Flub-A-Blub-Blub, 5 Billionaires in a Sub

Also this seems like a yikes…

https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1673406252473528320

He just…admitted it? Three years ago?

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Did they like, fix/rebuild it? Or he just decided to yolo it?

How much money did we blow dragging the wreck back up?

Does 3,000m track with the depth it’s believed to have imploded? Like, the Titanic is at approx 4,000m and takes about 2 hours to reach, and they imploded about 1.5 hours into the dive?

Yeah pretty much thought to have been around that depth :harold:

Lol, these motherfuckers cut corners everywhere, and then charged rich assholes a quarter million dollars to ride their death trap coffin:

I didn’t realize that submersibles have been around for nearly 100 fucking years, and there’s never been a death, until now. What a fucking asshole this guy was.

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Next time I half ass something I’m going to call it a maverick design choice

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Lol, motherfucker didn’t want to pay to rent a more expensive mothership, so instead of having the submersible strapped into the ship until it was ready to go (the industry standard), they just fucking towed it behind the boat for three days in choppy waters. What a fucking asshole.

And he was too cheap for titanium (which is strong against compression), and which every other submersible has used for decades so he went with cheaper carbon fibers (which is strong against tearing but weak against compression). Just fucking LOL at this whole thing. Imagine paying a quarter million dollars to go on a death trap that was less safe and more weakly built than a submersible that was built when Roosevelt was president.

Teddy….

I saw speculation that there could have been obvious problems for up to a minute before the implosive end. Tortured on the way out.

The rest of anyone that signed off should be subjected to explosive decompression as well.

I dont think anyone really did sign off on it? sounds like a completely unregulated industry there being only a handful of submersibles capable of going this deep. I think Rush had people build a sub for him that wasn’t rated to go as deep as he ended up taking it and decided to yolo it.

there is a lot of irony in the same type of engineering hubris that directly led to the titanic disaster being on display here.

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Absolutely begging the media to stop calling rich morons “mavericks” when they do extremely stupid things.

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“Industry.” It was literally just him i think. All the other submersibles are part of legitimate scientific/exploration companies. They’re not for-profit ventures charging millions for joy rides (I think).

I think it’s more like priced out than too cheap. He tried to buy a real submersible at one point from a billionaire’s private collection and realized he doesn’t have that kind of money. The other aspect is that you can’t really transport paying tourists mission specialists in real submersibles because they’re too small. The highest capacity of any of the classed vessels that have made dives to Titanic is only three people afaik, and the a significant % only carry one or two. This mofo took five people down. There’s a reason that it’s mostly governments that own these things. Imagine trying to forge a titanium hull that can carry five people and getting it past classification. It would necessarily cost more than any of the best ones that have ever been built and I’m not even sure it could be classed.

Also, it’s not just carbon fiber construction but the fact that it wasn’t spherical. I dabble in compression molding and would be immediately skeptical of the cylinder-with-end-caps design withstanding the low pressures for the parts I make in my basement. That edge where the cylinder ends and the hemispherical titanium cap is glued on gives me major :harold: vibes. If I had to place bets it would be in that seam being ripped apart.

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I suspect that’s probably right. He had a patent (:leolol: ) on the acoustic monitoring system that was supposed to detect and provide early warning of failure in the CF hull and seemed amazingly overconfident that there would be “plenty of time” to resurface when the alarms went off. I dunno if any of the actual details have been released yet but wouldn’t surprise me if they alerted a Code Red before imploding.

Nicolson

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