Originally Posted by Chief Ten Beers:
Yeah there really is no excuse for it
If you can't or won't find a way to properly test it and have it certified, then you shouldn't be allowed to solicit gullible adventure tourists... and you certainly don't create this thing from "past its due date" carbon fiber
They basically did everything they needed to do to certify the craft other than pay the fees to a 3rd party to be able to call it "certified." Certification is part design (what the engineers & designers think the materials & design can handle), and part real life depth testing. There is test-depth (depth the sub will operate in its regular use), max operating depth, and crush depth.
From an engineering perspective the sub was built with a margin of safety significantly greater than the U.s. military uses. Their typical margin of safety (difference between test depth and crush depth) is 1.5x. This one was 2.5x, so the Crush depth should have been well over 25 thousand feet, more than twice the normal test operating depth of 13,000
The first thing they did when they got the sub was test it by sending it unmanned to 13,000 feet. Then they tested manned dives to varying depths. They also tested scaled down models to much greater depths so they knew where the faults would potentially occur. AFAIK that's all normal certification procedure. Problems were found in depth testing with the first prototype built back in '18 (the one with all the complaints the media keeps referencing). But that project was scrapped and the entire thing was rebuilt.
IMO the liability here is as much or more on the engineering firms who built the project - Spencer composites, Electroimpact, and Janicki Industries. They failed twice in building a project that would do half of what they thought it would do. You can blame the CEO for pushing the carbon fiber design but obviously multiple engineering firms obviously told him they could build the project, signed off on it, built it, and rated it.
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Originally Posted by FlaChief58:
Me too. It must have been a fairly big piece for them to find it.
yeah, kind of crazy to think any there were any remains.
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