didn’t seem well equipped to tacle hard stuff (I would venture, by lack of money).
This is what happens when you take the move fast and break things culture to anything where people die when things break. Really just sad and so stupid.
>It’s sad of course, but the early days of flight were also quite dangerous but they lead to rapid innovation and the stable industry of today.
And if you tried to take paid passengers on a homebuilt uncertified aircraft today you would go to jail. This isn't the early days. The challenger deep was reached over 60 years ago. We've been building submarines longer than airplanes. We know how to do this stuff safely. This was negligence.
Sure but at that time no one knew how to fly. Today we absolutely know how to build and test decent submersibles and there’s really no excuse for building a machine as untested as this one.
Unfortunately with flights you can usually at least take a good guess at what went wrong. I think we’ll be lucky if they find (and retrieve) wreckage in this case
But risk can be mitigated with proper engineering, testing, and manufacturing process control. These are all quite well understood just seemingly not well implemented by this company.
I think there's a happy medium, and civilian tourism probably isn't really the place to be pushing the safety envelope.
Science, discovery, boldly going where no one has gone before? Absolutely safety is going to be somewhat compromised. Taking rich people to the gawk at the Titanic? I, personally, think you're a bit of dick for MacGyvering a vessel together and calling it good enough.
The iteration has already been done. Safety rules exist because somebody has died and had it written in their blood. Failure to read the literature gets people killed.
This is reckless and it is stupid and excusemaking for it has no moral grounds.
This is a response that, if made not in jest, is a signal of mendacity.
Submersibles visited the Challenger Deep in the 1960s. We know how to build them, we know how to build them effectively, and we know many of the ways not to build them. "But we added tourists!" is not a meaningful factor here unless what you meant-but-wouldn't-say is "but we value engineered it!" in which case: yes, exactly, that's what safety rules are designed to put guardrails around.
I just watched it too. What was up with there external lights? several were constantly turning off/on. Where they overheating? loose connection? or what was going on.
I just mean, if the lights are so unreliable, imagine if they all failed, they moving in the dark next to the Titanic. (looks like they also have radar, but that could fail too)
And the Pilot in that ep seemed to partly depend on the viewer at the front to say if they got close to something.
Looks pretty hard to navigate the sub. I know they trying to give a tour to consumers, but I would want the pilot at the front by the window with the best view and time to react. "Driving" kinda blind with just radar and high ISO camera's is a bit sketch.
Yeah I'm sorry about that. Maybe someone could download it and host it somewhere (which would be contrary to the license, but possibly in the public interest in this case).
Note that the BBC is funded primarily by what's known as a "TV License"[0] in the UK - I think it's entirely possible they could probably increase ads or something for international viewers but understand why it isn't their area of focus
People - including politicians - have said for many years that the BBC should sell iPlayer subscriptions to international viewers, but they just...don't. They also have a massive archive of beloved content, enough to be a first-class streaming platform, but that stuff's not available even to UK residents.
Probably because with their current scheme they liscens the material for other markets and thus would be in violation of these kind of deals? As well as their co-funding/producing of foreign material. The question I would as as a liscense payer is what they earn through this.
Not saying it's not possible but why it is quite the hard thing to get out of, and not spend liscens money while doing so, makes sense. I would guess someone has made these calculations once or twice too.
Pretty sure it's not that they "just don't" though.
The car show Top Gear had (maybe still has?) great music because the BBC has a license to almost any piece of music (since they have several radio channels in the UK, a musician would be insane to refuse a license to the BBC), but the DVD version sold internationally would replace the music with something generic, I'm guessing it's the same with the version broadcast internationally.
When the trio that made Too Gear a huge show moved to Amazon's Grand Tour, one of the things that suffered was the music, because I guess Amazon didn't want to bother getting licenses to broadcast music in many many countries.
BBC should put its entire archive free online ad supported for international users and ad free for UK viewers. Then the popular items could migrate behind a premium paywall over time.
They really remind me of Tesla. Exploit bleeding-edge technology by doing things as fast and as cheaply as possible. This may sound glib but I really do blame Elon for making "move fast and break things" acceptable in the world of hardware.
When things work you can do great things in record time.
> but I really do blame Elon for making "move fast and break things" acceptable in the world of hardware.
No offense, but to put it bluntly, this just means you have no experience with the hardware world, pre Musk, and don't understand the line between "user feature" and "safety critical".
I hardly think that is fair. Tesla hasn't re-invented the wheel on life-critical safety systems. They use off the shelf airbags and brakes. Their software on the steering, braking, etc control loops are more or less standard for embedded vehicle systems. The linux PC running the touch screen is not the system controlling the brakes.
The failure modes for a vehicle are also a lot simpler than a sub. If the interior starts to fill with smoke you can stop and get out. A submarine doesn't have that option.
I believe other manufacturers do use other sensors besides radar... but that's still a relatively pedantic question about the efficacy of a single safety feature. It still isn't an apt comparison to the reportedly sloppy design of the Titan sub.
If Tesla decided to make their suspension entirely out of carbon fiber despite knowing carbon fiber handles stress cycles differently and tends to fail catastrophically at the limit then you'd have an apt comparison.
Or you can look at the Boeing 787's carbon fiber body design as an example of how to do something completely differently. They deviated from the norm but that involved years of engineering and testing to identify potential failure points, how operating conditions impact the service life, etc. They designed inspection schedules and procedures for out of spec events like excessive G-forces, hard landings, explosive decompression, over-pressurization due to pack failure, and so on. All of these things are well known with aluminum airplane bodies but not for carbon fiber.
So a 787 operator knows if they have an explosive decompression event exactly what needs to be checked and how many flights to shave off the expected service life.
From what we know right now Titan had a unique hull design yet did absolutely none of the engineering or testing legwork before putting paying passengers inside. That is what makes them reckless and Boeing or Tesla not so much.
