But (and this is my electronics engineer mind still trying to wrap my head around this) - when you pressurize a vessel made from composites, the tensile strengt

But (and this is my electronics engineer mind still trying to wrap my head around this) - when you pressurize a vessel made from composites, the tensile strength helps keep it all together, which is trivially intuitive. When the same vessel sees an exterior pressure, wouldn't basically the full force have to be borne by the epoxy, making, say, knitting yarn as effective a material for holding the thing together as carbon fiber? (I assume there's some flaw in the above reasoning...) As for the observed absolutism, I mostly agree - my one nitpick would be that from what I've seen, it is a much more challenging material to monitor, the vessels tend to fail catastrophically rather than gracefully, and, well, let's just say that there were a couple of seemingly bold design choices being made by the OceanGate team, choices which weren't validated through sufficient testing afterwards. That would be my main criticism, based solely on news reports: That OceanGate appeared to think 'move fast and break things' was an appropriate design philosophy when the stakes were people's lives. A simple (as such things go...) action like doing numerous unmanned test cycles on a Titan sub to rated depth would have shown what challenges were still unsolved. Instead they basically did the test cycles on manned dives. That was, uh, bolder still.