https://mediakron.bc.edu/ottomans/turkish-bombard (Preview for this link not working today, okay)
Includes my favorite siege weapon story with the Dardanelles Gun This thing is *MASSIVE*. Beefy cannon, made by Musir Ali, originally from Hungary. First pitches it to the Byzantine Empire, but because the damn cannon's so expensive, they say no. He goes "hm. Okay", turns right around, and goes "HEY OTTOMANS, WANT MY GUN?"
There are bigger guns, but this is still one of my favorite Brooklyn Supremes of gun
lurking on r/machinists and it's good
i find that machining as a profession is incredibly compatible with the specific blueprint of autism mapped out by reddit infrastructure
i love manufacturing
I’m still thinking about that “is OSHA regulations Cop Behavior” post. Like. You know who thinks regulations are for losers? People who build submersibles out of logitech gamepads and rejected carbon fibre. People who trust starlink as their only surface lifeline.
Do you wanna be like the fine film on the floor of the Atlantic that was once a billionaire? Is that the hill you’re really gonna die on?
We have an expression in my field- “Regulations Are Written In Blood”
People don’t have fucking safety standards as a power trip, we have them because somewhere in the past, NOT having those regulations killed or maimed someone.
A lot of laws out there are bullshit- safety regulations sure as fuck aren’t. I have the literal scars to prove it.
Please please please remember that bosses and CEOs hate safety regulations.
Doing things safely cuts into their profits and lets workers survive long enough to learn.
If you're ever irritated at how long it takes to be safe?
Remember your bosses hate it twice as much!
Then be even safer.
Safety regulations are there because businesses see workers as expendable.
Purdue’s ‘world’s whitest paint’ wins 2023 SXSW Innovation Award - Purdue University News
Why this is so important:
Typical commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler when subjected to sunlight or other light sources. Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80% to 90% of sunlight and can’t make surfaces cooler than their surroundings.
In comparison, the world’s whitest paint reflects 98.1% of solar heat away from its surface.
Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power.
Using this formulation to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts, more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses. At SXSW, researchers demonstrated the effects of the difference with two model barns sitting under direct halogen lights: one painted in commercial paint and one in Purdue’s white paint. Judges were able to compare thermometers reading the barns’ internal temperatures and to feel the difference in the roofs. The barn painted in Purdue’s technology consistently held cooler internal temperatures by 8-10 degrees Fahrenheit. The “whitest white” barn roof was also much cooler to the touch, prompting many surprised responses from judges and viewers.
While Ruan’s original paint formula is massively efficient, it required a layer 0.4 millimeters thick to achieve subambient radiant cooling. The newer, thinner formulation can achieve similar cooling with a layer just 0.15 millimeters thick.
The new paint also incorporates voids of air, which make it highly porous. This lower density, together with the thinness, provides another huge benefit: reduced weight. The newer paint weighs 80% less than the original paint yet achieves nearly identical solar reflectance – 97.9%, compared to the original formula’s 98.1%.
This could be an important piece in fighting global warming. Imagine if the city of New York City repainted all the skyscraper roofs with a paint that cools down buildings.
yo
[image id:
tweet from Karl Groves that reads: "Stolen from Reddit: 3D printer add ons for wheelchair handles to prevent randos from "helping.""
Below it is a picture of wheelchair handles with yellow 3d printed spike rings, 3 on each handle.
/end image id]
This is so fucking metal
Who up smelting their ingot? Hit like!
Reblog if you’re forming your ingot now!
Today on "I'm an Adult and Get to Decide What That Means": Mad scientist light switches
Today in that’s an excellent accessibility aid and I need the print file omg
Print file here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:649284
It’s got versions for several types of switches.
WANT
Enjoy, my brethren. Thingiverse is a treasure.
I was at FIRST going to be mad about the lack of inclusion of spell components.
You take a piece of mica and snap it in half, and a deathly shriek echos through and rattles the mind, emanating from your temporary fragmentation of reality.