"General Motors said Wednesday that automatic emergency braking will be standard on 98% of its new vehicles by Aug. 31, the end of this model year. The four remaining automakers were close to hitting 95% in December."
I was referring to cars in general, not new cars. It’s absurd to say that something is malpractice when it was standard practice just a couple years ago. I’d prefer that we get rid of the advanced electronics in cars entirely, so I’m not exactly a fan of Tesla’s model, but I’m also not a fan of saying that every car must have radar to be a reasonable car.
I own a Tesla, and I can tell you that the aesthetics are only aesthetics. The beauty is literally skin-deep. Inside, the car is bodged together to make manufacturing as cheap as possible and with no other considerations.
Tesla likes to boast about the safety of their cars, and while I don't deny this, I believe that the safety is an accidental side-effect of the inherent properties of building a car with no explosive fuel and a heavy battery pack at the very bottom of the car.
A lot of people going on about the game controller, which itself wouldn't bother me if there was a direct connection way to control it too (aka via the touchscreens).
What bothers me more and is clear as day in those pictures are things like the screws into the carbon fiber pressure hull holding the screens up. There was someone (ex test engineer?) on reddit yesterday talking about a few things, but what really stuck out was how he mentioned there were a lot of questionable decisions being made that made him nop out of the project. And others mentioning simple things like painting it orange so it can be found on the surface easier were simply not being done.
So, while its possible the surface ship didn't have a sensitive hydrophone recording the dive, which seems almost impossible so i'm going to assume it does, everyone seems focused on how they should be able to hear it implode. Meaning it is drifting about somewhere...
But, I wonder, it seems quite possible to me that the thing simply sprung a leak, and flooded out in a matter of seconds rather than imploding. Once that happened none of the fail safes to surface would work because its likely not buoyant enough once full of water. A microscopic pinhole would probably ablate really fast, but would be completely unstoppable.
Given the hull is only 5" thick, even a 1/2" screw on the inside would be a significant percentage of the way through already.
I mean how should I know? The point is that I suspect there could be another option, which is that the pressure hull could have failed without imploding.
So, yes it seems insane, and having seen pictures which look both like that is a liner and ones where it looks like its not, I don't know. There is very clearly an outer shell offset from the pressure hull. Whats on the inside isn't as clear, but I'm not sure why they would be running cables out of the floor when they could just be running them out closer to the arm/etc if there is space behind.
Although from a human comfort perspective, I'm not sure why there isn't a little foot well/bench either. There is obviously stuff under the floor, but it also looks fairly hollow too.
I am blown away that there is any overlap between HN readers and people getting gotten by this clickbait.
The controller is sending control signals to the computer which controls the motors. The controller itself is basically irrelevant. It’s not actually doing the control, the motor controllers are.
Using off the shelf stuff like this is also common since it’s extremely well tested and usually very physically robust.
Of course it's not directly controlling anything. It doesn't "directly" control your video game characters either by this standard. Who could possibly think differently, it's wireless for cryin' out loud.
This is a "this submersible seems like it was cobbled together out of whatever was lying around" story, a "hmm, that's funny/interesting/worrying" story from a source that has a big video-gamer audience, and a little bit a "this thing could have run out of batteries when they needed to turn" story. It's almost certainly not the cause of their issues but it does give people pause.
I wouldn't be worried about using a COTS part that people are familiar with, and I agree that's the "juicy" part of this story that gets reactions unfairly, but is it really unreasonable for people to look askance at the apparently sole method of controlling the vehicle relying on Bluetooth and AAs?
Logitech tests products under these conditions? Sea water?
I've had considerable experience with Logitech products and I can't imagine employing a consumer grade Logitech controller for any life-critical purpose. It's built-to-a-price e-waste from which you hope to get a couple years of service under near ideal indoor residential conditions.
For what it's worth us nuclear subs use cots game controllers for periscope control. It has other benefits to like being super intuitive for new young soldiers to use.
They use the Microsoft controllers which have literally 7 digit R&D budgets, and have non-gaming use cases in mind. Not cheap off brand Logitech controllers.
This specific detail seems to be completely amiss for a lot of the old farts takes in this thread. It demonstrably breaks and fails to pair in the damn documentary!
I don't think game controllers are considered to be well tested and physically robust. Look at the reviews for the product on amazon, it seems to not be very reliable.
While this probably wasn't the part that failed, it shows an incredible lack of judgment.
Microsoft controllers, specifically the x360, very much was, other than a decade of real world testing they also tipped millions of other application R&D into it. Logitech rip off from 2005, that would unpair frequently? Completely different fucking ball game.
People take issue with the controller thing because it is in the intersection of what common hackernews readers know/understand and related to this situation.
So the conclusion could be that if the controller is a bad / cheap, everything else is also similar, hence the reason for this situation.
But from what I can tell, the pressure vessel + multiple levels of redundant safeties for surfacing all seem pretty well-done. The fact that the CEO and sub designer is down there tells me this wasn't some entirely sloppy cost-cutting solution they hobbled together.
Also, one of the "passengers" they call "Mr Titanic" is also down there - so not a clueless person looking for an adrenaline rush as some other comment mentioned.
These people understand the risks first-hand and have deemed it acceptable to go on it - game controller or not.
I do get what you are saying, and there is a "feel" difference when driving a car with a mechanical linkage. But I wouldn't go as far to say that makes the DBW input irrelevant. Ergonomics, materials and tactility could even be seen as more significant in these cases
First of all, the controller setup was seen in previous video to fail during testing so it is not in fact robust as a system even though I agree the controller by itself is probably physically robust.
I work in a robotics field and have an academic background in it as well. The controller and the other related information we know (that its input is mapped to keypresses, that in a previous test a controller failed and the only solution was troubleshooting of the controller, that a thruster was installed backwards in a previous test) is absolutely relevant. I will add that you can also see what are basic office monitors and the windows taskbar in the images. Yes, motor controllers are involved somewhere, and I don't know all of the details, but all of this strongly implies to me that a commercial PC is the core system, with this controller connected via some keymapping software, and motor controllers probably connected by usb-serial converters or something similar.
