Titanic tourist sub missing

[theprestige]

Quality control has gone downhill ever since Neil Peart died.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Seems that if a professional engineer working for Rush signed off on this design they should be rather worried about retaining their license.

Did anyone besides Rush ever actually sign off on anything?

 

[dudalb]

Seems that if a professional engineer working for Rush signed off on this design they should be rather worried about retaining their license.

THye can always claim their design was fine, but the people who built it and operating it really screwed up by using shoddy material, etc.

 

[Steve]

THye can always claim their design was fine, but the people who built it and operating it really screwed up by using shoddy material, etc.

"titanium ring being bonded to the composite tube", as per Foster Zygote's post, is design regardless of the quality of materials subsequently used. A technical disciplinary committee comprised of qualified engineers would review the design on its own merits. Foster Zygote's wife, who appears to be materials expert and is likely qualified to sit on such a committee, thinks the design is faulty.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

There were a lot of unsound things signed off. Starting with the fact that normally that kind of composite is cured in a vacuum autoclave, to get any air bubbles out, while Rush just went with a cheaper normal autoclave. Assuming anyone who's even vaguely heard of how to do it right, actually had any say in this death trap, is already going into fantasy land

 

[smartcooky]

Holy Snappin' Duck-**** !



I am not going to even bother summarizing this testimony, except to say, its clear that Stockton Rush was a menace to society!!!

 

[Checkmite]

Edit. Am watching it now. See pictures of the remains.

Blueprint Acquired

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

To be honest, I don't understand why he didn't just make it all out of titanium. I mean, it's 10K or so per ton. Yeah, it's more expensive than other materials, but it's not going to be extra millions. Even if you end up making it thicker and bigger (to still have buoyancy), you end up with, what maybe 200k for the material? Let's say 250k? That's the ticket price he charged for one person.

ETA: after also searching for the price for carbon fibre composite, I'm even more baffled, because that stuff is FAR more expensive than titanium per ton.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

How would the titanium vessel be fabricated? Do they cast it?

 

[theprestige]

They cast it into the sea.

 

[Checkmite]

A whole pressure compartment made of carbon fiber was his Big Idea, it was his Innovation and he became fixated on it to the point where he would not hear anything against it.

Carbon fiber is much lighter than steel, yes? Since OceanGate didn't have its own ships but had to rent them for expeditions, a submersible of the same size made of steel or titanium might have narrowed the options perhaps. Like maybe only a handful of ships in the world were really build to handle launching and retrieving something like that (and they're all taken), whereas practically any ship can handle something like the Titan?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

How would the titanium vessel be fabricated? Do they cast it?

However they made those titanium domes for it, I would assume.

 

[Foster Zygote]

To be honest, I don't understand why he didn't just make it all out of titanium. I mean, it's 10K or so per ton. Yeah, it's more expensive than other materials, but it's not going to be extra millions. Even if you end up making it thicker and bigger (to still have buoyancy), you end up with, what maybe 200k for the material? Let's say 250k? That's the ticket price he charged for one person.

ETA: after also searching for the price for carbon fibre composite, I'm even more baffled, because that stuff is FAR more expensive than titanium per ton.

I don't know the answers to all of that, but I do know that he got his carbon fiber cheap because it was considered expired.

I'll ask my wife about it later, but my guess is that there's more to it than just the cost per unit of mass, and that manufacturing processes have a big impact on the overall cost. Everything I've seen has said that Rush wanted to go with the composite materials because of cost. His whole shtick was that he was going to revolutionize the industry by doing it cheaper and bigger, and in the process show how much smarter he was than everyone else who'd been doing it for decades.

 

[theprestige]

ush wanted to go with the composite materials because of cost. His whole shtick was that he was going to revolutionize the industry by doing it cheaper and bigger, and in the process show how much smarter he was than everyone else who'd been doing it for decades.

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that schtick. Many a successful enterprise has been built on that approach. Especially as new materials and processes become available.

You'd think that the established players in the industry would be the ones to exploit the new advances. But it doesn't always work out that way. Sears had decades of experience with mail-order retail. The Sears Catalog was a household fixture for generations. You'd think they would have had no trouble at all, putting their catalog online, and hooking it into their existing fulfillment infrastructure. Instead, Amazon ate their lunch. SpaceX ate ULA's lunch. Everybody ate Nokia's lunch, starting with Apple. Hoka and On are eating, if not Nike's lunch, all of the food Nike's been leaving on the table.

