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They have another ~30 hours of air. The biggest hope is that they are not terribly deep trapped near the surface and can be located in that time.
by HWR_14 3y ago
They have another ~30 hours of air.
The biggest hope is that they are not terribly deep trapped near the surface and can be located in that time.
- p-e-w 3y agoHow could they be trapped "near" the surface? That would require the sub to maintain buoyancy precisely, which seems unlikely without active systems.
- HWR_14 3y agoAs I understand it, the vessel is not able to surface on its own. At its most buoyant, a small amount of the sub will emerge from the water, and that weight will push it back down, so the vast majority of the sub is underwater. This bobbing, which depending on waves can have a small amount or none of the sub above water at any time, would make them hard to detect but easy to retrieve if they were located.
- ehnto 3y agoImagine being so close yet still not able to escape the vessel. I don't know what is standard for subs, but it strikes me as particularly terrifying that they have no way to open it from the inside.
- HWR_14 3y agoI think, but based on nothing but news stories about this incident, that's common for very deep sea submersibles. It makes sense, the could opt out of a whole bunch of surface ship concerns and they expect to be launched and retrieved. It also helps simplify the design if you don't have to worry about opening hatches from the inside. That adds complexity and can introduce new failure modes.
- gr8flyer1011 3y agoI'm betting that little potty bucket may be filling up...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eternityforest 3y agoI don't see why that would make them hard to detect. As long as you're above the waves a few percent of the time you should have no trouble getting a signal out, and if you have an antenna you could probably get GPS too, plus, there's some pretty powerful dyes you could release periodically, LEDs that could be seen easily if it's just a few meters of water.... Seems like it would have to be criminally bad design without any kind of signalling at all, to be near the surface and not found within hours.
- madaxe_again 3y agoAir is great and all, but hypothermia will get them first.
- iamtedd 3y agoAnd do they have water to drink?
- HWR_14 3y agoThey had 4 days of air When they launched. At $250k, they probably had some drinks on board for a 24 hour trip, and 3 days of no water is considered survivable. So air is most likely the limiting factor, but it's possible they messed up the drink provisions extremely badly.
- slowmovintarget 3y agoCarbon dioxide levels will do them in before lack of oxygen.
- HWR_14 3y agoAssuming they don't have filters onboard, yeah. I thought it was possible to filter out many man-days of CO2 with relatively small filters.
- slowmovintarget 3y agoIn a well-designed submersible that goes through thorough testing and gets a classification and rating... which I gather the CEO took short-cuts on. He's one of the passengers on board.
- rasz 3y agoMuch more if cannibalism set in.
- red-iron-pine 3y agothey'll be out of air or hypothermic long before they get crazy enough to start eating each other or drinking blood