You take a fragrant rose petal, and you blow it. It becomes ten, then fifty, then a thousand as your foes find themselves wrapped in comfort beyond belief- forgetting their woes as they fall asleep.
You take a fine powder, grind it in your hands to a paste, and flash it out as a mighty BOOM rattles the world as you’ve condensed it more than you should.
You take a diamond, crush it in your hands, and toss the powder up as it collects on your eyes, giving you more sight into the Weave.
You take a powder, inhale it, and your senses come alight, blood burning and pumping as you now race through time faster than anyone around you can - faster than life itself can register you being a part of its story for a brief moment.
And then Stormcaller reminded me that if it was there, the room would be split between components and spell device and that would be no fun to work with. And I said okee. Stick squad.
It is obvious that I should be using this blog for good and for what I truly wanted all along. Roasting the shit out of Elon Musk to hell and back.
Obviously, that’ll get way bigger than the Oceangate post that I should’ve posted in sections rather than all at once lol. But we’ll do intermittent stuff. Totally repeating points other folks have said, but I deserve this, as a treat.
Delightfully ambitious, I love it. Resources used by the artist, Rachel Maksy, linked in the video description on YouTube.
Titan: Don't Fuck With the Ocean
So this has been delayed, and everyone and their mother has already commented on this. We’re well past the virality mark on this topic. But whatever, I want to crack in and get this thing wrapped up anyways. For context, I study mechanical and manufacturing engineering. I’ve grown up around submarines with my dad being an engineer on US Navy subs, and I was able to ask him about this. I’ve also got a diving cert and enough experience living coastal to at least get me a knowledgeable respect for the ocean. Being 60 ft under should instill that, at least.
First of all, this is one of my favorite sources on this. Shoutout to @we-are-lawyer for recommending me this channel. This group, Sub Brief, is a bunch of submarine vets who essentially talk on what they want. This man brought up many points that I didn’t even think of, and he has thorough research. Moreover, he speaks from a place of kindness - in this first video, he essentially confirms what was on my mind at the time: with the time limit left and the circumstances, the victims were practically already dead. He intended this final message as a wish of hoping this would bring the grieving families some closure, which I highly respect. https://youtu.be/4dka29FSZac
The points brought up in the video are what he has mostly sourced from the Oceangate website itself, and are the following
1. The team is primarily fresh college graduates and interns. While recruiting the young folk is a great thing (I still count as young folk and I like getting money for job), there was no submarine expert on the team. While they have sources in aviation and aerospace engineering, which do overlap with submersible technology and other undersea endeavors, the ocean is still a different beast. Submarine experts will have had to deal with multiple issues rise up on them that a layperson wouldn’t even think of- if I’m lucky enough, this piece will get addressed by one who thinks of something I haven’t thought of, and I get to learn a new thing. I also worry because young folk are some of the most exploitable classes. We’re desperate and need money to live, odds are stacked against us, college debt, we don’t know every single way yet we can be exploited, there’s an age and experience dynamic, previous jobs for part time like fast food and retail could have set an exploitative standard of expectations, and more. From the tone from Stockton Rush, it’s very possible they could have experienced some of the dangers of ‘startup culture’.
4. There is only one port through the hatch, sealed with seventeen bolts, and it can only be opened from the outside. This would not help them underwater, since it would be actually physically impossible with the pressure differences to open even a handcranked hatch. People have died in sinking cars in only six feet of water from being unable to open the doors at that depth. To put this into colloquial terms, you know how a plastic container of water for a workstation watercooler is difficult to lift? How you would have to work pretty hard to open a door with it in the way? Or picture even a door you would have to lift upwards rather than slide against the floor? Now imagine that with at least fifty of those. Circling back, the main place this would be an issue is if they miraculously managed to lower their ballast and surface independently. Once they reach the top of the water, they wouldn’t be able to get their hatch open to get air in, making it sadly possible in a niche situation for them to suffocate while seeing sunlight. Moreover, apparently I have to add something else - it wasn’t seventeen, but eighteen. Revisiting the interview with Pogue, there was something also telling. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/titanic-submersible-interview-transcript-with-oceangate-ceo-stockton-rush/ An eighteenth bolt was put “way up high”, a touch more out of view, but apparently…. They don’t bother with it. Time to project, but if that’s between me and imminent implosion faster than I can think of a good curse in time, I want all eighteen.
