honestly, it’s a lot more intact than I thought
Also little cleaner than what I was expecting granted it’s probably been cleaned up from wild life and the recovery crew but still I was expecting a little bit of blood like I’m not even trying to be a gore loving weirdo I just know that humans are basically balloons full of blood and implosions are really violent especially at that depth this sub went to
Well, they moved it through 3500 meters of water in the process of retrieving it. That’s gonna be the equivalent of a full wash cycle, albeit in seawater.
Keep in mind that the balloon of blood in this case is being crushed by water. Any blood wouldn’t have hit the walls as much as diluted in many gallons of water. Without a chance to deposit and dry, blood doesn’t really “paint” things.
I’m just reading and watching news interviews with experts so I’m just armchairing here, but It looks like the parts that survived are titanium bits that is what certified submersibles also use, except they usually is spherical in shape. I imagine the tube bit that’s made with carbon fibre where they housed the passengers is the bit that is so torn up that it’s unrecoverable
The pieces shown in these photos are the metal parts. The bit that was most likely to break up was the cylindrical carbon fibre hull, and there are no pieces of that in evidence here. The acrylic window is also missing from the front piece.
This diagram shows that the white bits are a glass fiber shell
https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersibles-under-pressure-in-deep-deep-waters
It’s not part of the pressurized system so there’s really nothing to rip it to pieces. Definitely no sign of the carbon fiber parts.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush says the company had been evaluating the potential of using a carbon fiber composite hull since 2010, primarily because it permits creation of a pressure vessel that is naturally buoyant and, therefore, would enable OceanGate to forgo the use — and the significant expense — of syntactic foam on its exterior. So, for Cyclops 2 OceanGate decided to avoid the metallic hull altogether and began a search for a manufacturer that could help it develop a composite hull.
Once again the motive for the choice of carbon fibre seems to have been its relative cheapness.
Probably weight too.
Consider this thing displaces about 5 m^3 of water, you’d want it to be buoyant after dropping the ballast, so the entire vehicle needs to weigh in at under 5000 kg. You’ve got 400kg of humans, and probably another 600kg of batteries and other equipment.
That means you need your pressure vessel to be under 4000kg. To fashion a 151cm OD cylinder, that was 252cm long, with spherical end caps out of titanium that was 10cm thick you’d need (if my math is correct) a weight of 7,853 kg. That would sink to the bottom of the ocean floor, which is decidedly unattractive.
I just dont get the point of putting your body down there. if most of what you’re seeing is through the digital displays anyway, why not just send a drone and watch remotely? seems like an awful massive risk and expense to try and actually dive down there for nothing more than looking out a window
Humans do lots of crazy things. Why do people like to jump out of airplanes for example?
Why do we smoke cigarettes?
Regardless of where one falls on the “it’s gross to gloat over any person’s death” ↔️”lol let’s put more billionaires at the bottom of the ocean” spectrum, it’s pretty damn disturbing to imagine human beings aboard that contraption, thousands of feet below the surface. What a misbegotten, miserable, wasteful endeavor.
Some points:
The occupants did not incinerate. The water temperature and the massive amount of water compared to the air would have overwhelmed any temperature spike from the implosion.
There are no bodies. There is a good chance the occupants were reduced to small bits and jelly as they were ejected from the initial breach along with the air.
They will never find any remains. The implosion happened 1.5 hours into a 2 hour descent. Any body parts that remained identifiable would have drifted far from where the largest and heaviest pieces of the submersible settled.
Any body parts that remained identifiable would have drifted far from where the largest and heaviest pieces of the submersible settled.
They also would likely have been quickly consumed by sea fauna. Circle of life.
This is sad for humans, but it’s nature.
James Cameron, director of the Titanic film, once dove in a submersible to the deepest point in the ocean. So he has connections within the community of submersible designers. Regarding the loss of the Titan, Cameron gave an interview in which he said that he had heard second hand reports from people in the Titan support crew who said that the vessel encountered problems, aborted its dive, dropped ballast, and was attempting to ascend at the moment of the implosion. So the people on board knew what was happening, they probably heard sounds of the hull beginning to strain, although the implosion itself would have been instantaneous.
By all accounts, carbon fiber doesn’t “strain”. It does its thing great right up until it fails catastrophically.
Which is why they used acoustic sensors to monitor the carbon fiber’s integrity instead of strain gauges. They absolutely would have had warning.
The Titan Tragedy—A Deep Dive Into Carbon Fiber, Used for the First Time in a Submersible
*No hull monitoring system was needed during a April 2019 dive when Karl Stanley, submersible expert, took the Titan to 12,000 ft off the coast of the Bahamas. Stanley heard a cracking noise and urged Rush to cancel that summer’s dives to see the Titanic, reported the New York Times. *
Was the hull made purely of carbon fiber?
The hull consisted of a carbon fiber tube with titanium endcaps, one of which served as a door (which could not be opened from inside) and contained the porthole.
I watched this that shows the making of the hull. So it seems that it’s carbon fibre over a metal cylinder. I don’t know if that cylinder is titanium but it doesn’t seem like the hull was pure carbon fibre. That cylinder is nowhere near thick enough for anything but the base for the carbon fibre though so it’s not like it would offer anything but squish in an emergency. But I did find this very interesting (and terrifying somehow):
Hmmm… still not sure…
The Titan Tragedy—A Deep Dive Into Carbon Fiber, Used for the First Time in a Submersible
OceanGate shows a metal tube around which the carbon fiber filament is wound but it may be a mandril removed after hardening of the composite.
The tube section was carbon fiber only, no metal. The endcaps were titanium. Many thanks for the link, I will take a look!
I’ll be damned, you’re right, the carbon fiber was wound around a metal tube. My bad.
Still better than being stuck in there for four days as their air supply ran out, which is what people thought might have happened before the wreckage was found.
I did not suggest that the scenario that I described was the worst case scenario. Another possibility was that the craft could have gotten turned on its end, e.g. after getting snagged on the wreck, or on other debris. Imagine five people piled on top of each other in a vertical tube asphyxiating over four days.
It would have been sufficiently terrifying… You’d be hearing the hull pop, groan, and creak, then the laptops used to drive the boat start lighting up with “DANGER! HULL INTEGRITY FAILURE!”, followed by Stockton frantically grabbing that video game controller to drop the ballast, do an emergency blow, but it’s already too late… You don’t know how long before you get turned into shark chum, but the suspense…
These are the external parts. None of the pressure hull other than the end caps survived the incident.
Can anyone explain why they would bother?
While it’s obvious that it failed because they ignored safety regulations and certifications that are in place for a reason, it is still important to prove with physical evidence so they know 100% without a doubt. This would officially serve as a warning to other egotistic innovator wannabes who want to cut corners.
I think some of it is to fully understand the failure mechanism.
To try and prevent something similar in the future.
🪦R.I.P.
