It keeps being brought up. I suspect as a sort of character assassination technique. Sort of the disaster analysis version of bike-shedding. "well I don't know much about the physics of carbon fiber in high pressure environments, but I know a cheap gamepad when I see one." However, I expect that such a commercial off the shelf gamepad to be probably the most reliable well tested piece of equipment on the sub. it is highly unlikely to go bad and is super easy to carry a spare.
Also no analysis I have seen actually knows how the sub was controlled or bothers to explain how you would do it better than a gamepad. If I had to guess, the motors and ballast controls went into an array of controller boards in a rack somewhere. the control circuity(probably something like i2c or canbus) tied into a central microcontroller. and then a laptop or tablet is used for the human IO(gamepads and screens). There probably was not much redundancy in the system, but I am not sure that is a bad thing, redundancy massively complicates the design and introduces new error conditions. (look into the causes of the US Navy destroyer John S. McCain collision, it was a highly redundant controller system. and the helmsman failed to realize he had no control, it was really a training issue) often it is better to just have the ability for manual control. that is, go back to the rack of motor controllers and manually start twisting knobs and jumping wires. but none of this matters, because it is not what failed.
It cheapens the narrative to go after stupid superficial things like the gamepad, that did not cause or contribute to the fault rather than what actually caused the engineering failure.
Don't let the passengers drive? that is unfair, teach them how not to hit rocks? Also unfair, sorry can't help myself today.
Really I suppose it depends on how hard and where they hit the rock, was it a failure of of the gamepad that lead to the rock hit? that is, dead controls and drifting (those infernal radio gamepads, amiright) If I remember correctly the whole sub had an outer shroud anyway. how much damage to the outer shroud was done?
Anyway, I don't really want to be the guy defending oceangate, I think a carbon fiber submarine sounds like a monumentally ill founded idea in the first place, and the move fast and break things attitude they employed in their engineering process should have never gone anywhere near a passenger. but at first thought, at the speeds the sub moved I doubt a rock hit would damage the sub. if I had to bet, it was plastic deformation leading to delamination and fatigue.
They allege that this system was designed by students or recent graduates from Washington University who have no real experience. I don't think it's the student's fault.
Showing Rush tossing the controller while saying "it's bluetooth so I can hand it to anybody... it's meant for a 16 year old to throw it around and super durable" is powerful imagery for a jury.
The complaint specifically mentions Bluetooth, which I can't tell if it's an error. They switched from the DualShock controller used in Cyclops I, which does use Bluetooth. There is probably a reason they switched wireless technologies (Bluetooth is even worse than Logitech's 2.4 GHz wireless), which if not documented, could also show negligence.
Your carbon fiber hull fatigue theory is interesting.
I picture it sitting out in the hot sun and cold nights for months. It reminds me of the CNA building in Chicago, where windows fractured due to uneven sun exposure. The owners didn't replace them until one fell and killed a pedestrian, resulting in an $18 million settlement in 1975.
Be careful: are you trying to predict legal results, or find truth? Those are (unfortunately) rather different questions. If you're looking for truth, you don't care about what makes "powerful imagery for a jury".
BTW, the "carbon fiber hull fatigue" theory is not GPs, it's the extremely obvious top candidate for the failure.
Anyway, there is still no evidence that using a gamepad had any concrete negative effect. Letting passengers drive? Yeah, that's a problem. But it would be at least as big a problem with industry standard controls, which wouldn't even have the faint advantage of familiarity.
The switch from the Dualshock to the Logitech, as a system designed by students, demonstrates negligence that led to the catastrophe. Had the system not been designed by students, it would not use a wireless game controller. You could argue it in your head but in reality, which is part of the claim, no such system exists in any submarine.
Why are you so determined to make the gamepad mean something? Is it not enough that the whole design of the sub was fundamentally flawed?
Anyway, the best sense I can make of your logic is that designedByStudents -> gamepad, and designedByStudents -> negligence, therefore gamepad -> negligence. In that case I believe your fallacy is "affirming the consequent", with a side of ad populum w.r.t other submarines. I don't see how changing the type of controller fits in.
I'm not affirming the consequent here. I'm saying don't dismiss the gamepad claim outright. As I said, it's not normal for a sub traveling miles under water to have electronics sourced from Walmart's toy section.
This thread is about the gamepad. The lawsuit mentions it. It's relevant. Period.
It's mentioned, but we can still point out that its importance is at best overstated, and that the article headline mentioned it in a deceptive way, and that it most likely had nothing to do with the actual incident (again, plenty of bigger issues).
