Devils advocate, most off the shelf mass market electronics are actually quite reliable. Having custom made hardware often means poor firmware support, extreme costs, and difficult to debug.
Nothing wrong with using off the shelf electronics, especially since the interior of the submarine is atmospheric pressure.
Plus Logitech gear is, in my experience, pretty well made. My Logitech joystick lasted easily ten years, and I’ve got a Logitech mouse that’s about twelve years old and still works fine.
I have no idea if they actually had spares, but there’s something to be said for having three $30 off the shelf parts over one $200 custom part, provided that failure isn’t immediately catastrophic.
multiple spares apparently
Around the 1 minute mark, he does mention that they keep spares onboard.
Ahh, good to know, thanks! So we can scratch that off of the list of stupid things they did, although the lack of a transponder beacon and a surface egress option are still pretty high on the list.
I read that military used Xbox controller because it was more intuitive than traditional method.
But I do hope that they update / change their gamepad regularly, because thumbstick drift is a thing.
More than the game controller and light bar, the bigger issue with this thing seems to be that it has no means of egress if lost but floating, and that the pressure vessel seems to be from titanium and carbon-fiber which, while strong and light, are brittle and therefore are more likely fail catastrophically. Navy subs creak and flex as they descend because the steel adjusts to the increased pressure. Steel will flex elastically along a good strength curve, and when it does fail, you have a little bit of wiggle room where it starts crushing like a can but might not split or pull away from the bolts.
Steel is heavy though, and this thing was mean to be carted from ship to ship and unhooked with store-bought bungee cords. The whole thing is scary AF and if that price tag still left them at a point where they were feeling like they needed to use consumer-grade parts, then maybe there just wasn’t a viable business there.
I thought I read somewhere that they’re not making a profit yet. I mean just the fuel costs alone have to be astronomical
If they’re not making a profit as it is charging rich rubberneckers 250K a trip and cutting corners on their builds, I can’t imagine they’ll ever be able to do it.