All of that looks like an undergrad project. It's common and acceptable for a student project's first test in a swimming pool. By the time humans are inside and depth is concerned, formal design and validation of something more robust should be seen. You'd want to see something much more robust with redundancies. At a very bare minimum I would expect something like an industrial or marine joystick and industrial or marine display connected to PLC. That's like a few thousand dollars and still really falls short of what I would be comfortable with. But at least it could be rigorously tested and doesn't depend on windows, drivers, keymapping software and who-knows-what in terms of development environment, libraries, compilers etc.
Why wouldn’t there be a backup? In an old video, the CEO explains that there are 2 more backup controllers on board “just in case ”. Also, considering that the controller is just a dumb interface for controlling a computer I would assume that this computer also has a screen and a keyboard.
My only gripe with this is that the controller has a battery in it, which may cause a fire and smoke but those are well commercialized items made to be used by kids, so I find it unlikely to have design flaws to cause that and would expect to be quite a robust piece of equipment.
I would be very surprised if the incident has anything to do with the controller.
Have you seen the bit where they cant get the 2005 logitech controller to re-pair over 2.5ghz? Or when there was a mapping issue with the driver stack so they were stuck on one trip spinning around in circles before having to use the controller backwards to finish the trip?
Robust? Neither my Xbox controller, or a third party alternative, are rated and proven to work in submarine conditions. My two controllers don't even work flawlessly from my couch.
"At the meeting Lochridge discovered why he had been denied access to the viewport information from the Engineering department—the viewport at the forward of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers down to depths of 4,000 meters. Lochridge learned that the viewport manufacturer would only certify to a depth of 1,300 meters due to experimental design of the viewport supplied by OceanGate, which was out of the Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (“PVHO”) standards. OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth of 4,000 meters."
The sub has already survived multiple dives to 4000 meters, and so far nobody has come out with reports of any apparent problems with the viewport. Maybe it failed from an impact or from accumulated fractures from all these pressure cycles, but I'm also completely willing to believe that the depth-rating for human occupancy has enough of a safety factor that going 3 times deeper doesn't lead to failure.
From the pre-accident reports about the sub it seems like hull integrity was the thing they actually cared about the most, with everything else being in an even worse state. My money would be on the sub drifting somewhere with no power or no control or whatever.
Not an expert on submarine design, but if it's comparable to aircraft, each pressurization-depressurization cycle actually increases the stress on the vessel. Just because it worked once doesn't necessarily mean it will always work.
Yeah for which carbon fiber yube is a far more likely failure point given it's ulyrw low longitudinal compression strength not to mention risk of cyclic failure from delamination.
> The sub has already survived multiple dives to 4000 meters, and so far nobody has come out with reports of any apparent problems
The goal is to have extremely high reliability at the given rating. Not failing for a half dozen trips is nearly meaningless. Safety critical equipment is expected to meet the rated load thousands of times without issue. Using equipment well outside its rated working load, in situation where failures kill people, is highly irresponsible.
If the banging sound article was correct, it sounds like they had a failure of the ballast not coming off...
I wonder how many layer of safety there is, there should probably be at least 3 independent ways that ballast can come off when your life depends on it..
I read "No Time on Our Side" by Roger Chapman a few months ago on the recommendation of HN commentor /u/z991 [1]. It recounts the 1973 rescue of a damaged submersible on the ocean floor from the perspective of the crew trapped inside [2]. Mainly their struggle with limited oxygen and rising CO2 levels. A fairly brief but gripping read which I also recommend.
Of note, I recall even though the sub in question had a working acoustic phone and beacon, the rescue vessels really struggled to pinpoint its precise location and maintain communications. The ocean is a big place!
The more I read about this, the more it (sadly) reminds me of a bungie jumping accident years ago: the bungie cable contained many separate strands, all ending in loops. The habit of the operators was to hold all the loops together and pass a large carabiner through the bundle, catching a number of the loops.
Until one time they caught few enough (none? I remember "none," but that seems absurd) that the whole thing failed, and the jumper fell straight to their death.
Going down in the ocean to a depth far deeper than any military submarine goes -- I don't see any info online, but I wonder if fewer people have been as deep as the Titanic than have reached Earth orbit -- in something that apparently was put together and vetted by effectively hobbyists seems the pinnacle of lunacy. Apologies to the missing for saying it.
Lunacy yes but this behavior has been the norm for all of human history, this seems like a fairly reasonable attempt to do something great IMO. Go read Darwin awards and realize the incredibly stupid shit people do daily.
They have multiple of them on board and can swap in a new one if there's an issue. The focus on the controller is misplaced to me. Game controllers are well made and better suited for the job than custom hardware. It's just the association with videogames that makes it seem odd.
If they used $30 logitech keyboard as well, would anyone question that?
Pros of having a wireless controller: freedom of movement (in this case in a very cramped environment) and not having as much of a tangled cord situation.
Cons: desynchronization issues, transmitter goes bad, receiver goes bad, interference, batteries run up, someone forgets to pack batteries, someone forgets to check if the backup batteries are still good.
According to the NYTimes, OceanGate refused to undergo any sort of external audit/certification process [0]. I would imagine using an off the shelf, cheap controller would have been one of the first things to be flagged. Makes you wonder how many other critical components did they skimp on
This is what actually amazes me. The reliability of something like an airplane, bus, or train, is held to extremely high engineering standards. There are even safety rules for bicycles. But you're allowed to take people for rides in a submarines with barely any oversight.
What international safety standards apply to bicycles? Seems to me that if you’re way out in international waters it’s not too surprising that no one is going to step in to stop you doing something this stupid. There’s not much jurisdiction.
ISO 4210 comes to mind. There's also a handful of ASTM standards, F2043 for categories based on intended usage, and others specifying the testing requirements for frames etc.
