Alright. In My Tepidly Professional Opinion* Here Are The Actual Major Red Flags With The Titanic Submersible

alright. in my tepidly professional opinion* here are the actual major red flags with the titanic submersible

first, stuff that people are clowning on that isn't actually a red flag at all

using starlink satcoms for their overall [surface] communications

i know it's fun to clown on elon musk but starlinks are like. Fine. they work fine as satcoms. this is not the issue. none of these problems would have been solved if they'd been using KVH or somebody else instead

also these have fuck all to do with the tiny sub, since radio waves physically do not penetrate water enough to be useful for communications lol

the stupid game controller to steer

it's actually super common to use COTS (commercial off the shelf) parts like that instead of some bespoke steering system.

they're easily replaceable if they break, they're designed to be integrated into larger systems, and you don't have to do a huge amount of design work before you can even steer your thing

here's one example of this. but it's pretty common

that being said. here is the fucked up design stuff that i notice

Where The Fuck Are The Chairs

if you don't have seats inside your vessel, you don't actually have a way of securing passengers during rough movement. i suspect that this makes it very dangerous or difficult to ascend quickly in an emergency.

they have had known issues with communication

[source: the independent]

i will grant that underwater communications is not an easy problem to solve unless you're physically running telephone wires

but this is fucking unacceptable lol

[source: the independent]

ignore the video game controller thing

i presume that they mean "messages in the form of text, sent via an acoustic signal", not "they are literally using cell phones to text each other" because obvs cell phones (and most radio) would not work

it's actually extremely unclear to me what system the sub and the mothership are using to communicate. idk if this is a "technology reporting hard" issue or if these people are being deliberately cagey. anyway they're probably using some form of underwater acoustic communications, but what specific form it takes idk

regardless, the fact that they've had problems with this system in the past is a red flag

and the fact that their sub has apparently no internal navigation system is also a red flag. "not having GPS" isn't really, since GPS doesn't really work underwater (you need radio 😔), but they should have some kind of internal navigation-- at the very least "here is my speed and heading and based on that my expected position is here on a map"

in a power failure situation, they would have been SOL

[source: the independent]

"everything is done with computers" = "nothing works in the event of a power failure"

it seems like AT THE VERY LEAST in the event of a power failure, you need to be able to drop your ballast and ascend quickly.

it is not clear that they had the capability to do that

something weird going on with their pressure hull

[source: nbc]

while it is "normal" for structures that are exposed to regular massive changes in pressure to have fatigue (imagine bending a piece of metal in and out over and over, eventually it will break-- you want to catch and replace that before it happens), it's weird to me that

the vessel's depth rating was downgraded

without any public statement about what repairs were done, it nevertheless went back to the 4000ft depth less than a year later (in 2021)

they obviously have no "black box" system or any way to locate a missing vessel

most boats are required to have this! because most boats are required to be registered with and inspected by various authorities!

these guys deliberately skirted that rule by launching off a boat rather than from a port and therefore avoiding the need to get registered or inspected. lmao!

[source: nyt]

Company Culture Is The Killer

complete disregard for safety is really what killed these people

[source: the independent]

obviously if this is your CEO your company culture is totally fucked. beyond saving. you do not have a regard for human life.

for reasons unknown they didn't flag the authorities that the vessel was missing for hours and hours

[source: the independent]

not that it likely would have helped to save these people if they had been alerted earlier, but it shows a desire to cover up mistakes

and like. obviously. you should get your shit inspected. nobody taking paying passengers anywhere should be allowed to be their own safety inspection authority.

the original sinking of the titanic was what led to SOLAS (safety of life at sea) rules being instituted. they've been updated several times since then, but they don't yet cover submersibles like this, since they are relatively new. it's likely that this incident will cause a new interest in updating the rules. as they say: every regulation is written in blood

*i'm a mechanical engineer who works in the maritime industry, but not like, a particularly related section of the industry-- i do shit with cargo containers mainly. no further info on my credentials will be given since i have no desire to doxx myself on tumblr dot edu. i've tried not to say anything too wrong or out of my depth in this post but my opinion is "guy with an engineering degree who reads news articles" level of informed. so take your maximum grains of salt

when the composition looks better with speech bubbles but you cant think of any dialogue

A samurai does the sword thing but instead of someone dying it’s perfect top surgery

I don't even play gacha games, but being on Tumblr I absorb a lot of information about them against my will, and I have to admit it is in fact extremely funny that a. the limiting resource in Arknights is your characters' mental health, and b. the items that restore mental health are a series of increasingly unethical experimental combat drugs, and then you hit the top of the item tier list and the most powerful mental health restoring item of all is an ordinary fast food hamburger.

My boss likes to ask me what I'm writing whenever I'm on break, and today I told him I was writing whump for Whumptober

he, being a 50+ man with no ties to tumblr, had to ask what that was

So I explained "it's an online event where a list of prompts is released every year full of various situations for you to inflict physical and emotional damage on your characters". needless to say, i felt like a psychopath as he walked away with a vaguely concerned expression

THAT IS!

Until he came back around a few minutes later and paused by my table to say "what if you whumped someone by sticking them inside of a box crusher and turning it on, but stopping it before they actually got fully crushed? and just keep crushing them and stopping just before they die?"

I bust a gut laughing. I was NOT expecting that from him, but I now know my boss is a savage and would slay at Whumptober

me: sees a character who's quiet and mild mannered and generally dignified with not a lot of Big Feelings

me: hmmm wonder what it would take to have him curled up in a ball sobbing