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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33524 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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mostly your weight is virtually unlimited compared to aerospace

Your weight is virtually unlimited, but your density can be an issue. I'm reading that a major reason they went with a carbon fiber section in the hull was that they could maintain significantly more buoyancy that way, whereas if they'd used titanium everywhere they'd have needed to add separate syntactic foam floats too.

Proper real time communication with the mothership

It's supposed to have this, isn't it? The history of "communication was lost, at least briefly, every single time" is another one of those normalization-of-deviance red flags that's come up.

I can't seem to find any details on the communication system, though, other than a debunking of the "Starlink broke!!1!one!" idiots. Cameron had voice contact at the bottom of the Mariana Trench via acoustic modems, so it's not impossible, but what did Oceangate actually choose?

I'm reading that a major reason they went with a carbon fiber section in the hull was that they could maintain significantly more buoyancy that way, whereas if they'd used titanium everywhere they'd have needed to add separate syntactic foam floats too.

Apparently pressure-capable syntactic foam is expensive, but another traditional solution for deep sea exploration is to use gasoline tanks, which are slightly bouyant and not compressible. See the original Trieste, which reached Challenger Deep in 1960, and also managed to surface automatically in the event of electrical failure.

Or maybe they could have used the carbon fiber tanks as floats, and if they shatter, you make sure you have enough excess buoyancy to still surface if one of them goes, because you'll be unlikely to lose more than one at a time.

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