Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
I think you are comparing this failure to a vaccuum collapse of a tank, rail car or pop can caused by condensing Vapours. In that scenario you rapidly go from 15psia to 0psia and rapidly cross the 1PSI or so vaccuum rating of these things and the metal yields and fails relatively instantly.
In this scenario to have a composite material so you likely have delamonations which are week points that start to crack and arrest themselves at various pressures as decent is occuring. You are also only gaining about 200 kpa of pressure a minute on something designed to 35000 kpag.
You also have the strain gauges on the inner hull which as the hull becomes compromised would show increased strain.
So in general I don’t think collapse is instant, also given the reporting they had dropped ballast and were ascending when the failure occurred so they knew they were in trouble.
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Yeah, there is no reason to think they didn't have time to realize things were going wrong. Unless the carbon fiber hull used just the bare minimum number of carbon fiber bands where if just one broke or delaminated, then there would be an instantaneous implosion. From experts that were interviewed by various news outlets, it seems likely that there would have been tapping, cracking, and popping sounds as stands broke until it reached a critical point and finally imploded instantly. The amount of time that it would have taken to reach that point is debatable and conjecture, but it may have been several minutes.
As the hull became thinner, they may have even experienced visual signs such of warping of the sides, which could have also affected other electrical and mechanical parts of the sub, including the ability to lean the sub and drop the ballasts. As the hull continued to delaminate, water would fill in the pore space and the sub would become heavier as well. The outer part of the delaminated hull would have acted like sponge.
The leaked transcript could very well be fake, but the scenario they present seems plausible based on what some experts have stated. The biggest reason to think it's fake IMO, is that some people said the short form writing system that the would use would not look like the words in the transcript. I haven't seen previous mission transcripts to compare though.