So then the most important question relating to the gamepad remains: why do people keep mentioning it? The specific sub thread we're under started with a pretty good theory IMO.
In the meantime, the correct thing is in fact to dismiss the gamepad until any evidence appears relating to its role in the vehicle loss, and not to get to excited for that to happen.
To be fair, a sharp impact to the hull would definitely have made the ongoing fatigue worse, and could even been the trigger for a failure. (Of course this continues to have nothing to do with the gamepad.)
There's no new evidence in the article, about the gamepad specifically or anything else as far as I can tell. We've already argued the implications of the gamepad a dozen times over.
> The lawsuit acknowledges the root cause of the implosion may never be known and does not place sole blame on any one factor.
With so many other factors that contributed to the implosion in a big way, this detail seems insignificant.
It was a cramped vessel, wireless may have been safer because nobody could yank a cable out, or get twisted up in a cable. It was probably communicating wirelessly over a couple of feet or less in a RF interference free environment.
"The carbon fibre and titanium, there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did." (Found the quote on WikiPedia.)
It seems insane to me. It's easy to be an armchair anything, but I don't understand why you would do such a thing. It's not like a submersible needs to be light weight, either.
Engineering a submarine is well above my pay grade, but some of the variables you have to balance are.
the walls have to be strong(thick) enough to withstand the pressure (this is obvious, I know)
the ratio of wall thickness to void(crew) space determines reserve buoyancy.
smaller submarines are stronger than bigger ones. but have a worse buoyancy ratio.
The end result is that as you design a submarine to go deeper it has to become smaller with thicker(heaver) walls until past a certain depth it goes negative buoyant and will sink. So you have to add additional buoyancy. not a trivial task given the pressures involved. the Trieste(first submersible to the challenger depth) was built like a blimp, with a tiny crew sphere hung below a massive tank of oil(they used oil because it is lighter than water and will not compress).
So a lighter material hull is very desirable, it makes the whole operation much easier. They probably should not have been testing it on commercial passengers however.
This is also the benefit of titanium, it is almost as strong as steel with half the weight.
It is insane, but not entirely pointless. A metal submersible is heavy and negatively buoyant, whereas you want it to be positively buoyant (then add removable ballast).
The way you add buoyancy is expensive fancy aerated concrete, or something like that, and a lot of it, since it's not that buoyant. But it is pressure resistant.
By making it out of CF, you save on that cost.
Not a worthwhile cost cutting exercise but at least there is some reason for it.
My understanding is that most commercial manned submarines don't actually go that deep. As with depth there isn't that many interesting things... And lot less light. So pressures they are dealing are quite reasonable. Which makes implosions pretty unlikely in normal operation. Common scenario is to operate in areas were sea bed is at depth where implosion is impossible.
It is, so it’s taken really seriously. The hulls are made from material with well characterised gradual failure modes - bending and deforming rather than sudden failure. This means metals with thoroughly inspected welds and joints to ensure no internal voids, and a process of gradually diving deeper to check the hull meets the design requirements.
Using materials that fail plastically and gradually increasing depth trials means the failure mode is hopefully deformation rather than complete failure, and will happen at the highest depth as possible so a quick surfacing can be achieved.
Submarines, along with space, are an area where innovative new methods need a lot of testing before you commit human life to it.
If I remember the early reporting correctly, this submarine had plastic deformation on every dive. So it was already failing, they just didn't do anything about it.
Yes, as one way to control cameras on top of masts. Replacing periscopes.
Not really a comparable to actually steering the boat.
Here’s a video from a submarine tour where you can see the Xbox controller in action: https://youtu.be/0StWrXoN8nI?si=Hf5eoGOU-jxDNa2x
Also no analysis I have seen actually knows how the sub was controlled or bothers to explain how you would do it better than a gamepad. If I had to guess, the motors and ballast controls went into an array of controller boards in a rack somewhere. the control circuity(probably something like i2c or canbus) tied into a central microcontroller. and then a laptop or tablet is used for the human IO(gamepads and screens). There probably was not much redundancy in the system, but I am not sure that is a bad thing, redundancy massively complicates the design and introduces new error conditions. (look into the causes of the US Navy destroyer John S. McCain collision, it was a highly redundant controller system. and the helmsman failed to realize he had no control, it was really a training issue) often it is better to just have the ability for manual control. that is, go back to the rack of motor controllers and manually start twisting knobs and jumping wires. but none of this matters, because it is not what failed.
It cheapens the narrative to go after stupid superficial things like the gamepad, that did not cause or contribute to the fault rather than what actually caused the engineering failure.