The reason the acrylic spiked my concern for a half-moment is essentially Stockton Rush opening his big mouth on it. Now I’d like to bring up LegalEagle (Devin Stone’s) video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJQPthD9rx8, which also graciously introduced me to new aspects. I try to avoid 100% ‘stanning’ creators or 100% trusting them immediately, but so far Legal’s methods are solid and trustworthy, conducted with very cordial professionalism, and even seems to have a very respectably positive relationship with his workforce. (Another sources is Awkward Anthems, even upon leaving the team to pursue her video editing dreams in her own way, citing that workplace as the best she ever had https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NvgNHo7CzI ) . Anyways, Legal’s video gets to more that I will try to cite in a coherent fashion, but it brings up Stockton’s quote in the acrylic that it will “fails optically long before it fails structurally”. Essentially, it’ll crack before it’ll break, and the interior crew will see that. A terrifying thing for a crew of tourists, notoriously ~very stellar at managing life threatening situations~ to see without essentially panicking or getting in the way of emergency safety methods, but also THAT MEANS NOTHING IF YOU HAVE NO PROPER WAY OF MANAGING ASCENSION CAREFULLY. Again, the submersible has to ascend slowly enough without causing bends (nitrogen poisoning). In my years of diving, that one *terrifies* me. Sure, you may see it show signs of breaking (if you’re actively paying attention, of course), but do you have the procedure trained and drilled into you for what to do? Are the proper tools giving you self sustainability available to you?
Carbon Fiber Materials Physicist https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJCCJ3tF/ Shoutout to @wearebeguiler for finding this one and sending it my way. What the physicist refers to refers to is the following: Carbon fiber has its use in aerospace and in cars. Very cool. That's fine. However, it hasn't been tested enough for submersibles. It also doesn't have as good of a compressive strength, meaning its ability to withstand getting squished and not fracturing (vs tensile strength, the ability to get pulled and not break). When the ocean is the environment of multiple atmospheres of pressure on your vessel, compressive strength should be a high priority.
So the carbon fiber filament was wound like in this vid https://youtu.be/Vi4J1LDS504
Back and forth, very much like a spool of thread. That's not to say carbon fiber isn't 100% bad in the ocean - there's some dive tanks with carbon fiber cited in this article https://www.engineering.com/story/potential-structural-reasons-for-the-titan-submersible-failure
While there's a metal tube used as the frame that the carbon fiber is woven around, I don't know if this is actually kept in the submersible or removed after - so that touch screen is either drilled right into the carbon fiber or not.
Now that carbon fiber is 5" thick. A normal human person with most hand tools can't really remove or break that. But the ocean will still potentially warp and crack and bend those fibers as the submersible is subjected to changing pressures. I also want to double check on the epoxy matrix (you know, like epoxy resin used in gluing or filling in things, or for some really detailed mini figures), and how well it handles water. It’s a polymer - polymers love sucking in moisture, and that weakens their strength, degrading the polymer structure that we need it to strictly stick to.
I DIDN'T HEAR NO BELL, I'M STILL GOING
Safety concerns on this were ignored, as the New Republic found a lawsuit filed against it by a previous employee. https://newrepublic.com/post/173802/missing-titanic-sub-faced-lawsuit-depths-safely-travel-oceangate In this, the employee Lochridge cites that there wasn’t appropriate testing for wear and tear on the hull, such as porousness and absorption with the glue. Testing a five inch thick hull is difficult, and the nature of the submarine demands that testing is non-destructive. This means they can’t crack the expensive piece of thick sub in half to see if it’s working. Destructive testing can be done on cheaper things, like an item of mass manufacture to see what tensile or compressive strength in Pascals it will break at. As well as this, immediately after in 2018, 38 submarine experts signed a petition to Stockton Rush, warning that this submarine was not safe and not appropriately tested and approved. He resisted with legal action.
