Mastodawn

Nowhere Girl

Laminated (i.e., glued) strips of carbon fiber can be extremely strong under certain conditions... but not if it gets wet, cold, or exposed to high pressure.

Guess what's in the ocean?

The moral of the story is unregulated capitalist assholes flouting science and safety regulations will get people killed, and unfortunately, they don't kill themselves anywhere near often enough.

@gwynnion I tried to watch a video on YouTube a while back that contained large excerpts of the corporate marketing materials puffed out by Stockton Rush's organization, and...I'm just astonished at how much they DON'T say in those videos. Rush wanted to go underwater and he wanted to be stingy about it, cheaping out to the max—surely that was obvious to people, but the marketing materials sell this as some grand exploration and surmounting of life's obstacles rather than going to war with physical and engineering realities.

@mxchara Like, there wasn't a pressure door. People had to be bolted inside the hull for each dive; one of many things which gradually weakened it each time. But if I looked in that thing and saw a fucking videogame controller and bare walls? I wouldn't get in that thing.

Hell, the main view port was never rated for dives that deep. EVER.

@gwynnion yeah like...there's a part of this business that hasn't seen the light yet and that's the argument that MUST have happened, at the earliest point in the OceanGate business, when Rush first put his foot down when it came to spending money. Some engineer or someone must have told him "okay you're gonna need bare minimum this much metal between you and the deep Sea and that's gonna cost ya" and Rush must have flipped out and demanded cheaper options. miraculous materials, maybe!

@mxchara Which would make more (albeit horrible) sense if he never intended to get in it himself. But he did! Repeatedly! Even when the hull started delaminating with a loud bang! After everyone in the industry told him, "Don't do that. You'll die."

:: Asta ::5d ago

@gwynnion @mxchara I still can’t get over that quote of him talking about the loud delamination as somehow strengthening the hull, because “those are the fibers that weren’t cut out for the team” or whatever

@aud @mxchara Yeeeeaaah.

@aud @gwynnion waat wow okay, that's a way to conceptualize carbon fibers, I suppose

@mxchara @aud "It fails in stages!"

:: Asta ::5d ago

@gwynnion @mxchara you won't believe what the last stage is...!

@aud @mxchara I mean, I guess on the plus side, they probably never what happened...

@gwynnion yeah about that...I wonder. here's the thing: in context, like if you're tending a big machine (I'm thinking of my experience with factory work here) the last thing you want to hear is some unexpectedly loud bang. But unfortunately short sharp sounds are just the sort of thing that people (such as myself) dissociate away from.

@mxchara They scare the heck out of me. LOL.

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)5d ago

@gwynnion @mxchara the part of the report to us that's most fascinating is how it's repeatedly like "And then OceanGate didn't follow up on any of that because they didn't want to spend the money". that shit belongs in a fuckin fairy tale

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)5d ago

@gwynnion @mxchara oh also the "and then we sanded down the warped bits of the cabron fiber", that was a hoot too

Laukidh 4d ago

@atax1a @gwynnion @mxchara and left the sub outside over the winter, in Canada.

Kirtai 🏳️‍⚧️5d ago

@gwynnion @mxchara
I remember reading that when the company which made the main view port heard about what it was being used for, they offered to make a new viewport rated for the actual depth, for free.

Their offer was refused.

@kirtai @mxchara Considering it wasn't rated for even half that depth, I'm surprised it wasn't what killed them.

Kirtai 🏳️‍⚧️5d ago

@gwynnion @mxchara
Oh yeah, that thing was all kinds of deathtrap; in layers even.

@kirtai @mxchara The most baffling part is the fact it worked at all.