Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

A quick infographic.

What was the part about them being liquefied or something

So you know what a water lance is, right? Highly pressurized water forced through a thin nozzle? It can cut through metal?

Well imagine that, except it's coming at the entire surface area of your body from all over.

SCHLUROAPOSPFSJ

Human Ocean Slurry

but again- all that happens so fast that at best they would have experienced "hey what was that sou-" SPLOOSH.

You're mostly right, very fast painless deaths.

But there would be plenty of pants shitting terror in the lead up to it.

It's a creak and a crack and it would slowly crush the walls, gauges explode lights pop and then instant squish. Pressure doesn't go 0>10k it has to build to the point of failure.

Really cool moment in some submarine movie where they hang a rope from wall to wall and you see it sag from pressure of the walls being crushed inward.
(Down periscope)

Yeah, and that's exactly how it would go down. As I said on the page before, it accelerates.

Any force on any thing causes strain (deflection) on that thing. The strain is very minimal if it's structurally sound. We're talking fractions of a fraction of an inch. Most structures are designed so that if something does fail, it starts to strain very noticeably before catastrophe occurs. As you dive deeper, the materials are strained at first 1/64th of an inch, then 1/32nd, then 1/16th, and so on. As it strains more and more, you might hear a pop or something as a bolt is shifted or the material starts to dent. Unfortunately in a submersible, a dent in the shape has immediate negative implications in the structural integrity, so it quickly deflects more, which has more negative implications, in an accelerating, self-destructive cycle until it reaches equilibrium again.

I'm not really an expert on structural forensics, but I do think that applies mostly for a larger vessel, which has more room to strain as it collapses on itself. I think Celebrindal is a bit more accurate with
just because they were already shoulder-to-shoulder-to-wall in the first place.

It was so structurally unsound (especially at that depth) that I wouldn't doubt what triggered the catastrophic failure was one of them shimmying their weight over to get comfortable or something.

Fun story. I'm familiar with a building outside of my hometown that was built originally as a WWII plane hangar and only designed to be operated for at most 20 years. 75 years after its construction, the workers in the building noticed one of the lights went out suddenly. At the end of their shift, they sent someone up to go change the lightbulb.

Turns out, it wasn't a dead lightbulb, the wires between the fixture and the ceiling had snapped because it had pulled away. The ceiling deflected about 2 feet because the roof structure had failed. It thankfully avoided catastrophe because they noticed it before it was too late. Everyone evacuated and they patched the building up to continue operations.

It's not about the size or structure it's the application of forces. It doesn't go instantly from pass to fail and pop like a balloon.

Shouldn't, anyway, depends exactly what part failed.

What if they went mad like in Event Horizon, and they sacrificed one of their own to summon Neptune and Neptune rose, and crushed their silly mortal machine!

No, but a military submarine has a volume of around 1900 cubic metres. The Titan was 80 cubic metres. They both have the same internal pressure. Not only did the Titan have less volume to crush, it was also at a much, much greater depth (meaning much greater external pressure) than an operational military submarine. A military sub would also have armor, which would theoretically cause a slower failure.

So you could be right, but I really doubt the Titan lasted more than 1 second after anything would have popped.

I miss threads like these

(I havent been on a forum on a really LONG time)

The thing about carbon fiber is that it's very very strong, but when it fails, it's instant, catastrophic failure. I'm going with the "liquefied before they knew there was a problem" theory.

FFXIAH remains one of the last bastions of Good Internet.

Didn't that ship also make a couple trips down there prior to this failure? If nothing else, it's poor maintenance or foresight to the realities of pushing this "innovation" past its feasible constraints

At those pressures it does. But it doesn't pop. Pop is an explosion.

Not even. Its like there they are in front of St Pete and his book and its how did I get here?

Yep. Only it ain't just carbon fiber. Any failure at that pressure differential, any material.

