[q_andrew]

Something I noticed in the lawsuit (complaint 5.12) I haven't heard mentioned about this story:

Other than TITAN, no commercial manned submersible has ever suffered an implosion (only early military submarines have done so).

That's a pretty damning statement if true. As a land-dweller, I thought implosion was the main concern when using new submarines.

[jmount]

I think the idea is: implosion is so scary they work really hard to engineer it out (as long as you don't go beyond your max depth).

[actionfromafar]

"The carbon fibre and titanium, there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did." (Found the quote on WikiPedia.)

It seems insane to me. It's easy to be an armchair anything, but I don't understand why you would do such a thing. It's not like a submersible needs to be light weight, either.

[consteval]

I would think, with how advanced computer simulations are, you should be able to tell if something will implode or not. But maybe I'm wrong.

[Ekaros]

My understanding is that most commercial manned submarines don't actually go that deep. As with depth there isn't that many interesting things... And lot less light. So pressures they are dealing are quite reasonable. Which makes implosions pretty unlikely in normal operation. Common scenario is to operate in areas were sea bed is at depth where implosion is impossible.

[sitharus]

It is, so it’s taken really seriously. The hulls are made from material with well characterised gradual failure modes - bending and deforming rather than sudden failure. This means metals with thoroughly inspected welds and joints to ensure no internal voids, and a process of gradually diving deeper to check the hull meets the design requirements.

Using materials that fail plastically and gradually increasing depth trials means the failure mode is hopefully deformation rather than complete failure, and will happen at the highest depth as possible so a quick surfacing can be achieved.

Submarines, along with space, are an area where innovative new methods need a lot of testing before you commit human life to it.

[jemmyw]

If I remember the early reporting correctly, this submarine had plastic deformation on every dive. So it was already failing, they just didn't do anything about it.