Just as a fun fact, it’s actually quite common for industrial machinery and the like to be controlled with a gaming controller. Like, a hundred things wrong with the submarine trip - but the PlayStation controller is genuinely one of the more legitimate aspects.
They’re simply made well, easy to use, and typically extremely durable and long lasting.
It is also sort of like the WWII US grenade being modeled on a baseball because every young American knew how to throw a ball.
Everyone has used gaming controllers, so it is a familiar control system.
that controller was the jankiest shit on clearance at kmart.
Yeah, they are good controllers.
But it shouldn’t have been the wireless one.
And it shouldn’t have been the only controls on board.
I bet all those industrial machines with controllers also have a physical emergency button build in.
I mean… most industrial machines have a stop button present on them (though not on the controller). I’m not sure that the sub having a “stop imploding” button on the inside of the hull would have done much good though
Sure…where the failure of the device does not lead to inevitable death.
In a situation where my life is 100% dependent on a device, said device must have gone through appropriate design and testing procedures.
I mean. Yeah. It does. The controller didn’t fail during the submarines trip lol. It was perfectly fine the whole time.
Trying to over engineer a specific entirely new device when incredibly developed options already exist is kind of an engineering mindset failure that would only lead to more problems.
Well you’re clearly better informed about the status of the sub than i, but I’m just saying it’s unusual for a life support device to be something not designed for such a purpose.
The controller is not a life support device. It’s an input device. It is designed with the express purpose as being an input device.
Again, any one million dollar “special submarine input device” they could have manufactured would be less tested and more prone to failure than a simple controller already subject to decades of research and both hands on and automated testing.
I’m not trying to be mean to you and I hope you don’t take it as such, it’s just really standard practice.
In this context it absolutely is a life support device - if it fails, the occupants are dead.
Do you have any other examples of a time where such a device is used in such circumstances?
The best anology I can think of is planes, and none of them are using entertainment input devices AFAIK?
As a scuba diver I have a buoyancy control device, which I am totally reliant on for life and thus I take 2. Did they even take spares with them? If they did then i can see this being a legit way of being safe.
Not taking it as being mean - its an interesting conversation, hopefully you feel the same.
pushes up glasses
ackshually, it was a Logitech F710 controller
yes this is actually a pivotally important detail
the idiots who made this sub were so fucking cheap, useless, and incompetent that they even opted for what amounts to the ‘great value brand’ of FUCKING INPUT DEVICES.
The reviews on Amazon are a hoot
Some good customer Q&As too
Don’t forget, it’s built out of materials which are more suitable for making airplanes than submarines, and is bound by no safety regulations
and the carbon fiber hull was cheap because it’s shelf life had expired.
i think it was not the whole hull but one of the materials, the hull was made of that had expired. well, carbon fibre has its strenght when pulled, but when pushing it bends. but if one uses resin on the fibre, then it gets some strenght when pushed too. similar to steel and concrete, while steel can really be pulled a lot, concrete is way better when pushed than steel. steel is quite stable when pushed too, but thats not its main strength. i think the resin was what really held the pressure in the sub, not the carbon fibre, but with this i only have that dangerous type of half-knowledge i’ld have to bring to expert level before doing something stupid (like depending on that to be fully true without really knowing).
in general things often last longer than their expected “minimum” to be used without concern. but in practice one would have to test for damage or if its worn out (like its done with airplane parts at fixed intervals) even without using materials of bad quality. but that was AFAIK what oceangate’s management decided to explicitly NOT check the sub for - despite internal demands to do so.
i would not say its not possible to build a secure pressure hull out of carbon fibre, or out of carbon fibre of not the best quality, or a hull of a different shape than a sphere, or a hull out of different materials with different bending behaviors under pressure, or when such components are “glued” together on the edges that do the different bending, but ALL of this at the same time and without even checking at least after a new maximum depth was reached? not to mention crackling sounds after which heared one would want to double check. Even the wright brothers seemed more cautious to me.
today one would at least get some wear level statistics with unmanned vehicles in a slightly deeper than intended depth to have security margins and afterwards throughout checks for the parts that are important, single points of failures or are one of the proudly new developed.
Phew, at least it’s not a Logitech controller
I, for one, welcome the bourgeoisie crushing machine.
Aww, I was really excited because I thought it was gonna turn into the intro text from Iron Lung.
No, just memeing about Oceangate again
I gotcha
Perfect.
In December 2023, Szymanski faced criticism online for increasing the price of the game by two dollars
???
Yeah? And? If a dev wants to increase the cost of their game, they can do that. It’s a single dev, not a AAA studio. Don’t like it? Don’t buy it. Iirc he also released an update that added a bunch of lore stuff.
It still befuddles me, especially since it’s a specific format for a horror story: A bunch of rich people pay through the nose for a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and of course it kills them (though the final girl might escape). The Menu was a recent example. Maybe to get Stockton Rushed should now mean to buy a super expensive experience or trip or thing that kills you.
A drug named Stockton Rush would be super expensive, and the most amazing trip ever, and fatally toxic.
So if you’re hiring someone to chart out your trip to Everest or the Titanic or the moon or something, it’s good to get your legal team to do some due diligence and make sure the company knows what its doing. (For a deeper dive, check out Behind the Bastards’ two-parter on Stockton Rush. All the warning signs were there he was doing mad science and not listening to his deep-sea experts.
Also, the door that only can be opened from the outside was total early foreshadowing.
Logitech
I thought it was XBox?
