That’s actually horrifying, to think they’re desperately banging and hoping someone hears them.
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A depressingly plausible scenario.
Something tells me that they didn’t bother to strip down the thing to its bare bones and run checks for structural integrity after every dive. Or even every now and then.
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It’s a complicated thing. His channel is twelve or so years old now, and the first 8+ years he did well for the basic reasons that it’s an incredibly interesting and ambitious project. That’s why I started watching. However, the further along the boat got, the more and more clear it became that this guy has no idea what he’s doing. Furthermore, the more and more belligerent he got on and off camera with people trying to give him expert advice. Like there’s a particularly painful video where a hydraulics engineer visits, and with the absolutely best intentions tries to very gently explain to the guy in the nicest possible way that his hydraulic system is a total shitshow and will cause him nothing but trouble. It is designed completely wrong in some fundamental ways. The boat guy rips him a new one on camera for his trouble, and guess what- he’s had nothing but massive problems with the hydraulic system ever since.
The final straw for most was when he staged (yes staged) an acetylene explosion that sent him to the hospital with a serious brain injury. He got actors to play doctors and generated fake x-rays. He got his girlfriend to do a fake “we have terrible news about [boat guy]” video. This was all spread over several videos. The GoFundMe for medical bills was imminent. Eventually it came out that it was fake and he claimed it was a fun joke and not the sociopathic PR stunt it appeared to be. He lost something like 100k subscribers that week. Almost half his audience that he’d spent several years building.
The whole thing is unbelievable and now most people are watching as a guilty pleasure schadenfreude thing, waiting for it to finally sink (which it very nearly has more than once).
As for traffic generation, his channel has been slowly dying ever since the prank, which itself was an accelerant on his audience loss from people realizing how clueless and arrogant he is. It’s a bit encouraging, honestly. The lowest common denominator in entertainment doesn’t always win.
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Are there any “real” submarines that could be dispatched to cable the submersible? Is that only a fantasy that it could be done? I am not experienced in military matters. 
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That’s… remarkable. Not in any kind of good way.
Thanks - I’ll definitely steer clear.
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Few…
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My understanding is that there’s no military submarining at those depths. The USS Dolphin is generally credited as the deepest-diving submarine; and it went down to just shy of a kilometer and was more of a research thing than a service model, with most of those being good for 500m or less; since that’s enough to make detection a real hassle without making a pressure vessel large enough for an entire submarine crew(especially a long-duration nuclear submarine crew) impractically difficult to build.
There is more military interest in deep recovery; and apparently the “Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System” has been brought in; which has done recoveries at 19,000 feet in the past with the assistance of similarly deep-diving ROVs.
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The Losharik is confirmed to have a capability of at least 2000m.
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Yeah, a fat lot of help they’d give the West right now.
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Yeah. Although techbros and billionaires seem to be fans of them more often than not.
I don’t think it’s operational anyway. I don’t think I’d ever trust a pressure hull again after a fire inside. My point was just that the US isn’t the world.
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No longer available (scrapped). Posted for the sake of completeness, and to illustrate how insanely complicated deep sea salvage can be.
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Banging at regular intervals is what the passengers are supposed to do in this situation according to a BBC interview.
A submarine search and rescue expert in Australia, Frank Owen, tells the BBC his “confidence went up by an order of magnitude” when he heard reports of banging being detected by floating sound detectors.
“There’s a couple of reasons for that,” he explains. “Firstly, on board this craft is a retired French navy diver. He would know the protocol for trying to alert searching forces… on the hour and the half hour you bang like hell for three minutes.”
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While you are right about carbon fibre itself, carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) like used in that submersible will have some compressive strenght, about 50-60% of tensile strength thanks to the martix binding it. When I was a scientist I sometimes watched experiments of my work colleagues that involved testing compression strength of CFRP, and it was most definitely a thing. Matrix was typically epoxy resin.
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That’s a criminal negligence in my opinion - stress concentration caused by such tiny holes could be disastrous (Stress concentration - Wikipedia). The proper way to do this would be gluing a larger mount using epoxy resin. It’s shocking that they didn’t do it that way.
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Read an interview with Bo Rask, an experienced swedish submarine commander. His analysis is that even if the sub hasn’t imploded they are probably doomed, even if the submarine is located. He also pointed out that there is a reason why deep sea craft usually do not look like this one. But the answer to the last question is very on point
How will this affect submarine tourism?
- It can have major consequences for its future. I hope so. I think the whole thing is frivolous, stupid and associated with huge risks.
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Sounds cool. Links?
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There’s so much weird around this whole thing. Here’s one of the more well-known Simpsons’ writers experiences on the same sub.
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