Not sure if legally required, but if my memory doesn't fail, all European-branded bikes I've seen are tested by those standards and categorized (e.g. cat 5 for downhill mountain bikes)
Sorry I phrased the question badly. I mean to say which standards are enforced by law globally? ISO 4210 certainly exists globally but I’m sure there are a great many countries where you can buy a bike that violates it.
All those items you list are operated inside national boundaries and can be regulated. I think they only operate in international waters specifically to avoid regulations.
It's less than it's off the shelf and more that it's the cheap brand your mom might buy your little brother as a second controller because it's half the price of the first-party one.
It’s cheap because it’s mass produced. If you asked for one you’d be charged for all the engineering, r&d and manufacturing for a one off. It would be a suitably expensive controller, but probably no higher quality.
The cheap controller angle is noise in my opinion.
There's a lot of room between one-off and a logitech controller from wal-mart. You can buy a COTS industrial or marine joystick which is tested and has a documented direct interface.
I’m not sure how an items cost can be determined by the action you might take after it breaks..
It costs what it costs because that’s how much it costs to make it and have a mark up on it. These factors are not a commentary on its durability, robustness or quality. Try as you might to find a correlation.
If you learned the autopilot on the 777 your flying on was running on a dell laptop they bought at best buy running windows, would you feel safe on that plane?
With all the talk about failure modes of carbon fiber, the scariest part of this article is the photo of the display and light held up by screws drilled into the side of the pressure vessel.
Yeah, I had exactly the same thought! If it’s a single hull and not a double hull or something, and that’s the actual inside of the hull we are seeing, how the fuck is that safe? Someone uses too long of a screw and bow you have what, 400 atmospheres of pressure pushing against the presumably sharp point of the screw?
Strain monitoring built into the hull only helps you if you can surface in time once you notice a problem, and not at all if it is a catastrophic failure.
I heard an anecdote at one point that when a submarine depressurizes that deep, everything inside gets pushed through whatever hole caused the depressurization, like squeezing the contents out of a tube of toothpaste.
"Hellevik, being exposed to the highest pressure gradient and in the process of moving to secure the inner door, was forced through the crescent-shaped opening measuring 60 centimetres (24 in) long created by the jammed interior trunk door. With the escaping air and pressure, it included bisection of his thoracoabdominal cavity, which resulted in fragmentation of his body, followed by expulsion of all of the internal organs of his chest and abdomen, except the trachea and a section of small intestine, and of the thoracic spine. These were projected some distance, one section being found 10 metres (30 ft) vertically above the exterior pressure door."
I wonder if anyone knows if this universally true? Would the inhabitants of this submarine have experienced a similar fate if one of those bolts failed or a hole in the hull developed?
That was a decompression event with high pressure air flowing out. If a submarine has a rupture that deep, it would go the other way, high pressure water coming in. Most likely, as soon as there was any break the whole thing would collapse in on itself. Picture yourself crushing an empty coke can between the two flat ends. It goes from intact and pretty strong to all of a sudden easy to push and crushed.
In the event you could contain it to a simple pinhole and not have it instantly crush, the stream of water would cut anything placed in its path. It would work similar to a lightsaber.
Keeping it to round numbers, pressure at 4000m is about 400atm, or a bit under 6000 PSI. From what I can see, a waterjet cutter ranges from 20,000 PSI to 100,000, depending on model and which source you trust. So if they could contain it to a pinhole, they'd probably be lucky enough that the incoming stream wouldn't cut through the far side, though the same isn't true of the occupants.
Though as you said, the far more likely outcome is that the vessel would crush almost instantly.
Also, at that depth, the crushing pressure of an implosion would instantly superheat the air within the hull like a diesel engine combustion chamber. Which would win - flashed into ash or compressed into goo?
No — that incident was due to a high pressure area (saturation diver living quarters) being opened to a low pressure area (the atmosphere at large), resulting in explosive decompression. The submarine in question is a low pressure area in a high pressure environment, so essentially the inverse of the Dolphin accident.
Also, why are they using carbon fiber and titanium? Genuine question - I would have thought that being light weight isn't a particular advantage for submersibles.
Imagine someone falling onto that monitor at 4000 meters. When the operator accidently moves because of the joystick. If it wouldnt be so sad, it could be funny actually.
> This submersible does not have any kind of beacon like that. On my expedition last summer, they did indeed get lost for about 5 hours, and adding such a beacon was discussed…
> To be clear, I was not on the sub that day—I was on the ship at the surface, in the control room. They could still send short texts to the sub, but did not know where it was. It was quiet and very tense, and they shut off the ship’s internet to prevent us from tweeting.
> According to the BBC, the entire sub is bolted shut from the outside, so even if the vessel surfaces, the occupants cannot escape without outside assistance and could suffocate within the capsule.
Why is the submarine bolted shut from the outside?
Assuming, quite reasonably, that there has to some kind of rationale for this -- I would guess it's because there's some significant structural complexity (and hence risk) involved in having it be open-able both ways.
The location of the door really doesn't allow it to be opened while its in the water. I would guess, as I have no evidence other than an untrained eye, that the window would either be fully underwater or at least partially underwater. It would sink if it was opened. Not to mention that they would need to equalize the pressure inside the sub to even push it open.
Bit of a tangent maybe, but according to some expert I heard on the radio this morning, it's a submersible and not a submarine precisely because the vehicle is so totally dependant on the support ship. That includes everything from communication to getting in and out.
Yes, this was my thought too. Titanic depth, I think, would not be too deep for steel cables to reel it back in, but marginally. It could also double as a communication link.
Naval submarine hatches rely on the pressure to keep the hatch shut. The water pressure outside is greater than the air pressure inside. The hatch locks around a sealing o-ring. Escape trunks are sealed off from the rest of the ship and work like an airlock. Deepsea Challenger's outward-opening hatch/egress trunk worked the same way; indeed, its view window was on the hatch.