It’s been ages, but the primary reason this raised my hackles was my limited understanding growing up US Navy with submariners. Checking back on memory and literally asking previous submarine workers, they had a RIGOROUS SUBSAFE program. Time and time again, submarine deployments would be delayed the moment they found anything wrong with the vessel, and they would stop to repair it. Within the Navy itself from aircraft carriers and the planes on there, if even ONE worker dies on there, the captain or Chief of Staff or whoever’s at the top of pecking order gets in deep shit. Unlike the Star Trek remake movies, you do not get to keep the ship if you break the ship that severely. As such, this is about where I transition into how it got broken.
Cited in Legal Eagle’s video and other sources, in 2018, the Titan submersible got hit by lightning. Fortunately, it wasn’t a direct hit to the hull, but it did fry the electronics badly. The parts sourced for it were somewhat haphazard, rushing to fit them again. As previously stated, the submersible had also undergone voyages down - but never appropriately to the 4,000 m it claimed to.
While there were seven means of dropping ballast listed, they relied on the people inside Actually doing them. This means they need to both recognize that something is going on, and cooperate. Tourists, and especially rich tourists for whom a million is a cup of coffee, are notoriously not great at teamwork with strangers, not to mention the panic of life or death with odds stacked against them. Again, while there’s not quite an official ‘submarine worker certification’, I would argue that staying that long at that depth would count as work in a confined space, which in itself requires a certification. While they are not researching, per se, they would potentially have to act.
Normally, stuff like this whole thing would be investigated. Many people bring up that because it’s international waters, it’s hard to get proper restrictions on them. This isn’t QUITE true, because there exists the Safety of Life at Sea convention (SOLAS), a set of rules invented right after the Titanic disaster. We’ll get to more on the Titanic right at the end, but rules for safety for all vessels do exist. The sections of guidelines on submersibles isn’t quite as thorough as others, but my hope is that it does get many more thorough changes with this. Either way, they wouldn’t have been checked in the Titan disaster; Stockton’s crew, rather than deploying the submersible from shore for a dock of its respective nation to inspect it, dropped the sub from their own boat. This is also very much why there was such a delay on informing Coast Guard once they lost contact. They immediately would look very, very guilty, and that they did.
Finally, I want to close with a statement: I do not want the Titan compared to the Titanic. It makes for an eye-catching, ironic tagline, but the comparison is weak. The Titanic disaster was a tragedy, and the compartmentalization to cut off flooding was legitimately a fantastic invention for the time. It simply happened to have all of those compartments shredded open. She was an impressive feat, but nowhere near as much a beacon of hubris as the Titan and Stockton Rush’s reckless disregard for safety. The Titanic ought to still be treated as a gravesite, and the realization of the SOLAS convention is something I am very thankful exists now, and that I hope grows in light of this implosion. While, yes, it did not have enough lifeboats to carry out all passengers, this was something that most *all* ships did at the time. Lifeboats were not to keep people alive for a long amount of time, they were to get a few people out to a ship who could hopefully be nearby, and immediately rescue them. Yes, this sounds ineffective in the days we have now of radio and satellite signaling, but we’re still floundering now in ways we don’t know yet. Compared to disasters like the sinking of the S.S. Arctic, the fact that people respected the women and children first rule in this case is commendable, and there are still many stories from the engineers who worked to do what they can in crisis, to the last orchestra. It’s very easy to go on and on about the Titanic, but I’d like to first again thank Lawyer for correcting me on this, and that they have delved way way way more into the Titanic’s history than I. Go hit them up for questions. Anyways, final sign off. Don’t fuck with the ocean. Don’t stop exploring it, please. She’s terrifying but I love her. But you don’t get to play flimsy games with other people’s lives.
