Titanic submersible

What an utterly crass remark, Fulmen

MichaelG.

I infer two things from this:

• That if visiting the scene of someone else's disaster isn't grotesquely expensive but in fact highly affordable, you could feel comfortable with either yourself or others doing it.

• That you believe the only people who have any business visiting concentration camps, or sites of historic disasters generally, are people who know they have relatives who suffered or died at the sites in question.

Are my inferences correct?

Yeah. Don't have much sympathy for rich tourists disturbing a grave site for fun.

Edit: Bill makes a valid point. But I still think there is a difference between remembering something like the Holocaust and respecting a grave site.

Also, people are drowning in the Mediterranean every day without anyone giving a hoot. But the moment a couple of rich a***oles go down the whole world holds it's breath. The only real sad part is that Musk wasn't on board.

Edited By Fulmen on 22/06/2023 19:38:53

Edited By JasonB on 23/06/2023 07:41:09

Is is tourism or is it voyeurism

What controls are there, or can be put in place, to stop this happening all over again?

As I see it if someone has the money he can build anything without any real expertise, sell tickets to punters, who are always out there,and try to go down to the Titanic.

JA

There's something in your inferences but they're my personal beliefs as to what I think's right for me. I'm happy to express them for others to see but wouldn't seek to enforce them.

My missus and I actually did visit the Somme battlefields twenty years ago or so. After looking at the crater at La Bosselle (?), and High Wood, and chatting to a collector delighted with the shrapnel balls he'd picked up, we both began to feel there was something parasitic about wallowing in imagined emotions of those caught up in lethal events over which they'd had little if any control. We felt creeped out, and shortened the time on the Somme in favour of visiting relatives in the Vendee.

So yes, I do wonder why people dwell so much on the crimes, follies and misfortunes of humankind, especially spending sums that most will never have as disposable on doing so. But that's me - you can think what you like, as will I.

Never used the “ignore member” button till now but don’t want to read anything else fulmen has to say

Hi, it doesn't matter what one's views are of visiting any shipwreck, those who have perished had probably earned the money they payed for the trip, and I doubt they deserved what has happened. I feel sorry for the nineteen year old mostly, having his life cut short at such a young age, being just three years younger than my late elder brother, both my siblings and myself realise how much he missed out in life. Rich or poor, young or old, it's always a tragedy for loved one's lives.

Regards Nick.

+1 to ignore Fulmen, what a jerk!

Martin

In my time in RN, I was both compressed and decompressed. Going into a chamber from which 3/4 of the air has been removed is not an easy thought and as Michael says, one has to trust the operators of the facility. (One of the problems with a decompression chamber is that everybody farts a lot!)

Back to Titan, there is a small mercy that it appears that the occupants suffered sudden death rather than lingering on the sea bed whilst the oxygen ran out.

I believe that the pressure vessel has been located 1600 feet from the bows of the ship. I cant understand anyone wanting to risk their lives to visit a grave site , but each to their own. Horrible thing to happen to them though , especially the 19 yr old lad. Wonder what Dr Robert Ballard thought of the vessel....

+1. Thank goodness the banging noises heard were not from desperate sub crew. An implosion would have been over before they knew it. Still tragic for the families of all those on board.

Edited By Hopper on 22/06/2023 23:33:17

Well, now we know, though I am not sure if dying by anoxia would be better than the collapse of the hull. The assessments of oxygen supply led me to think that had the submersible been intact, the occupants would more likely have succumbed to the cold; and one effect of approaching hypothermia is the loss of mental faculties making it very hard to make the right choices or react to other people properly, even in critical situations. (The ocean floor temperature is about 4ºC.)

Looking back up the thread, which I'd not previously spotted,

- The remark about the claim that the Titanic was "unsinkable" is so crassly repeated over and over again. No-one at the time who actually knew anything about ships ever said that! It was a foolish mis-interpretation by some newspaper hack, of a far more measured and qualified hope in a professional engineering journal. So comments on here about "hubris" are as wrong and out of place as others denigrating people's wealth - and let's not forget most of those who died or survived on the Titanic were not particularly wealthy by 1912 standards, but even if they were, water and cold respect no riches.

- Yes, the ship became a grave; as now has that submersible, but there are no human remains from the original disaster down there. Just pairs of shoes.... (Dr. Ballard's original explorations of the wreck photographed some.) I am less worried about expeditions to view wrecks like the liner, or the Hood and Bismark, than I am about taking anything from them.

- The search area had to be wide both on the surface and on the sea-bed. It was a small object in a vast area of both. Apart from the darkness and natural sediment in the water limiting lamp range, and the difficulties in searching a very wide area of deep, noisy ocean by sonar, there is a slow current across the site so searching for the submersible would have needed to consider it drifting.

