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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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Since the story came out people fixated on "lol he used a shitty gaming controller" but really that is one of the least sketchy design choices in the entire rig. Why reinvent the wheel and make a custom set of controls that are realistically another huge expense and potential failure point, when off the shelf solutions exist for that component?
The corners that were cut are the ones involving the viewport/nose adhesion to the ships frame, and the structural integrity of the carbon fiber hull itself. They had test data suggesting it was a bad idea to engage in repeated dives with their design, and an even worse idea to operate at the depths they chose. They decided to ignore that.
From what I can tell the lawsuit (which is against Ocean Gate, not Logitech) is really just calling out the controller as another example of willfully negligent behaviour.
You're certainly correct that the actual cause of the failure was the carbon fibre hull. Just a terrible idea on so many levels. Carbon fibre, by its nature, is good under tension, not compression. It was never going to function well as a pressure vessel underwater.
There were a litany of terrible decisions made by Ocean Gate, such as not tethering the sub, because it was cheaper to launch it from a towed raft, but none of those bad decisions ultimately mattered once that pressure vessel failed. Those people were dead so fast that, to quote Scott Manley, "You go from being biology to being physics."
You can always bring a second controller for redundancy. I would bet money the game controller had zero impact on the failure and I hate all the shade being thrown on this innocent controller.
That game controller has terrible range, zero compatibility with any other device, and randomly adds inputs when the controller is more than 2 feet away from the receiver. It is reasonable to consider if uncontrolled movement contributed to the implosion, or a loss of control at a critical moment preventing return to the surface.
Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly.
In the context of the lawsuit it's definitely a valid thing to bring up, mostly because it helps you tell the story to the jury. But yeah, in practice it probably didn't represent much of a hazard on its own (though it almost certainly wasn't fire rated)