Also thanking @wearelibrarian for hitting me with other sources. I have been fantastically annoying to folks about this incident living in my head, but Librarian and the other folks in the Collective server have been more than patient with me. I'll check back on other sources circulated through that but https://www.insider.com/titan-sub-passengers-mission-specialists-oceangate-avoid-legal-jeopardy-2023-7 And a good ol' tumblr thread https://www.tumblr.com/silversouledcat/720746922988699648 I hate that this took me a month, but oh well, g'night. AMA later.
Titan: Don't Fuck With the Ocean
So this has been delayed, and everyone and their mother has already commented on this. We’re well past the virality mark on this topic. But whatever, I want to crack in and get this thing wrapped up anyways. For context, I study mechanical and manufacturing engineering. I’ve grown up around submarines with my dad being an engineer on US Navy subs, and I was able to ask him about this. I’ve also got a diving cert and enough experience living coastal to at least get me a knowledgeable respect for the ocean. Being 60 ft under should instill that, at least.
First of all, this is one of my favorite sources on this. Shoutout to @we-are-lawyer for recommending me this channel. This group, Sub Brief, is a bunch of submarine vets who essentially talk on what they want. This man brought up many points that I didn’t even think of, and he has thorough research. Moreover, he speaks from a place of kindness - in this first video, he essentially confirms what was on my mind at the time: with the time limit left and the circumstances, the victims were practically already dead. He intended this final message as a wish of hoping this would bring the grieving families some closure, which I highly respect. https://youtu.be/4dka29FSZac
The points brought up in the video are what he has mostly sourced from the Oceangate website itself, and are the following
1. The team is primarily fresh college graduates and interns. While recruiting the young folk is a great thing (I still count as young folk and I like getting money for job), there was no submarine expert on the team. While they have sources in aviation and aerospace engineering, which do overlap with submersible technology and other undersea endeavors, the ocean is still a different beast. Submarine experts will have had to deal with multiple issues rise up on them that a layperson wouldn’t even think of- if I’m lucky enough, this piece will get addressed by one who thinks of something I haven’t thought of, and I get to learn a new thing. I also worry because young folk are some of the most exploitable classes. We’re desperate and need money to live, odds are stacked against us, college debt, we don’t know every single way yet we can be exploited, there’s an age and experience dynamic, previous jobs for part time like fast food and retail could have set an exploitative standard of expectations, and more. From the tone from Stockton Rush, it’s very possible they could have experienced some of the dangers of ‘startup culture’.
4. There is only one port through the hatch, sealed with seventeen bolts, and it can only be opened from the outside. This would not help them underwater, since it would be actually physically impossible with the pressure differences to open even a handcranked hatch. People have died in sinking cars in only six feet of water from being unable to open the doors at that depth. To put this into colloquial terms, you know how a plastic container of water for a workstation watercooler is difficult to lift? How you would have to work pretty hard to open a door with it in the way? Or picture even a door you would have to lift upwards rather than slide against the floor? Now imagine that with at least fifty of those. Circling back, the main place this would be an issue is if they miraculously managed to lower their ballast and surface independently. Once they reach the top of the water, they wouldn’t be able to get their hatch open to get air in, making it sadly possible in a niche situation for them to suffocate while seeing sunlight. Moreover, apparently I have to add something else - it wasn’t seventeen, but eighteen. Revisiting the interview with Pogue, there was something also telling. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/titanic-submersible-interview-transcript-with-oceangate-ceo-stockton-rush/ An eighteenth bolt was put “way up high”, a touch more out of view, but apparently…. They don’t bother with it. Time to project, but if that’s between me and imminent implosion faster than I can think of a good curse in time, I want all eighteen.
