The original guy in that company had such hubris that it amazes me that he was an engineer at one point. Choosing materials for a submarine that didn’t fit the role (carbon fiber sucks at compression), going cheap on those parts (Boeing QC-lot rejected carbon fiber lol), over-reliance on commercial-grade components like the gamepad for submarine control, and the general “safety is overrated” mentality that eventually hoisted his own petard.
The submarine wasn’t designated seaworthy by any third party organization and even independent engineering analysts said years prior that structural failure was less of an if and more of a when.
The off the shelf commercial parts (game controller, computer monitors, etc) weren’t that bad of an idea… the bad idea was to not get anything that was fire safety rated. That whole submersible was a fire trap.
I agree, definitely for those safety-related critical components.
Got a separate sonar monitor that needs a controller to navigate menus? Sure a Logitech F710 would work for that. For actually controlling the entire sub? Definitely not.
There is a good reason engineers specify single points of failure so as to mitigate them in the design phase.
Move fast and break things isn’t the right philosophy to have when you’re leagues under the sea and a failure can be absolutely catastrophic lol.
Off the shelf controllers aren’t a bad idea, but why Wireless? The US Navy switched to xbox controllers at one point because new recruits could use them with minimal training.
Honestly its impressive it did multiple trips before failure, if it had been an unmanned drone or something it would’ve been brilliant. But instead it turned people into fish food, what a fucken waste.
Also I misspelled drone initially as Dorne and now all I can imagine is Rogal Dorne being slowly lowered towards the Titanic on a crane.
The USN has been using gamepads for years to control submarines. It’s just a more intuitive interface for most people. They do however use corded controllers rather than wireless, because wired works. I’m unsure of what manufacturer they use, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that they got a proprietary X-box 360 controller that was made exclusively for them.
Right, but at the very least the government goes through a commercial grade dedication screening for these types of things. It’s not like Norfolk Naval Shipyard just goes “eh let’s just put a X-box 360 controller from Amazon on it and call it a day.”