Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
arstechnica.com
Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
37 comments
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More than the game controller and light bar, the bigger issue with this thing seems to be that it has no means of egress if lost but floating, and that the pressure vessel seems to be from titanium and carbon-fiber which, while strong and light, are brittle and therefore are more likely fail catastrophically. Navy subs creak and flex as they descend because the steel adjusts to the increased pressure. Steel will flex elastically along a good strength curve, and when it does fail, you have a little bit of wiggle room where it starts crushing like a can but might not split or pull away from the bolts.
Steel is heavy though, and this thing was mean to be carted from ship to ship and unhooked with store-bought bungee cords. The whole thing is scary AF and if that price tag still left them at a point where they were feeling like they needed to use consumer-grade parts, then maybe there just wasn't a viable business there.
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Frankly the biggest safety issue is that they have no transponder. So even if something goes wrong and they have to surface, rescuers are stuck looking for a drifting needle in a 41 million square mile haystack.
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Honestly, I'm shocked by this. I would have thought that they'd at least be not-stupid enough to have something like that.
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Fair point, especially with all the other shortcuts taken.
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Yeah you'd think they'd at least have an EPIRB or something along those lines?
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And the view window was only rated for 1300 meters, while they’ve been going down to 4000 meters. https://newrepublic.com/post/173802/missing-titanic-sub-faced-lawsuit-depths-safely-travel-oceangate
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Yeah, I saw that since I wrote that post. Crazy. Whole thing seems like a tragic shitshow.
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I thought I read somewhere that they're not making a profit yet. I mean just the fuel costs alone have to be astronomical
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If they're not making a profit as it is charging rich rubberneckers 250K a trip and cutting corners on their builds, I can't imagine they'll ever be able to do it.
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I read that military used Xbox controller because it was more intuitive than traditional method.
But I do hope that they update / change their gamepad regularly, because thumbstick drift is a thing.
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I mean there is something to be said for KISS (keep it simple stupid) principles. Especially in an environment that is very unforgiving. In fact in SCUBA there is even a rebreather named as such [1].
And something like an xbox controller is both well engineered and quite intuitive. That said...you are going to want redundancy.
For example I believe SpaceX Dragon uses largely off the shelf computers running linux [2], and not the older rad hardened versions many other space programs require. That said...they also setup them as a to work in triplicate to ensure quorum on the data validity and then have a backup set fo computer in case they cant get quorum out of the primary.
[1] https://www.kissrebreathers.com/
[2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what-computer-and-software-is-used-by-the-falcon-9
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It's even funnier than that. Appearently, for drones they made drone pilots design their optimal input device, and the result was basically a replica of a commonly used Xbox controller. The legal department was dumbfounded because there's obviously protections for an Xbox controller and they just resorted back to the original.
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The article mentions that this isn't the first time this sub has gone missing. Is it just common for these things to drop communication for hours at a time? Seems reckless and scary
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The article states that they've been lost before, but that they still had contact with the surface. Sounds like this is the first time comms has been lost.
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Ah okay that makes a bit more sense. Spooky stuff
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You could do worse than Logitech. I got the F310 from a Goodwill for like, five dollars, and it's perfectly competent, if not top shelf quality. I could see remotely piloting a submarine with one. (At least it's not STD, the controllers that give you herpes.)
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Good grief.
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This explains everything!
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What doesn’t surprise me is that wealthy adventure enthusiast billionaire would think it’s okay to cheap out on something supposed to sustain his life underwater. $30 game controller? Plumbing pipe for ballast? Off the shelf monitors? Is that picture showing they done even have any seats or way to strap in safely? Bolted in from the outside without a safety escape built in? I feel they would have been better off trying to go at it with an old timey diving bell attached to the surface with an air hose. That would have been even cheaper than this underwater coffin they built. At least then they would have been tethered and retrievable.
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What doesn’t surprise me is that wealthy adventure enthusiast billionaire would think it’s okay to cheap out on something supposed to sustain his life underwater.
I find that surprising, actually. Cutting safety standards that protect customers? Totally in line with expectations, but normally that doesn't touch the billionaire themselves. The fact that his negligence may have killed him instead of just ending up as a cost of doing business fine for killing other people is... appropriate, I guess?
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37 comments
Devils advocate, most off the shelf mass market electronics are actually quite reliable. Having custom made hardware often means poor firmware support, extreme costs, and difficult to debug.
Nothing wrong with using off the shelf electronics, especially since the interior of the submarine is atmospheric pressure.
I have no idea if they actually had spares, but there's something to be said for having three $30 off the shelf parts over one $200 custom part, provided that failure isn't immediately catastrophic.
Around the 1 minute mark, he does mention that they keep spares onboard.
Plus Logitech gear is, in my experience, pretty well made. My Logitech joystick lasted easily ten years, and I've got a Logitech mouse that's about twelve years old and still works fine.
Maybe it still is atmospheric pressure…