> Naval submarine hatches rely on the pressure to keep the hatch shut
I don't remember which company it was, but there was an aircraft company that made the mistake of relying on screws instead of pressure to keep the cockpit windows in place.
The windows were installed from the outside with outside screws to hold them in place. During maintenance one of the windows got replaced and the worker accidentally used the wrong screws which were much weaker than the correct screws.
Next flight when the plane got high enough the difference between outside pressure and the higher pressure in the pressurize cabin blew the window out and one of the pilots got sucked out. Someone else in the cockpit was able to grab his legs on the way out and hold on keeping him from falling, although he spent the rest of the flight dangling out the window getting buffeted around pretty severely. The people left in the cockpit were sure the guy dangling out the window was dead, and they were having a hard time holding on, but they didn't want to lose his body and managed to keep him.
They also were having a hard time communicating with each other or with air traffic control because of the noise from the missing window.
They did get down safely, and the everyone's surprise found that the guy dangling in the window was alive, quite bruised, and had frostbite all over his face, but nothing permanent. He made a full recovery.
They redesigned the windows so on newer planes they installed from the inside with inside screws, whose job was now to keep the window from falling into the plane instead of keep it from falling out.
A "wrong screw" accident then might mean losing a window when taxiing or during takeoff or landing or at low altitude, before there is much pressure different between inside and outside. No one would be sucked out then and the noise would be a lot lower. At higher altitudes the pressure difference would be keeping the windows in place.
As I said I don't remember what company's plane had this accident. It was on one of those "air disaster" documentary shows.
But, as with airplane doors (but in the opposite direction), if the door was designed to open outwards then you couldn't open it under pressure no matter how hard you pushed
At those pressures I don't think you would want to open the door even if you could. I was more thinking about being at the surface and having nobody else to unbolt it from the outside.
Oh yes, I am (though I am absolutely not a real engineer nor do I have any experience with subs) just questioning why they would need to bolt it from the outside anyways. If it was to keep occupants in, I would imagine that a door that opens outwards would solve that issue if submerged, and would still be openable on the surface
It is a simpler design to screw the nuts from the outside. Otherwise the hull would need through hull screws attached to the door or some sort of clamp around the hull edge by the door opening.
An emergency release implies explosive bolts that could fail catastrophically at depth.
... which would be a risk that I might recommend for another application and manufacturer, but not for this firm, apparently. For this firm, I think I'd recommend "Don't do what you're doing, but if you must, keep it as simple as possible."
There is 96 hours of oxygen onboard, and even without any supplement, 5 people would survive in a space that large for at least half a day with no fresh air
The entire operation manages to somehow feel both incredibly sophisticated (it's not easy to get a sub to that depth) and simultaneously incredibly stupid.
Correction: these people were smarter than you, and they may have at some point recently come to understand that they couldn't make a safe tourism business out of this sub.
I’m not really convinced. If everyone is a little overconfident (in the sense that they think they’re above average) then the least competent are indeed the most mistaken about their relative competency. Which is (I think) what most people—at least ones not trying to use it as a debate tactic—understand Dunning-Kruger to be.
Another domain, but I feel that way when I watch some universally panned TV show/movie. One where a random person can think of simple changes to the script or plot that would make it far more interesting. I find myself wondering...how did these people recruit hundreds of people, and spend millions of dollars to make this, but no one took a second glance at the script to fix some glaring issue.
> buying wrong COTS components, ones that are not fit for intended purpose
What could possibly lead you to presume that? Do you feel in a better position to make that call than all the engineers who actually work on that task at a professional level?
The part most surprising to me was that there is no way to see out of the craft besides the camera system. Why not watch the video on land after the fact? It seems so senseless to endanger yourself as a participant.
window was in front of tourist toilet they had there, question is I'd they had enough flood lamps so that it was possible to see anything further than a meter away
Using 9mm diameter semi static climbing rope as an example.
For volume: Volume of 4km of rope is 0.009^23.144000 = 1.02m^2 which seems like an amount that would fit on a large spool on a ship.
For weight: rope itself weighs about 60g per meter so 0.06*4000=230kg of rope. It has a breaking strength of 22kN, which is roughly 2000kg static load. Given everything is probably roughly neutrally buoyant seems like enough.
Not saying its practical but it seems like the actual volume/weight of rope would not be a problem.
You’re aware of ROVs? They usually communicate with an umbilical, which is considerably fatter than a piece of string. It’s deployed from the surface vessel, not from the ROV. The same could just as easily apply.
Couldn't it be that the spool with the rope floats on the surface and only one end of it is connected to the submarine with a snap hook? It may work and saves me the maths exercise lol :)
> Do the math for the weight of a string 2 miles long.
There are materials that are a bit more dense and others a bit less dense than water. It should be possible to craft a string with a "weight" of zero, when submerged.
Can anyone who knows something about this industry answer a question?
I know nothing about it and I was surprised to read about this situation because I would have assumed a submersible would be in fairly constant sonar contact with its surface vessel. I would've thought it would be followed a rigidly planned route and its location relative to the surface ship would be well understood at all times, i.e. "you are 3508.3m below us, 340m east, 233.1m south."
Think about all the methods used throughout human history to determine location. Looking toward distant mountain ranges, determining the positions of the stars, measuring shadows cast by the sun, receiving signals from GPS satellites... none of those work underwater.
The support vessel relies on acoustic pings to track the submersible. If the submersible stops responding, or is out of detection range, you'd have no idea where it is.
"Rigidly planned route" is not really the case either. You're not going to drop in at the exact same GPS coordinate, and there might be currents that push you.
> The support vessel relies on acoustic pings to track the submersible. If the submersible stops responding, or is out of detection range, you'd have no idea where it is.
Sure, but you'd know the last location, wouldn't you? Especially if it's pinging at least once a minute? And if the craft failed, surely they would just set down on the floor nearby, not travel miles in a random direction sideway.
