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>Hopefully future subs will have more safety features.

From an engineering standpoint, Titan didn't have any safety features at all. What any sane engineer would recommend as a last-ditch backup system Oceangate relied on as a single-point-of-failure.

No phone. No beacon. Budget bluetooth controller and touchscreens. Electronics you'd expect to find in an RV. All from a CEO who flaunted his corner-cutting and apathy towards safety.

We should never do this again.

After this, anyone boarding a future tourist sub to the Abyssal Zone or deeper is asking for it.




> From an engineering standpoint, Titan didn't have any safety features at all.

This isn't quite true. It had multiple redundant ways to drop ballast, for example.

What I would say from what I was able to find out (and with some familiarity of safety engineering processes from work; I make cars) is that it's safety-concept was very spotty. It had solutions to some problems, but also large gaps in the safety concept. Safety was not addressed in holistic fashion.

It's interesting to compare this with solutions found in other subs. For example, Titan had four different ways to drop ballast, but from the list I saw, all of them required manual intervention by a non-incapacitated crew and electronics to be working.

On Cameron's Deepsea Challenger--by another rich guy who funded a vanity dive, and relying on homebrew innovations in material science--ballast was held by corrosible wire that would be corroded by seawater in a set time, so the sub would eventually surface automatically. Ballast drop was also triggerable remotely by an acoustic signal, more reliable than radio. The available info is pretty bad, but Titan may not have had those solutions in place.

I'm very much out of my depth (no pun intended) on naval/submarine engineering, and I'm hoping for someone with better knowledge to extend that comparison somewhere.


There were apparently timed-release (bags of lead shot on dissolvable links) and manual-release (rock the sub to tip lengths of steel pipe off their racks on the sides) ways of jettisoning ballast as well.


Forget safety features. Its structural design was fundamentally wrong. That's just insanely bad structural engineering.

I wouldn't even buy a used carbon fiber road bike.


You can't just have a phone that works at those depths


Acoustic data/voice connections are solved COTS hardware bits - https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/acoustic-general-p...


I've been thinking about this problem.

Would an iPod glued to the inside that played yellow Submarine by the Beatles.

At what range would that be detectable? How long could it last?

Edit: even better this banger on loop https://youtu.be/uzR5jM9UeJA


Yet, there still are Teslas with comparable issues on the road, maiming unsuspecting people.


What comparable issues? I thought Teslas had good safety.


Are you intentionally trolling or are you really restricted in your awareness?

'FSD' scam killing people and the myriads other problems aside:

1. https://www.autoevolution.com/news/we-need-to-talk-about-tes...

2. https://www.slashgear.com/1075194/whats-up-with-teslas-whomp... https://www.flickr.com/photos/136377865@N05/albums/721576584...


"FSD" is not a comparable issue, and handwaving "myriads of other problems" doesn't cut it, sorry. Welcome to try again if you'd like.


Why don't you get off your lazy ass and perform some own research? I am not here to please and hot-serve you or anyone else, sorry. Or spending my hours to 'discuss things through' with strangers.


I did suspect you lacked the capacity to substantiate your claims with evidence. Pathetic.




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