The reason the acrylic spiked my concern for a half-moment is essentially Stockton Rush opening his big mouth on it. Now I’d like to bring up LegalEagle (Devin Stone’s) video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJQPthD9rx8, which also graciously introduced me to new aspects. I try to avoid 100% ‘stanning’ creators or 100% trusting them immediately, but so far Legal’s methods are solid and trustworthy, conducted with very cordial professionalism, and even seems to have a very respectably positive relationship with his workforce. (Another sources is Awkward Anthems, even upon leaving the team to pursue her video editing dreams in her own way, citing that workplace as the best she ever had https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NvgNHo7CzI ) . Anyways, Legal’s video gets to more that I will try to cite in a coherent fashion, but it brings up Stockton’s quote in the acrylic that it will “fails optically long before it fails structurally”. Essentially, it’ll crack before it’ll break, and the interior crew will see that. A terrifying thing for a crew of tourists, notoriously ~very stellar at managing life threatening situations~ to see without essentially panicking or getting in the way of emergency safety methods, but also THAT MEANS NOTHING IF YOU HAVE NO PROPER WAY OF MANAGING ASCENSION CAREFULLY. Again, the submersible has to ascend slowly enough without causing bends (nitrogen poisoning). In my years of diving, that one *terrifies* me. Sure, you may see it show signs of breaking (if you’re actively paying attention, of course), but do you have the procedure trained and drilled into you for what to do? Are the proper tools giving you self sustainability available to you?
Carbon Fiber Materials Physicist https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJCCJ3tF/ Shoutout to @wearebeguiler for finding this one and sending it my way. What the physicist refers to refers to is the following: Carbon fiber has its use in aerospace and in cars. Very cool. That's fine. However, it hasn't been tested enough for submersibles. It also doesn't have as good of a compressive strength, meaning its ability to withstand getting squished and not fracturing (vs tensile strength, the ability to get pulled and not break). When the ocean is the environment of multiple atmospheres of pressure on your vessel, compressive strength should be a high priority.
So the carbon fiber filament was wound like in this vid https://youtu.be/Vi4J1LDS504
Back and forth, very much like a spool of thread. That's not to say carbon fiber isn't 100% bad in the ocean - there's some dive tanks with carbon fiber cited in this article https://www.engineering.com/story/potential-structural-reasons-for-the-titan-submersible-failure
While there's a metal tube used as the frame that the carbon fiber is woven around, I don't know if this is actually kept in the submersible or removed after - so that touch screen is either drilled right into the carbon fiber or not.
Now that carbon fiber is 5" thick. A normal human person with most hand tools can't really remove or break that. But the ocean will still potentially warp and crack and bend those fibers as the submersible is subjected to changing pressures. I also want to double check on the epoxy matrix (you know, like epoxy resin used in gluing or filling in things, or for some really detailed mini figures), and how well it handles water. It’s a polymer - polymers love sucking in moisture, and that weakens their strength, degrading the polymer structure that we need it to strictly stick to.
I DIDN'T HEAR NO BELL, I'M STILL GOING
Safety concerns on this were ignored, as the New Republic found a lawsuit filed against it by a previous employee. https://newrepublic.com/post/173802/missing-titanic-sub-faced-lawsuit-depths-safely-travel-oceangate In this, the employee Lochridge cites that there wasn’t appropriate testing for wear and tear on the hull, such as porousness and absorption with the glue. Testing a five inch thick hull is difficult, and the nature of the submarine demands that testing is non-destructive. This means they can’t crack the expensive piece of thick sub in half to see if it’s working. Destructive testing can be done on cheaper things, like an item of mass manufacture to see what tensile or compressive strength in Pascals it will break at. As well as this, immediately after in 2018, 38 submarine experts signed a petition to Stockton Rush, warning that this submarine was not safe and not appropriately tested and approved. He resisted with legal action.
