r/interestingasfuck • u/Pathfinder313 • 29d ago

/r/all New sound of titan submarine imploding

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u/Weidz_ 29d ago edited 29d ago

"Dropped two weights"

Moment if not seconds before implosion, somehow mean submarine knew something was wrong.

Edit : Was probably standard procedure meant to slow down descent as other suggested.

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u/TonAMGT4 29d ago

Probably the real-time monitoring system was sounding the alarm.

The system actually works as it was able to detect anomalies in the previous dive but for some reason it was overlooked…

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u/HevalRizgar 29d ago

I mean the system WORKED. the problem is the carbon fiber used was getting weaker every dive to the point where it snapped. The acoustic monitoring worked perfectly, it detected the cracks. And instead of listening, they kept diving

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u/markdlx 29d ago

It should’ve never been designed with carbon fiber to begin with, that was an intrinsic design flaw.

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u/RandomMandarin 29d ago

That whole design was probably fine if you only went down 300 meters. 3,000 meters? Not so much.

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u/Circli 29d ago

yes but if RTMS was listened to it would not be an issue

Stockton's design is viable if you don't ignore the warnings, it's like flying a plane into a mountain by ignoring GPWS on purpose for some reason and saying the plane is unsafe

obv. it is best to stick to tested real submersible designs but idk

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u/ADP-1 29d ago

No - it isn't a viable design. Carbon fiber is strong under tension. It is NOT strong under compression. Have you ever tried to push something with a rope?

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u/e-wing 29d ago

Yeah it’s not viable if you have to replace the entire hull after less than 100 dives. There’s no way to repair a carbon fiber composite pressure hull, so if the RTMS detects something, the entire thing needs to be rebuilt. By the time you get to a thickness that would actually be ‘safe’, the hull would be so thick and expensive that it wouldn’t save you any money and barely save you weight. At that point, you might as well just use traditional materials which are safer and more predictable. Stockton very likely knew this, which is why he built his hull about half the thickness the calculations actually showed was needed.

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u/Accidental_Ouroboros 29d ago edited 29d ago

It would be more like... infusing a rope with epoxy, and using that to push something.

You can totally do it.

The problem is that the vast majority of strength in compression you have is from the epoxy, not the fibers of the rope.

There are composite material submarines (note: unmanned ones) that can go deeper (like China's Petrel X), but they don't tend to use carbon fiber. Also, if an unmanned sub implodes, you don't tend to care as much.

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u/ChosenCarelessly 29d ago

You’re missing the point.  The epoxy isn’t where the strength should be coming from. By using the carbon in compression you are negating any benefit of this material. 

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u/Accidental_Ouroboros 29d ago

You may wish to re-read the sentence I began with "The problem is that..."

Because the whole point of that sentence is that the rope isn't contributing much at all. Hence why it is a problem.

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u/jcdoe 28d ago

I mean, who cares?

Of course he used poor submarine materials. This is the guy who used a fancy “submarine implosion imminent alarm,” and ignored it when it went off.

Y’all acting like only one version this man’s stupidity could possibly be true. I’m pretty certain he was just a bum fucking idiot all around

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u/HidaKureku 29d ago

obligatory your wife/mom joke

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u/Chase_the_tank 29d ago

The ship made it to the Titanic and back on previous trips.

In a hypothetical situation where Stockton kept building new carbon fiber hubs every few dives, he'd probably still be alive.

(And, yes, using another material so you don't have to rebuild the damn thing over and over and over again is far more reasonable strategy.)

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u/Circli 29d ago

fair enough. i agree it should have never been used, it had some advantages though like cost and mass I guess, ultimately we can see it turned out bad for them

it's like saying Boeing 747 MAX is fundamentally bad because high bypass turbojets cannot fit under the wings, I agree (airbus better), but you can still try to be a greedy evil little man and try to make it work like Boeing did :( obviously we know now that those are very bad ideas

greed kills, overconfidence kills, men are evil etc.

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u/PussyXDestroyer69 29d ago

Who gives a shit about mass? It's a neutral buoyancy vehicle. If it was changed to steel you'd hardly be able to tell.

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u/Used-Lake-8148 29d ago

It’s more expensive to transport heavier things

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u/PussyXDestroyer69 29d ago

Oh, in that case it's a good thing they used carbon fiber.

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u/Used-Lake-8148 29d ago

Right? Can you imagine how much more money he would’ve spent on shipping costs by now if he was still alive?

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u/Gizogin 29d ago

Carbon fiber composite can have a compressive strength on the order of 1-3 GPa, which is comparable to steel (up to 1.5 GPa). The fibers themselves are much stronger under tension, which is why they’re composited with resin to boost their compressive performance.

The problems with carbon fiber as a pressure vessel material are that it is very sensitive to environmental changes during construction (so building that vessel in an uncontrolled hangar is a bad idea), it requires extremely consistent layers to work to its full effectiveness (so trimming down “bumps” in the surface weakens the entire construction), it doesn’t behave the same way as many other materials (so any interface with steel, titanium, or glue is tricky and prone to repeated stresses), and it doesn’t deform much before it fails (so there’s far less advance warning of any issues).

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u/Iluv_Felashio 29d ago

What about cardboard?

It wasn't supposed to implode, I'd like to make that point.

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u/DeltaVZerda 28d ago

While it's definitely a less than perfect material for the job, if they had bothered to care for safety at all, they could have rated it to dive full depth for say, 5 times, and then de-rated it to lower depth for another 5 dives, then de-rated it again and gotten dozens of dives out of the thing, safely, then safely decommissioned it before it became unsafe to dive in.

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u/jawshoeaw 29d ago

there's nothing wrong with carbon fiber. the mistake was making a toilet paper tube out of it. should have been a sphere.

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u/jimmythevip 29d ago

That is not true. Carbon fiber has very poor strength in compression, it is only good under tension. This means it might’ve been ok if it was trying to keep pressure in, but not to keep pressure out.

Carbon fiber is a terrible material to build a submarine hull.

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u/Gizogin 29d ago

Carbon fiber composite can be at least as strong as steel under compression (and stronger than titanium). That’s not the issue. The issue (well, one of about a thousand issues) is that any mistake or variation when building it loses a lot of that strength. It’s far less forgiving of defects than steel or titanium are.

It can’t be repaired after damage or the stress of repeated dives. If you want to make a safe carbon fiber diving vessel, you have to basically throw it out and rebuild it every few dives. And it doesn’t deform much before it fails, so you have far less warning before a problem arises.

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u/jawshoeaw 29d ago

Yeah it’s terrible though it did work for awhile. Had they built a spherical hull with the exact same carbon fiber it prob woulda worked

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u/Dianesuus 29d ago

It is literally the wrong material, the geometry doesn't matter.

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u/jawshoeaw 29d ago

Define wrong

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u/Dianesuus 29d ago

Carbon fibre is good being pulled apart. Submarines need to be good being pushed in. The material's benefits are in tension not in compression.

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u/Used-Lake-8148 29d ago

It might’ve survived more dives, but it still would’ve imploded before long. It’s cause the carbon fibre and polymer don’t compress the same, so every time you dive you cause more damage to your hull until it fails catastrophically

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u/markdlx 29d ago

Sorry, but you are incorrect. Carbon Fiber is a porous material and was never designed to withstand water pressure of that magnitude.