Pressure at the titanic is 6,000 pounds per square inch. Inside the sub it was at atmospheric pressure, 14.7 PSI. Suddenly everything inside, air, people, the rubic's cube, belt buckles, is squished to 1/400th its normal size. And by suddenly we are talking nanoseconds.

The pressure at 12500ft would exert approximately the weight of a very large SUV onto every sq inch of your body (or the submarine's hull) simultaneously to put it into easier perspective

In many ways, traveling that far down under the sea puts you into an even more hostile environment than most places in outer space.

It made a lot of trips. Often they would lose contact with the surface, a couple of times the automatic surfacing feature had to be used because they lost power. It was a stupid, poorly put together enterprise. Just a case of a rich man having too much money and not enough sense. Make a submarine out of carbon fiber? A material that is weak to pressure? What could possibly go wrong? CEO was an idiot, its just a shame he murdered other people instead of just himself.

Tbf we don't know how weak carbon fiber is to pressure. We know it has a very high tensile strength but there hasn't been enough testing on its endurance to the kinds of forces you'd experience in the deep. What is more likely is that the structure failed due to repeat stresses rather than the material being incapable of doing its job: carbon fiber may be strong but it is also notoriously fragile at the same time and is very susceptible to outright failure when subjected to the same forces over and over again. In all liklihood the sub probably would've needed a new hull every few voyages.

James Cameron's Challenger was developed with this in mind. A large percentage of the hull was filled with a mixture of specialized foam mixed with bubbly glass balls in order to reduce the stress on other parts of the hull and increase not only its per dive reliability but also its long term durability. It paid off because the thing made a lot of dives to some of the deepest parts of the ocean.

Victor Vescovo's sub is an even more impressive feat of engineering and now the god and savior of humanity, Gabe Newell, technically owns it. Praise Gaben

Considering the other industry standards they skirted because "innovation doesn't have time for regulation" or some BS line similar, I sincerely doubt it was going through the insane levels of service every USN submarine and the other limited submersibles get periodically. Trips to that depth even on proven technology like Alvin (the 1st submersible to make the trip to The Titanic with Bob Ballard) aren't "proof of sound concept"- every trip down instead of proving the next would be fine instead weakened the structure.

I guess I wasn't clear in the distinction between sudden and instant.

It wouldn't have happened without fore warning, but the action was instant.

They had enough time to regret their decisions.

And they didn't even get to see the Titanic before living the experience.

I read a few different things about the design process for the sub, but I can't recall the basis for most of it, maybe it was one of the people who raised concerns and was fired. There is a lot of information swirling around and it's hard to know what's true.

Either way, I kept hearing that the intended or ideal thickness of the hull was supposed to be 7 inches, but it was left at 5 for some reason. It seems kinda strange to arbitrarily reduce it by 2 inches, it makes me wonder if the intention behind the material choice and reduced thickness was to meet some kind of weight restriction on the mothership. Idk the details of what they used but it's also my understanding that carbon becomes increasingly brittle in lower temperatures.

I also read that the window wasn't rated to those depths, something like 1500m max, that could've been a failure point as well. The connection point of the metal (titanium?) front 'hatch'/window/etc and the rear/tail would've needed some kind of bonding also, seems like that'd be a possible weak point if you consider constant compression/decompression at those depths.

Point being, the carbon tube itself isn't the only failure point. It seems like it would be challenging to bond carbon to titanium on something structural that is under those pressures repeatedly without it failing, but that's not my arena either so I could be wrong.

Yeah that's what I tried to point out in my infographic above. Code will always dictate safety factors, so I'm sure even though the sub was supposedly rated for a depth of 1000 metres (or 1500 as you said, I'm honestly not sure), it probably would've been OK up to about 3km from safety factors. The fact that they pushed it another thousand, though...

Moonja is a robot, confirmed.

LOL

Netflix US and Netflix Canada are adding the 1997 Titanic movie this weekend to their streaming services.