This is the attitude you need to give birth to truly innovative ideas like a Bluetooth controller attached to the desktop PC that controlled his hunk of shit submarine that killed everyone on board.
Bluetooth as the only means of control of a sub that would most definitely kill you if it loses control? The same battle tested Bluetooth that still can't reliably connect to the exact same device despite having done so all the time? The same Bluetooth that disconnects if I were to turn on 2 more Bluetooth devices due to interference?
How about the batteries that are required to power a wireless controller? Everything on a patchwork sub needs to be at least n+2 across failure domains. I wouldn't have gone in that sub even with n+5 and a paycheck TBH.
How much money was he trying to save here? Competitive gamers with a way lower net worth stick to tethered controllers for a reason, low latency and reliable connection.
Furthermore, I can believe a bunch of b/millionaires being duped into paying a non-refundable $250k. But I am struggling with the fact that they saw the abyssal porta potty and the BT controller, and still thought it was wise to enter.
The best case scenario here was an 8 hour trip in a space that's worse than long haul Economy to see Titanic ruins on a TV screen. I really don't get the value proposition here.
The other major issue with the controller is that it is not designed for a marine environment -- the water, salt exposure, and humidity inside the sub. Surely there are off-the-shelf marine controllers that are better suited.
It's simply not fit for the purpose. The ocean floor is an incredibly inhospitable place. This is safety critical. It's like performing surgery in a hospital setting with a pocket knife to cut costs. Though if fate hadn't already killed them by now, I'm sure the cavalier "who wants to drive?" passing the controller around the cabin would have gotten them snagged on the wreckage in due time. (Remember the Russian jet that crashed when the captain turned the controls over to his kids?) I am consumed by this story and how every new detail revealed seems more and more insane.
The Logitech F710 was not a "battle-tested" controller, it's a cheap third party controller of inferior quality. The official Microsoft controllers have serious R&D behind them, but not the Logitech ones.
In gaming, 3rd party accessories are ones nit made by the manufacturer of the game system. The first party is the console manufacturer (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) and the second party is the end user.
Logitech makes some great mice but their game controllers are notoriously poor quality for the price, especially since the first party controllers aren't much more expensive.
Some of the "weird brand" gamepads like 8bitdo are considered better than Logitech or even Nintendo!
He's right on the cheap part though, I had that controller and it will sometimes looks connection, making you spin around as if you kept the joystick in position. I threw that thing away..
The navy uses the standard actually battle tested xbox controller and the logitech one has many 1 star reviews on amazon, enough said.
You can literally search on google and see this in 5 seconds, it's bizarre that it keeps being spouted in some posts, almost makes me a bit suspicious because it's so dumb.
- Cables have a snapping risk in that limited physical space, Bluetooth solves it and there's no risk of EMI 4km underwater anyway.
Cables can easily be made practically 'unsnappable' in this context
Controls could also be mounted directly to a fixed panel, as is the case in most (all?) other submarines
My engineer brain says that moving from 'wired' to 'bluetooth' for a safety-critical connection is pure lunacy. I don't think any objective appraisal could reasonably conclude that this decreased risk or increased safety. Bluetooth is not even close to reliable enough for this application, and neither is any other wireless technology as far as I know
I read somewhere that by reducing the weight of the hull, it eliminated the need for the expensive tooling traditionally needed on the mothership to hoist the vessel in and out of the water. This was key to the business model of his shoestring budget amusement park ride to the bottom of the sea.
I remember seeing a claim that the Bluetooth part was a feature since you could just "pass the controller" inside the cabin but I haven't been able to find a source for it.
As for the carbon fibre:
>OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush says the company had been evaluating the potential of using a carbon fiber composite hull since 2010, primarily because it permits creation of a pressure vessel that is naturally buoyant and, therefore, would enable OceanGate to forgo the use — and the significant expense — of syntactic foam on its exterior. So, for Cyclops 2 OceanGate decided to avoid the metallic hull altogether and began a search for a manufacturer that could help it develop a composite hull.
> I remember seeing a claim that the Bluetooth part was a feature since you could just "pass the controller" inside the cabin but I haven't been able to find a source for it.
Handing the controller around smells like marketing wank, especially when you learn they bolted down the shitter and made the controls remote. Seems like an odd tradeoff. I’d be inclined to use a portable toilet or diapers and firmly attach the controls to the sub near the only window. People can still take turns.
The carbon fiber obviated the need for expensive to produce syntactic foams.
The Bluetooth?
Eh. It was there.
The sad thing is, the carbon fiber hull material may not necessarily be a totally losing proposition if you can make the carbon fiber hull module swappable and recyclable, and testable.
Evidently they got, what? 20ish descents to service depth before it lost integrity?
If you worked from there, and figured out those pesky details, you could make something workable.
In fact, we may even be lauding the man if they'd done the 30 + journeys to service depth unmanned, and used the data collected from scanning/ultrasounding or otherwise probing that hull piece to draw strong, clear, unambiguous bars around "number of trips til new hull needs to be swapped in".
Nobody would fault the guy for doing that, and he may have truly advanced the State of the Art in ways he'd still be alive to enjoy.
Is it possible that you can keep the carbon fiber hull as a solid piece with no penetrations, making it more watertight?
I kind of envision this craft as being a sealed capsule full of humans with all the propulsion equipment and batteries strapped to the outside and controlled wirelessly from the inside. But I haven't seen a full diagram of how Oceangate worked. Like, how did CO2 get scrubbed from the cabin?
The situation is quite often the exact opposite: young engineers often fail to see the big picture and don’t know how to find the adequate architecture or approach to solve a problem in a genuine way, while experienced engineers will have a natural, intuitive approach that works easily.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve looked at a project by some engineer in their 20s, and it is so over-engineered and complicated, entirely lacking in any ability to future proof against onboarding or feature development, so clever they probably are very proud of themselves, but mostly useless.
Less experienced people probably start with a design that looks like it might do what they need.Then they keep tacking on things as they hit limitations. This might be the right approach but an experienced person would know when to cut their losses and start over. A desperate newcomer would double down on adding shit leading to a convoluted complex mess.
