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The news reports they've found fresh debris at the Titanic wreck site.
This points to the loss of Titan being an implosion rather than one of several other, slower, deaths.
The worst scenario being to suffocate in the dark after four days.
An implosion happens so fast you don't even know it happened until you're standing in front of Osiris thinking, "I thought the Jews were right!"
An interesting parallel to the aerospace world. SpaceX was going to make Starship out of carbon fiber but the continued stresses of pressure and big temperature variants would make the CF and the resin matrix unstable. So SpaceX, which had bought some of the world's largest CF weaving systems, switched to stainless steel.
ReplyDeleteThe lost sub was made of carbon fiber and there were questions about its ability to withstand... continuedstresses of pressure and big temperature variants.
Another interesting side note is that in David Drake's "Venus"/"Reaches" series, the Venus republic used ceramic starships that had a tendency to catastrophically fail and were expensive to build and maintain, while other polities used metal ships that could handle the stresses of space flight and the constant transitions from real space to n-space and back.
And Airbus had some early teething problems with... carbon fiber composites, especially in their tails. Key structural elements were changed to metal and the issues went away.
Carbon fiber is great, until it isn't. And there's not a lot of warning before CF goes bad. Metal fatigues, but you can test for fatigue in metal using various methods like x-rays and visual confirmation. CF doesn't give you that. It looks good until it doesn't.
i would think none of them thought this would happen, but shit does happen...panzer guy...
ReplyDeleteOr, you have to walk that lonely valley, going "I always hated that song!" the whole way.
ReplyDeleteAny underwater vessel is dangerous. There's a lot of submarines from all the countries that ever sailed subs on "eternal patrol," as they say. That said, carbon fiber for that sort of thing strikes me as taking too many chances. That far down, I'd want to go in a spherical bathyscaph or something like that. Solid steel all the way, and designed so that if things go wrong, it'll automatically return to the surface.
ReplyDeleteIf the pressure barrier fails, it does you no good for the rest of the vehicle to return to the surface.
DeleteEven the original, thick steel, bathysphere had multiple failures. Sealing the #3 porthole took three unmanned tries.
But to tempt fate by diving 3 times deeper than the manufacturer of the viewport certified said viewport for, and using carbon fiber and resins that the manufacturers of the carbon fiber and resins said weren't designed or approved or even really tested for the cold, depth, pressure and continued series of stresses, well, the Fickle Finger of Fate, the Ferryman, the Grim Reaper, Davy Jones, Kali, whatever approved of such carelessness.
DeleteSeen some interviews with other sub adventurers and they all categorically say the tech and the company was on the wrong side of the science and the materials. And people have been voicing this before the disaster.