- #141
russ_watters
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I don't see that anyone suggested banning it (at least before you brought it up -- I didn't read through all the rest of the posts). But no, I wouldn't ban either. Nor would I allow a free-for-all if possible. The fact it happened international waters and the perpetrator died in it may make this particular incident impossible to prosecute, but it sure looks like murder to me. And there's no jurisdictional issue for criticism.Vanadium 50 said:And if you ban this, do you also ban space tourism?
The lack of safety factor is the eye-popping one to me. Having an appropriate safety factor (which is generally higher for larger risks/life safety) is a pretty basic engineering principle. Heck, I design air conditioning systems with safety factors and the main risk there is someone might be a touch warm for a couple of hours on the hottest day every couple of years (also, money). Life safety engineering scares the hell out of me as it is.Which one did you have in mind?
More specific and not necessarily inviolable: spheres are stronger than cylinders.
Similar: you can't push a rope (that might be Navy as much as engineering....).
Related but bigger than just engineering: if everyone else does something successfully one way, you should consider why and be careful doing it another way. This applies to both being cylindrical and using carbon fiber.
This operation had a tech-bro hubris feel to it to me. Tech-bros don't care about things going badly because there's no personal risk. It's just other peoples' money, and even the ones who eventually go to jail don't seem to see it coming (nor did this one see death coming).
Several things I take issue with here:I don't believe diving to the Titanic can be done safely - and I am defining "safely" as a 99% survival rate. There seem to have been about fifty manned dives, and one failure.
- I don't think it's correct to use the claimed outlier in the risk analysis. In other words, it sounds like you are saying that prior to this incident nobody had died visiting the Titanic. That sample size is small though.
- Because of #1 I don't believe the occupants of the sub expected that they were undertaking about the riskiest adventure trip there is. 99% survival rate is on par with attempting Mt Everest or space travel. Not Blue Origin either -- actual space travel.
- Nor do I think visiting the Titanic inherently is as risky. Pressure is what I'd call a "passive" risk. It's always there and it's big, but it never changes. It's always exactly the same. And because of that, it's relatively simple/straightforward; once you've engineered for it, there's not much else to do. Space travel on the other hand involves massive complexity. Everest involves massive uncertainty/variability.
- Stories are coming out of the woodwork now about people in the know who raised alarms. This particular outfit was known to be much, much more dangerous than the baseline risk.
That's not how it works. Safety factor is an exact percentage of a design rating, not a failure/accident probability. They vary based on things like risk and predictability:Now, if you want to argue it should be safER, OK, how much safer? Factor of 2? Factor of 10? And how do you verify this number?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety
I can't say if it should be 25% or 100% here, but note that the decision on the value includes mitigation; lower safety factors require more testing, quality control, etc. to provide "safety" in a tighter design tolerance. The point is: if it isn't a cookie-cutter scenario they require a detailed risk analysis to establish the value. And the value is never zero because that basically guarantees failure.
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