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Titan sub noise heard on board support ship.

LittleInch

Petroleum
Mar 27, 2013
22,788
Just watched a new documentary by the BBC and others like Discovery so if you're interested look out for it. Implosion: The titanic sub disaster.

Key new part for me is that they released video of the moment a loud "crump" was actually heard on board the support vessel apparently through the hull with Rushs wife Wendy doing the monitoring of the sub and her saying "what was that?". They then got a message from the sub which must have been somehow delayed saying dropped two weights which confused them. It is pretty chilling to listen to alright. That and the fact that they were thought not to be at the ocean floor implies they were getting some warnings.

This is a clip but there are others.

Not much we didn't already know, but they have noted dive 81 (out of 88) where there was a very large bang heard which they reckon was the point at which the hull was on its last legs after a major internal failure.

The Discovery documentary maker back in 2022 was very unimpressed with the whole thing and persuaded the company to can their documentary as he was convinced it would end in failure and didn't want to be seen to promote the operation.

Looks like it's on Discovery pretty soon. If you're interested, it's pretty good and not that big into the human interest side, but does have input from the wife of the man and his son that died which is quite moving.

 
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That's where compartmentalization comes into play. You can have two competing sets of knowledge and apply them independently depending on the situation.
I don't buy it.
Isn't knowing the earth is roundish a basic requirement for navigation? Or are you saying sometimes he thinks it is round and sometimes he thinks it is flat? Either way, he belongs in a mental hospital rather than on the helm.
 
Isn't knowing the earth is roundish a basic requirement for navigation? Or are you saying sometimes he thinks it is round and sometimes he thinks it is flat? Either way, he belongs in a mental hospital rather than on the helm.

Unless you are deriving the navigation solutions from scratch, you can use equations or GPS without paying attention to WGS-84, spherical Earth, or relativistic motion corrections for GPS timebases, etc.
 
Navigation uses formulas. You can memorize the formulas and work them without understanding them.

On the other hand Ptolemy was able to create relatively predictive models of the universe using a wildly inaccurate assumption, geocentric.
 
On the other hand Ptolemy was able to create relatively predictive models of the universe using a wildly inaccurate assumption, geocentric.


You can't have "relatively predictive" given "wildly inaccurate". The Ptolemaic geocentric model was actually VERY accurate, otherwise, it wouldn't have been accepted for a thousand years. The Antikythera mechanism is geocentric and very accurate, assuming the reconstructions of it were done correctly amd unbiased.
 
You can't have "relatively predictive" given "wildly inaccurate".

Yes it's accurate in terms of predictions relative to the earth, but in terms of underlying assumption that the earth is at the centre of the universe it's way off. And likewise a map can be very accurate in terms of predictions even if it assumes the earth is flat. You can go hundreds of km before a planar assumption starts to wreck navigational accuracy.
 
Years ago I came across a discussion of an indigenous map from the Alaska/Yukon mountains that came into the possession of some academics.
They were able to identify the locations but the supposed distances were way off.
Then someone tried comparing primitive travel times.
The map was surprisingly accurate in terms of travel time.
 
Yes it's accurate in terms of predictions relative to the earth, but in terms of underlying assumption that the earth is at the centre of the universe it's way off. And likewise a map can be very accurate in terms of predictions even if it assumes the earth is flat. You can go hundreds of km before a planar assumption starts to wreck navigational accuracy.

All models can work, until they don't. In Ecuador, there is a HUGE monument call Mittad del Mundo placed on the spot Spanish and French scientists and surveyors determined where the Earth's equator was, but according to the model used in GPS, it's 200 meters off from what is now determined to be the equator. My point was that the geocentric model was accurate enough for a thousand years, and maybe possibly more, had Copernicus not messed things up. It wouldn't have done the job in the space age, but for ordinary people, does it really matter whether the retrograde motion is just some predictable oddity in a geocentric orbital model or an optical illusion caused by heliocentric orbital mechanics?
 
This Thread is going seriously off topic.....

Has anyone else managed to see the documentary?
 
Unless you are deriving the navigation solutions from scratch, you can use equations or GPS without paying attention to WGS-84, spherical Earth, or relativistic motion corrections for GPS timebases, etc.
Whatever. The fact that someone believes the earth is flat despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary makes me question their decision making in all aspects of their profession and life. It is my understanding that it is more of a religious thing for these folks.
 
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It's just non-religious faith. Faith (belief held without evidence or in the face of evidence to the contrary) shows up all over the place, not just in religions or flat-Eartherism. E.g. I'd bet Rush had faith that Titan's design was safe, and that faith contributed to him ignoring the warning signs that it wasn't. Faith is a pervasive and dangerous vice, and like all vices it can be fun to indulge in! In limited amounts, carefully controlled, its psychological benefits can even outweigh the costs. But sometimes it leads to the destruction of the faithful.
 
I think fanatics are more what some of these people turn into and there is no way you can win any argument or change their opinion in any way.
 
This Thread is going seriously off topic.....

Has anyone else managed to see the documentary?
I am waiting to watch the documentary. I would rather see the accident report (from the Coast Guard, I think) before I watch anything else, as I would expect that there may be some things added or left out to make the story more sensational. Maybe not, but I won't base my opinions on the documentary first.
 
There was quite a bit of input from that investigation in the program, but the details will be very interesting...
 

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