So this has been delayed, and everyone and their mother has already commented on this. We’re well past the virality mark on this topic. But whatever, I want to crack in and get this thing wrapped up anyways.
For context, I study mechanical and manufacturing engineering. I’ve grown up around submarines with my dad being an engineer on US Navy subs, and I was able to ask him about this. I’ve also got a diving cert and enough experience living coastal to at least get me a knowledgeable respect for the ocean. Being 60 ft under should instill that, at least.
I will not make any comments on any of the other four victims. However, I reserve the right to be fully derogatory to the CEO who died in the submersible, Stockton Rush, for his disgusting flippancy towards safety in such a dangerous environment as 4,000m below sea level, for disregarding multiple warnings against the project, and for subjecting other passengers to this. I intended to start with my favorite source on this, but it looks like I’m beginning with spite. I claim that in engineering, if safety disregards don’t immediately boil your blood, you have to turn in your card.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65998914 “Titan sub CEO dismissed safety warnings as 'baseless cries', emails show”
Some people may have seen the quote “At some point, safety just is pure waste,” Stockton told journalist David Pogue in an interview last year. “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.”
Stockton Rush has typed "We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often," he wrote. "I take this as a serious personal insult."
*Frankly*, the response to this should very much not be personal insult, but a call to action. There is no reason to take this personally.
“I have broken some rules to make this…The carbon fiber and titanium, there is a rule that you don’t do that. Well, I did.”
“At some point safety just is pure waste…I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”
“[The sub industry is] obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations…But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”
This is gruesomely hilarious when you remember the CEO isn’t the actual person running the stress tests, manufacturing it, checking materials charts and costs, calculating max tolerances, or anything else. He’s the little funny man with the money and the reputation who tells people do what he wants anyways. He has no right to play maverick when he is hardly doing any of the work, and especially when it involves other innocent people. While he has a bachelor’s in aerospace engineering, a very commendable thing to get, that’s not what he does hands on as the CEO, and aerospace does not directly translate to submersible understanding. You do not get to be flippant with other peoples’ lives. These comments would be bad enough for anything on the surface, or even in the sky. But again, the ocean is a completely different beast, where it is much more difficult for emergency services to reach people.
As well as this, I need to state the difference between submersible and submarine. If I don’t, I feel the entire US Navy breathe down my neck. It’s like boat vs ship.
Submersible: needs to be supported by a vessel up top, not designed for long term deployments. Smol boy.
Submarine: can be operated independently, can go on six month or so deployments. Big boy.
Going forward, the primary difficulties of the ocean are first and foremost the atmospheres of pressure on the vehicle. The dangers of no breathing air in the ocean are of course, a major issue, but the pressure of the ocean will be what breaks this and makes that lack of air a huge issue. A submersible needs to be properly pressurized to withstand the changes and keep the passengers inside also safe. The ocean is also very difficult to reach communication through. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/wcmc/2019/6470359/, so the submersible losing connection isn’t entirely unsurprising. But other factors listed here lead to its delay.
Current spite fixation is the Cybertruck from Tesla. May or may not get around to condensing what we know on its flaws and what I can guess in a piece, trying to keep it shorter this time.
So while updates will be incredibly sparse, going forward, I do want to add more engineering content. While it may not be always as tabletop focused, there’s plenty of historical blogs within this collective. And while it may lean plenty of times more modern, there will still be ties into history, since technology moves in coordination with human demand and needs rather than a straightforward upward incline.
I want to do somewhat longer form posts, to make sure they are informative, and because I’m a little incapable of talking in a way that isn’t an infodump. I also want to ensure that I am bringing plenty of valid sources into pieces, which will also mean these take longer again, especially since I am continuing engineering work and courses and art work at this time.
My first post in this style will be in response to the Titan sub disaster. People on the Collective discord will know that I was rather fixated on the engineering fumbles in this, from the lack of safety redundancies to the use of digital rather than analog, to the lack of proper testing and submarine experts on site and the CEO’s dangerously reckless defiance of the importance of safety. My personal stance on engineering is that if you do not get violently angry about safety measures, you have to turn in your card. This goes double in the ocean, and even moreso the more factors of this specific incident listed. I also grew up around a nonzero amount of submarines and could directly ask submarine enlisted engineers on this, so this set off my alarms like nothing.
While I may be delayed, please feel free to ask more questions to this blog - it’s engagement and gives me more material to comment on. I know I promised a post on the semantics of catapult vs trebuchet (tldr: trebuchet is a subcategory of catapult, if you list catapult as a very loosely assigned ‘yeet machine’ primarily for war), but welp. That planned powerpoint presentation doesn’t exist, and it may well be a year later. Obviously, I will mess up hard on some of these. I ask that you tell me on these, but please be civil - we’re all here to learn together, nobody gets any wins from shutting down conversation. Thank you for your patience.
Shoutout to @we-are-scribe for connecting me with this one.
Really enjoy this one because it properly assesses things in terms of objectives - both in attack and holding out, and in clarifying that most sieges were not actually won by force.
I also appreciate the constant engineering struggle of cost-effectiveness, we are never truly free from it.
