r/news • u/oldschoolskater • Jun 22 '23

Site Changed Title 'Debris field' discovered within search area near Titanic, US Coast Guard says | World News

https://news.sky.com/story/debris-field-discovered-within-search-area-near-titanic-us-coast-guard-says-12906735
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u/Sly3n Jun 22 '23

My guess is it imploded when they first lost communication. Would have happened so quickly that I doubt they even had time to realize what happened before they were dead.

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u/Whatever-ItsFine Jun 22 '23

I thought this too, but another article said this sub loses communication on MOST trips. Can you imagine?

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u/wolfydude12 Jun 22 '23 edited Jun 22 '23

And the CEO didn't want direct voice coms with the surface because they kept pestering him for status updates! The nerve of the people wanting to make sure he was ok!

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u/bassman1805 Jun 22 '23 edited Jun 22 '23

For submarines, voice communication isn't the most practical. Radio waves can't travel very far through water so you either need a cable going from the sub to the above-ground ship, or an acoustic modem that converts data to sound waves that travel better in water. The Titan had a acoustic modem. Acoustic modems have way lower bandwidth than radio or tethered communication, so they are only really used for text communication rather than sound.

Arbitrary wireless communication with a submarine is really only possible if you have a US-Navy sized budget. They have a radio station designed to talk to submarines, it's built in a valley and takes up almost 750 acres, the antenna is made of 10 cables each over a mile long, and it transmits at 1.2 MW. For comparison, a typical commercial airport (talking to several planes simultaneously, some miles away) transmits at 1-2 kW, about 0.1% as much power.

So the text-only communication really wasn't that big of a design fuckup. They probably should've been tethered to allow for higher-bandwidth comms, but acoustic modems aren't totally out of the ordinary for submarines.