Nowhere Girl5d ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@gwynnion/116773244648760890

My favorite factoid about the Titan sub disaster, aside from what a terrible idea it was from the very beginning and everyone told them so, is that they built a scale model for underwater testing and it promptly failed and sank to the bottom.

They learned nothing from this.

Show threadNowhere Girl5d ago

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?

Show threadNowhere Girl5d ago
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.
Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen5d ago
@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.
Show threadNowhere Girl5d ago

@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.

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen
@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!
Jun 18 at 10:02pmWeb
Show threadNowhere Girl5d ago
@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."
Show thread:: 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
Show threadNowhere Girl5d ago
@aud @mxchara Yeeeeaaah.
Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen5d ago
@aud @gwynnion waat wow okay, that's a way to conceptualize carbon fibers, I suppose
Show threadNowhere Girl5d ago
@mxchara @aud "It fails in stages!"
Show thread:: Asta ::5d ago
@gwynnion @mxchara you won't believe what the last stage is...!
Show threadNowhere Girl5d ago
@aud @mxchara I mean, I guess on the plus side, they probably never what happened...
Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen5d ago
@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.
Show threadNowhere Girl5d ago
@mxchara They scare the heck out of me. LOL.