It is recommended to take a long cruise if you want to see just a tiny piece of it, and indeed even that experience is mind-boggling for the first time. That said, seeing nothing but water all around, as far as the horizon, can trigger intense fear in some people.
Sorry but this doesn't really answer my question. I know the sea is vast. Yet we are able to navigate it consistently. Why is this vessel unable to stay in contact with its parent and relay its relative location?
> I know the sea is vast. Yet we are able to navigate it consistently.
I'm not an expert, but I think this is an incorrect assumption. We can navigate it decently on the surface (even then, plenty of ships sink/go missing each year [1]) but underwater is a whole different story.
> Why is this vessel unable to stay in contact with its parent
There was a BBC special on this submarine, and it features that $30 Logitech gamepad extensively.
At one point they were at the bottom of the sea and the gamepad just stops working, as in the mapping of the gamepad keys to the controls of the sub weren't working correctly. They were stuck spinning around in circles on the sea floor.
The owner, on a boat in the middle of the ocean, had to call whoever it was that set up the gamepad for him on a cell phone, while his team and customers were at the bottom of the ocean, to figure out how the gamepad worked. That person never answered. They eventually troubleshoot it and find out that 'left' on the gamepad was actually forward in real life and all of the keys were mapped incorrectly.
The software that they depended on was just as buggy as you'd expect, and having watched the BBC special, I would never get in any submersible that this team designed or touched.
Some other horrors from the episodes if you can't access them:
- They didn't have navigation systems on the sub, so they were basically dead reckoning and trying to confirm their location with their team at the ocean's surface.
- They lost control multiple times.
- There were multiple incidents where they almost aborted the trip 16+ hours into it.
- It looked like they didn't even have voice or video communication with their team at the surface, they were communicating using text on what looked like an 1990's AIM client.
- It looked like everything was rigged together with consumer hardware, using older versions of Windows and custom software.
If the device into which you are plugging that steering device is a regular old PC, as it seems to be here, then something like a Logitech seems like exactly what one might recommend as the USB peripheral. Redundancy plans become easier, not harder, with consumer-grade hardware that can be swapped out during failure.
From what I read it is also the first carbon fiber deep water vessel. I find that scary as carbon fiber does not start to bend before falure, it fails catastrophically.
Realistically, aluminum and steel can fail in a similar manner. There was a lot of FUD when carbon fiber bikes came out that they can fail randomly after a crash that is apparently fine, but basically the aluminum bikes they replaced also failed like that.
You have to wonder why many migrants in Europe go missing at sea on rickety barges on a regular basis and they call off a few search boats in 24 hours.
5 Billionaires go missing on a rickety sub and multiple nations respond with everything they have.
Don't think so... Rescue ops worry people and everyone tries to help.
- Some kid lost in my country? Resources deployed for search, community helps, hundreds if not thousands do the land sweeping.
- Remember boys stuck in thailand cave? Whole world was trying to help.
- Just a moment ago plane crashed in amazon, killing adults, leaving 4 kids. Massive search effort they say was underway - 150 soldiers, dogs not knowing if they are alive - until found after 40 days. Not everyone can help there, you have to know the jungle and the dangers.
- Apollo 13 - I read that the whole world was holding the breath.
Looks like the more complex the rescue, the more popular it is in the news, the more everyone tries to do something about it.
This sounds bad when phrased like that, but if you change it to say “submarine uses standard USB-HID profile for steering control” then it seems like a reasonable design decision.
Stupid question, perhaps: was/it possible for this sub to have any kind of beaconing or communication system that works at depth? It seems like one of this first things I'd investigate before deciding to build a sub.
I was wondering how naval submarines work when they get in trouble.
I would expect to see some sort of emergency button (internally) that you could press, that would release some sort of buoy, that would float to the surface and start transmitting with gps etc. I think that would help narrow down the search.
The buoy would be in an external container (to prevent pressure problems), with explosive bolts or something to release.
From what I understand, naval submarines typically have a signaling device called an EPIRB mounted in such a way that it's released automatically if the sub dives significantly below crush depth and/or if a switch isn't activated on some set interval. Then it pops up on the surface and says "Hi, wreck here."
I don't think the former system would have worked here anyway, since the sub is supposed to get very close to the bottom.
They had this but there were problems with it, if I recall correctly. So it would be disabled in "times of war" or whatever because if it accidentally popped off it was not a good time for you.
”The submarine's emergency rescue buoy had been intentionally disabled during an earlier mission and it took more than 16 hours to locate the sunken boat, which rested on the ocean floor at a depth of 108 m (354 ft).”
> I was wondering how naval submarines work when they get in trouble.
Naval subs in trouble?
They go "forever on patrol." A naval sub is an espionage watercraft; signaling an emergency isn't exactly in the playbook for most of their mission cycle. ;)
Spanish/Egyptian. Where the person who was supposed to be a Scot had a Belgian accent.
I'm quite fond of the Bond film where he was disguised as a Japanese man, and all the actors pretended to be fooled. 6'2", with chest hair poking out of his kimono, an obvious wig, and speaking broken Japanese with his typical Scottish brogue. "Arigatoo gozzzimash"
Its practically impossible to do satellite to undersea communications. Being underwater does all kinds of hell to RF signals. Even just reliably doing undersea to surface communications is pretty tricky.
Is your phone waterproof? Stick it a sink full of water. Watch it lose all network connectivity.
I wonder what the drift would be like if you released a buoy 2 miles below the surface. You could theoretically have the last estimated location of the sub, but even then that's largely an estimate as its not like the sub actually has a GPS fix its all dead reckoning.
They already know about where the sub should be, somewhere around the Titanic wreck. If an untethered buoy pops up a few miles away, does it really do much to help clue you into where they are? And if its not much to put a tether on the buoy, why not just have the craft be tethered from the start?
