3 ms·

There are a number of reasons why it might have failed, fatigue, deviation from process/protocol but pressure vessels are well understood and not the problem he

• vkou 3y ago
  Are carbon-fiber pressure vessels well understood? I get that there's a lot of armchair quarterbacking from internet material experts here, but this does seem to be an outlier with this particular submarine.
  • aflag 3y ago
    I think their behaviour under pressure is well understood. Not a popular choice for subs, though.
  • PepperdineG 3y ago
    The issue seems to be hull integrity, namely being able to inspect the hull before it's failing in order to detect issues without risking anyone's life. The only thing they could do with a carbon fiber hill is use an acoustic hull monitoring that only told you that the hull was in the process of failing - so potentially getting no real warning at all. It does you no good finding out your hull is going to implode in 10 seconds when it will take you an hour to get to safety. This is what the ex-OG employee got fired over because he made a stink about how the carbon fiber hull was unsafe for this reason.
  • shadowgovt 3y ago
    They're well-understood to not be what you want to build a high-pressure submarine out of. They can take the pressure. But they're incredibly expensive to check for defects, and the result of a defect is "sub-second catastrophic failure" instead of any warning of imminent structural degradation.
• slowmovintarget 3y ago
  The main cause for the failure seems to be "sheer f-ing hubris," but those could certainly be contributing factors.