- I had wondered what emergency ballast / buoyancy methods this thing had. Jacque Pickard's Trieste bathyscaphe with which he descended to the floor of the Marianas Trench - some three times deeper than the Titanic's site - had pig-iron ballast held, or latched, by an electromagnet so fail-safe, so presumably it was buoyant anyway.

- It may be that we will never know how this vessel was lost, unless the wreckage is raised for analysis and to give the victims proper funerals. I do not know if that is intended, or if it will be left as a grave. That should be for the families to decide.

There are few areas of ocean that are not graves; but at least the locations of the Titanic, the Lusitania, the Hood and the Bismark, are known. Many more are unknown.

A sad day, a loss of 5 people affecting many families and friends.

From what I have read a large percentage of the craft was carbon fibre, made into a pressure vessel, in this case the hydraulic force applied to the vessel was on the outside skin. Does this mean the strands of carbon fibre within the epoxy binder forming the walls of the vessel are in Compression?

Most carbon fibre pressure vessels used today contain pressure on the inside of the vessel, the strands of carbon fibre within the epoxy binder forming the walls of the vessel are in tension, usually referred to as the hoop stress.

This makes me wonder if carbon fibre in an epoxy binder making a composite material has superior mechanical properties to say steel or titanium in compression? Epoxy being a plastic will creep under a moderate load if used alone. So what happens to a composite material made from carbon fibre and epoxy when the force is on the outside of the walls. The hoop stress is reversed.

I can only wonder what material physics are at play? if the epoxy binder were to creep as I think it will, the carbon fibre layup (There will be many layers of strands or cloth) might even be subjected to buckling, a common failure mode for columns. Or delaminating. I also assume that the pressure vessel is not completely symmetrical no doubt there will stress concentrations in particular areas.

Maybe a structural engineer in the forum could put my (amateur analysis) right.

Sorry, Nigel, you’re not being completely fair there, though maybe I wasn’t either. I stand nevertheless by my interpretation [shared by many others] that the hubris of suggesting Titanic was unsinkable is at least part of what makes this episode in history so compelling for so many.

“The idea that the ship was unsinkable was advanced by newspaper and magazine articles as well as by advertisement materials from the shipping company.”

“The claim actually made [by the builders and owners of Titanic] was that she was 'practically unsinkable', close enough, but nevertheless an unfortunate statement and one which would haunt both builder and owner for years.”

EtA: Here’s another source showing “a White Star Line publicity brochure produced in 1910 for the twin ships Olympic and Titanic which states ‘these two wonderful vessels are designed to be unsinkable’.”

Posted by Mick B1 on 22/06/2023 20:27:57:

“My missus and I actually did visit the Somme battlefields twenty years ago or so. After looking at the crater at La Bosselle (?), and High Wood, and chatting to a collector delighted with the shrapnel balls he'd picked up, we both began to feel there was something parasitic about wallowing in imagined emotions of those caught up in lethal events over which they'd had little if any control. We felt creeped out, and shortened the time on the Somme in favour of visiting relatives in the Vendee.”

Thanks for your reply, Mick. I'm sorry to hear how your visit to First World War battlefields was spoiled by the insensitivity and mixed-up priorities of some of the people you met there.

I think on balance more good than harm comes from such visits, because they can bring home to people, in a way the history books can't, the appalling scale of human slaughter we have inflicted on ourselves as a species, and decrease the chances, in some quarters at least, of catastrophes of the same kind happening again.

In the present case, I'm sure valuable lessons will be learned from the terrible misfortune of these five people - lessons that in the long term may benefit unknown numbers of other people, however indirectly.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 23/06/2023 03:54:25

Fulmer you are a vile person.

Blocked.

Jimb

Lets forget the personal comments, anymore and the thread gets locked, We are all entitled to a view.

.

I cannot claim to be a structural engineer, John … but I do have some first-hand personal experience of a catastrophic failure of a composite panel, which I will share later.

The pressure involved was trivially small compared with the Titan event, but the effects were certainly dramatic.

The pressures at depth are easy to calculate, but almost incomprehensible … but the story that I linked yesterday, about the Acrylic window, gives us some sense of the effect on a known material !!

MichaelG.

That is about the same number of people killed on the UK roads every day, and that rarely if ever makes the news. And most of those who die venturing onto our roads did not believe they were taking any risk, often killed by others breaking the law.

The folk on this submersible were on a great adventure knowingly doing something phenomenally dangerous. I take my hat off to them for their spirit of adventure, but should we feel more sadness than we do for all the other deaths As usual the media is sweeping us along, controlling what we think and what we should be sad about.

John …

I’ve just found this: **LINK**

https://www.science20.com/hontas_farmer/ocean_gates_titan_submersible_a_suboptimal_shape_and_a_tragedy-256678

It’s low on detail, but the logic seems reasonable enough.

MichaelG.

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Edit: __ See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36392416

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 23/06/2023 08:20:07