I tried to research, but it's not clear. It says the gulf stream can reach 5mph, but also that that is near the surface, and it's slower the deeper you go.
A buoy ascends at 2.8 m/s. 3000m would yield, meaning about 18 minutes of rise time.
If we assume that water is at max speed the whole way through, we'd be talking about 1-2 miles.
Realistically, because most of its rise is in deep sea conditions, I imagine it'd be less than 1 mile.
But, if it made contact as soon as it reached surface with a GPS location, I'm sure some scientist could calculate about how far it drifted from the water conditions. I'd imagine they could get it down to a few hundred foot radius?
The sub had a limited acoustic telemetry system for transmitting to the host ship. That signal was lost, so presumably the sub has suffered some type of serious failure.
So perhaps the best you could do here are something like emergency buoys that either one can record data on or perhaps automated recording some stats/location/whatever that can be released in an emergency and send a broadcast once topside?
what about fiber ? <4kg per km. throw at end powered buoy. maybe inflatable to hold more of it. currents still will be mess, but with lower than copper weight you could have a few km slack
I think your assumptions are unrealistic. A fiber optic cable weighing 4kg per km with no other reinforcement or protection would be extremely fragile.
According to my back-of-the-envelope math, using the density and tensile strength of typical glass, it would have a breaking load capacity of around 10 newtons (roughly 2 pounds of force). Even a steel cable with the same weight would only be about 20 times stronger.
4kg/km it's not for clean glass fiber. it's fiber drop cable, in whatever plastic sleeving + a couple of steel strands for some added rigidity/structure.
there are also versions with kevlar braiding to protect core and improve resilience.
Yes, you'd think emergency procedures would be at the top of the list right after you made a viable pressure vessel.
They obviously didn't do this. They previously lost the sub for five hours. Why this doesn't have an emergency buoy, or an locator beacon that works when the ship surfaces, I don't know.
What’s wrong with Logitech controller? It’s good and reliable, I use it in the drone platform I built (in addition to xbox/ps4/ps5 controllers) and we flew the drone from the other half of this planet, this is like saying “oh your tank/car/whatever steering wheel or this component is only $150 so it’s bad!!”, that’s the idea of engineering, find/make reliable pieces at an affordable price, guess that contractor if they rebranded that joystick sensors and sold for $50000 then it will be better!?
I think you're missing the point. When making these design decisions, you have to ask 'what can go wrong, and what is the implication of that?'. In your example, you can replace the controller with ease if it breaks, but you can't do that when you are underwater at 4000m below the sea level. Therefore it should at least be designed to be more durable and redundancies should be built in, say a basic console with physical buttons.
But anyway, this controller debate is probably irrelevant anyway. I think it's unlikely to have been the cause of the problem here. Hope the sub is found soon so we can know what happened exactly.
>but you can't do that when you are underwater at 4000m below the sea level.
True, but doesn’t that apply to most if not all parts in the submarine? In fact, you can easily pack like 10 of these joysticks in the submarine inventory.
But yeah I agree, I don’t think it’s been a controller issue.
Edit:
Unless it was “lost” on purpose, it’s probably the crew doesn’t want to be found in the mean time, and having a billionaire on board also make things more interesting, maybe they are after some treasure hunting stuff.
>This is not the first time the Titan has gotten lost. On Monday, Pogue tweeted that during his report last summer about the Titan, the submersible got lost for a few hours as well (while Pogue was on the surface),
The most bizarre thing in this thread is the people defending the cheap shit controller with lots of bad reviews on Amazon.
Some devs are so cheap it's grotesque bordering on delusional. Just splurge on the controller that's 100$ dollar more or maybe buy the lamp that's not from alibabas camping section, i promise you that's not what is going to tilt the budgets.
The xbox controller is already used by the military and other industrial environments exactly because of reliability - if you can't research your way to that info from just googling and instead want to "stock up on probably good-enough controllers, or have an extra one lying around (because there's lots of space in a sub??)" or "just be economical" or "i used the controller and it was good" - i'm happy you are not working with any software i would ever use, and for gods sake never anything mission critical.
Imagine being able to 100x the reliability of large parts of the one and only prototype you have, but instead you save 300 dollars of your 50 million dollar budget.
Xbox controllers are regularly used by the military for controlling all kinds of things. I've seen them for UAVs, submersibles, equipment on subs, etc. Using off the shelf components like that is common so I'm not sure why this is particularly noteworthy. Of all the things they may have done wrong with the Titan, the controller probably isn't on the list.
Something that I found strange was the use of carbon fibre for the main pressure vessel.
I was under the impression that the exceptional strength carbon fibre is only in tension, and that it isn't particularly good in compression.
Why would OceanGate use carbon fibre? Other similar deep-diving submersibles used either steel or titanium, which are isotropic and have high compressive strengths.
I firmly believe that people can risk their lives in however manner they wish, but with a few caveats. If your paying customers are also risking their lives, they should have a clear picture (I'm not sure this was the case here.) Also, you should have insurance or some other way of paying for a possible rescue operation.
Also relevant (and discussed in the piece) there are multiple independent systems to increase buoyancy and bring it back up to the surface, including some that should trigger automatically even if everyone aboard is unconscious.
Not discussed was whether any of them would operate if it lost pressure containment.
This move fast and break things approach to engineering seems like a Hollywood influenced dumb person’s idea of a smart person. Real engineers are slow and conservative because they are aware of various unknowns and probabilities of things failing. Before I studied engineering I saw the world in kind of binary works/broken plug and play terms. While real engineers are able to think below this abstraction to various wires, forces, resistances failing even if they usually work at a higher level. I can tell from the video this subs creators are unserious.
A friend of mine spent two years in Afghanistan—mostly on various fire bases. I remember him telling me about this piece of equipment they used to operate with this $10k controller that everyone hated. One of the bases figured out that they could use an Xbox controller. All the operators preferred using that.