It’s been ages, but the primary reason this raised my hackles was my limited understanding growing up US Navy with submariners. Checking back on memory and literally asking previous submarine workers, they had a RIGOROUS SUBSAFE program. Time and time again, submarine deployments would be delayed the moment they found anything wrong with the vessel, and they would stop to repair it. Within the Navy itself from aircraft carriers and the planes on there, if even ONE worker dies on there, the captain or Chief of Staff or whoever’s at the top of pecking order gets in deep shit. Unlike the Star Trek remake movies, you do not get to keep the ship if you break the ship that severely. As such, this is about where I transition into how it got broken.
Cited in Legal Eagle’s video and other sources, in 2018, the Titan submersible got hit by lightning. Fortunately, it wasn’t a direct hit to the hull, but it did fry the electronics badly. The parts sourced for it were somewhat haphazard, rushing to fit them again. As previously stated, the submersible had also undergone voyages down - but never appropriately to the 4,000 m it claimed to.
While there were seven means of dropping ballast listed, they relied on the people inside Actually doing them. This means they need to both recognize that something is going on, and cooperate. Tourists, and especially rich tourists for whom a million is a cup of coffee, are notoriously not great at teamwork with strangers, not to mention the panic of life or death with odds stacked against them. Again, while there’s not quite an official ‘submarine worker certification’, I would argue that staying that long at that depth would count as work in a confined space, which in itself requires a certification. While they are not researching, per se, they would potentially have to act.
Normally, stuff like this whole thing would be investigated. Many people bring up that because it’s international waters, it’s hard to get proper restrictions on them. This isn’t QUITE true, because there exists the Safety of Life at Sea convention (SOLAS), a set of rules invented right after the Titanic disaster. We’ll get to more on the Titanic right at the end, but rules for safety for all vessels do exist. The sections of guidelines on submersibles isn’t quite as thorough as others, but my hope is that it does get many more thorough changes with this. Either way, they wouldn’t have been checked in the Titan disaster; Stockton’s crew, rather than deploying the submersible from shore for a dock of its respective nation to inspect it, dropped the sub from their own boat. This is also very much why there was such a delay on informing Coast Guard once they lost contact. They immediately would look very, very guilty, and that they did.
Finally, I want to close with a statement: I do not want the Titan compared to the Titanic. It makes for an eye-catching, ironic tagline, but the comparison is weak. The Titanic disaster was a tragedy, and the compartmentalization to cut off flooding was legitimately a fantastic invention for the time. It simply happened to have all of those compartments shredded open. She was an impressive feat, but nowhere near as much a beacon of hubris as the Titan and Stockton Rush’s reckless disregard for safety. The Titanic ought to still be treated as a gravesite, and the realization of the SOLAS convention is something I am very thankful exists now, and that I hope grows in light of this implosion. While, yes, it did not have enough lifeboats to carry out all passengers, this was something that most *all* ships did at the time. Lifeboats were not to keep people alive for a long amount of time, they were to get a few people out to a ship who could hopefully be nearby, and immediately rescue them. Yes, this sounds ineffective in the days we have now of radio and satellite signaling, but we’re still floundering now in ways we don’t know yet. Compared to disasters like the sinking of the S.S. Arctic, the fact that people respected the women and children first rule in this case is commendable, and there are still many stories from the engineers who worked to do what they can in crisis, to the last orchestra. It’s very easy to go on and on about the Titanic, but I’d like to first again thank Lawyer for correcting me on this, and that they have delved way way way more into the Titanic’s history than I. Go hit them up for questions. Anyways, final sign off. Don’t fuck with the ocean. Don’t stop exploring it, please. She’s terrifying but I love her. But you don’t get to play flimsy games with other people’s lives.
Also thanking @wearelibrarian for hitting me with other sources. I have been fantastically annoying to folks about this incident living in my head, but Librarian and the other folks in the Collective server have been more than patient with me. I'll check back on other sources circulated through that but https://www.insider.com/titan-sub-passengers-mission-specialists-oceangate-avoid-legal-jeopardy-2023-7 And a good ol' tumblr thread https://www.tumblr.com/silversouledcat/720746922988699648 I hate that this took me a month, but oh well, g'night. AMA later.