So yeah, it's not the schtick that's damning for me. I like the schtick. I want to see more of it! Where I draw the line is at these guys all being certifiable tiny party hats for my behind.

 

[whoanellie]

I don't know the answers to all of that, but I do know that he got his carbon fiber cheap because it was considered expired.

I'll ask my wife about it later, but my guess is that there's more to it than just the cost per unit of mass, and that manufacturing processes have a big impact on the overall cost. Everything I've seen has said that Rush wanted to go with the composite materials because of cost. His whole shtick was that he was going to revolutionize the industry by doing it cheaper and bigger, and in the process show how much smarter he was than everyone else who'd been doing it for decades.

IIUC, an engineer testified this morning that the advantage of carbon fiber over titanium was weight. A fully titanium submersible would have required a great deal of added buoyancy.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

theprestige

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that schtick. Many a successful enterprise has been built on that approach.

Proabaly not very many with a goal of diving 3800 meters, or going into outer space.. Doing it cheaper and bigger at sea level is a worthy endeavor.

As far as SpaceX, bigger and cheaper is a no brainer when the competition is the government.

 

[Ziggurat]

The Sears Catalog was a household fixture for generations. You'd think they would have had no trouble at all, putting their catalog online, and hooking it into their existing fulfillment infrastructure. Instead, Amazon ate their lunch.

Not really. Keep in mind, Amazon didn't start by competing with Sears at all. They started by competing with Barnes and Noble. They started by selling books, not everything under the sun, and that wasn't a space Sears was even competing in. By the time Amazon was a general retail powerhouse, Walmart and Target had already eaten Sears' lunch.

 

[dudalb]

To be honest, I don't understand why he didn't just make it all out of titanium. I mean, it's 10K or so per ton. Yeah, it's more expensive than other materials, but it's not going to be extra millions. Even if you end up making it thicker and bigger (to still have buoyancy), you end up with, what maybe 200k for the material? Let's say 250k? That's the ticket price he charged for one person.

ETA: after also searching for the price for carbon fibre composite, I'm even more baffled, because that stuff is FAR more expensive than titanium per ton.

Money.The main problem is they did too much on the cheap.

 

[Ziggurat]

To be honest, I don't understand why he didn't just make it all out of titanium. I mean, it's 10K or so per ton.

That might be the bulk cost, but it's not close to the final cost. The thing about titanium isn't just that the metal itself is (relatively) expensive, turning the raw material into a finished part is also expensive. Titanium is VERY difficult to work with, much harder to work with than steel. And it's hard to work with because it's pathologically reactive with oxygen. People think of titanium as being very corrosion resistant, and it is. But the reason it's so corrosion resistant is because it forms a passivation layer of titanium oxide on the surface, and titanium and oxygen bond so strongly that this layer protects the rest of the material. But when titanium is molten, well, you really don't want oxygen anywhere near it, because the formation of those strong titanium-oxygen bonds is highly exothermic, and VERY rapid at elevated temperatures. You don't even want oxygen-containing compounds near it, which means you can't use standard ceramic casting materials. So turning that lump of raw titanium into a finished part involves a lot more cost than turning an equivalent amount of steel into a finished part.

ETA: after also searching for the price for carbon fibre composite, I'm even more baffled, because that stuff is FAR more expensive than titanium per ton.

Sure, but 1) carbon fiber is lighter, so you aren't buying the same tonnage, 2) you don't need as much sdditional buoyancy, and 3) turning carbon fiber into a part is a lot cheaper than turning titanium into a part.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Now about that Scott Manley video...

One thing that bugged me about it ever since, is that basically he treats some of it like an EXplosion instead of an implosion. E.g., water under pressure rushes in, which he thinks pops one endcap and the window outwards. Which only makes sense as long as you don't think about it long enough to realize that there's the same water pressure on the other side too.

It's exactly like with a CRT implosion. Air coming in isn't pushing anything outwards, because there's the same pressure of air on the outside. The only pieces that fly out are those that bounced on something else going inwards. You can see that very clearly on some very high speed camera videos of one imploding.