Obviously, it is easier to get a replacement Xbox controller to a US base than a lost submarine—so the circumstances are different. But sometimes off the shelf parts are the best option.
I think the game console controller is getting undue attention. Those things are super-durable and reliable!
If it can handle years of Donkey Kong, Galaga and Frogger at the hands of obnoxious teenagers it can handle a mini-submarine at the hands of adults.
I see no problem with that so long as it's fit for the purpose. You can bring 2 spares and have a controller and two spares for $90. Or you can bring a fresh one on each trip to spend $30 per trip to have zero concerns for any corrosion or similar that could happen in these environments.
Once you start doing the opposite: special-puprose building a fixed controller, you have to deal with all the issues that arise. It needs to handle corrosion, you need redundancy etc. It's going to cost thousands. The question asked should be "why should we not use the cheap off the shelf solution" and only choose something else when there is a good reason.
The title seems like absolute clickbait, implying the $30 controller is at fault. Yes, I have read the article and this is not the case. It wouldn't even make sense anyway. But the title together with a mid two digit dollar number heavily try to imply this. The US military uses $49 XBox controllers for basically everything: Training CPGs, drone control hubs and drum roll submarines among a lot of other things. The only gist to take from this is that controllers make fantastic interfaces. Not sure why we need to spotlight this with a potential drama/disaster in relation to it's price.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to understand from this article.
Using off-the-shelf parts is par for the course even on military boats and submarines. They are far cheaper than custom made parts with fault rates which are acceptable. With proper maintenance and redudancy, this is not at all an issue.
The issue here is the carelessness of the team, the lack of proper safety engineering and an utter disregard for industry best practices. The equipment is not the issue. These specific practices would have led to an unsafe submarine even with custom made parts.
The engineering culture at this company seems insane to me. From what I read they actively took pride in using as little technology and safety mechanisms as possible. If this isn’t gross negligence, what is?
> This letter is sent on behalf of our industry members who have collectively expressed unanimous concern regarding the development of 'TITAN' and the planned Titanic Expedition. Our apprehension is that the current 'experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.
Every time I have seen people calling this amateur hour, I wonder if they are right or if it is similar to NASA using the same chip that was used in the Sony Playstation in the early 90s as in the New Horizons probe which reach Pluto in 2015.
Radiation hardened CPUs usually use established ISAs / core designs, but they are specially adapted and hardened for space use. It’s not like they’re using the same physical chip as a PlayStation (especially as the PlayStation CPU is custom silicon with stuff like a geometry unit and motion JPEG decoder on chip, it’s not just a standalone R3000).
This is not unusual design. There a lot of military tech that work with commercial-grade electrics. It's easier to buy in bulk cheaper and replace when it brakes.
Honestly using an off the shelf gaming controller isn’t crazy, even military subs have used them for certain applications. But why on earth would you chose this controller when you can get a much more reliable wired Xbox controller for 80 bucks. This poor design chose makes me question their judgement during the design process.
Why would a bespoke one- or few-of-a-kind controller be better than a commercial one?
The commercial controller has statutory requirements to provide warranty and would financially damage the company if it had a high failure/return rate.
I thought the idea of using it in Bluetooth mode was sketchy, but the selection of a commercial controller didn’t bother me.
This is a shockingly simple product to make "self driving".
Why on earth do they have any controller, aside from some sort of emergency up button.
Furthermore, what the hell is the emergency plan???
This is going to cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The CEO who should be held criminally liable is inside the sub. I really, really hope they're found alive so that he can be held to account for this.
With regard to the people talking about COTS reliability of Microsoft, Logitech or whichever non mil spec components etc.
* Nobody tested that device when they had been working on an ocean going vestle.
* Nobody checked what happens if you have saltwater on your hands when you pick it up.
* Nobody checked what happens if it is exposed to salt fog for periods of time.
This is a potentially tragic event that I hope has a happy ending.
You know, once you challenged me on this I thought about a bit more and it seems its actually probably pretty hard short of using sonar off the sea floor.
If you use inertial sensors, you're in a moving fluid which really messes up your ability to dead set navigate.
That said, it seems like it would be much easier for a computer to handle this than a person, especially if it had already mapped the area.
I mean as long as they had 4 or 5 backups would it be any worse than some other wireless control they cobbled together? Doesn't sound like they had the best engineers on the team, honestly.
as an avid controller user, i wonder if they keep spare controllers at hand for mission-critical scenarios. given how little waranty first-party controller makers provide (3 months for xbox), and how almost all of them use potentiometers for joysticks, which are prone to "stick drift", i wonder how many situations could have a loss of accurate control because of this.
Why would it eventually get to the surface? The issue with submarines is that they don't normally float (and if you need them to have positive buoyancy, they have to be functional).
You'd just use your phone for GPS. Doing something useful with that information may be a challenge. All that is moot if they are locked on the wrong side of the airtight hatchway.
exactly my thoughts. i would imagine the quality of what you would see out the window wouldn't be much better then what you would see from a camera fed displayed on a screen. the only selling point is that you are seeing it in real time.
it would still be as good if you were sitting on the deck of a ship in front of a screen or a VR headset watching a live feed. it would be much better than being picked into a tube with 5 people and only 2 people being able to see anything at one time
My kids play with these controllers a few times a week, the latency is horrible and it's easy to accidentally hit the mode button which causes directional control to shift from the left joystick to the directional pad. The user can also switching between d and x mode and that would also cause the controller to stop working.
> Unusually though, it includes a private toilet for customers at the front of the sub. A small curtain is pulled across when it is in use and the pilot turns up some onboard music.
> However, the company's website does recommend "you restrict your diet before and during the dive to reduce the likelihood that you will need to use the facilities".
> The company bills the eight-day trip on its carbon-fibre submersible as a "chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary".
Well, they did deliver on their promises I guess...
Missing Titanic sub faced lawsuit over depths it could safely travel to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409475 - June 2023 (177 comments)