The family of a French explorer who died in a submersible implosion has filed a more than $50 million lawsuit, saying the crew experienced “terror and mental anguish” before the disaster and accusing the sub’s operator of gross negligence.
Paul-Henri Nargeolet was among five people who died when the Titan submersible implodedduring a voyage to the famed Titanic wreck site in the North Atlantic in June 2023. No one survived the trip aboard the experimental submersible owned by OceanGate, a company in Washington state that has since suspended operations.
They probably should have known that when they saw the sub was controlled by a modified game controller.
FWIW, using game controllers is a reasonable thing to do. that game controller? Naw. But a good PS controller? Sure. Xbox? Alright. Nintendo? Only if it’s that weird N64 one.
If you stop and think about it, they’re compact, reliable and comfortable to use. Major consoles invest a relative shit ton of cash into developing it; and there’s plenty of drivers for whatever system you’re using.
There were a lot of straight up stupid design choices, but that wasn’t one of them. (Though their specific choice in controllers… yeah let’s mock that. It’s a terrible controller.)
I’m pretty sure the US military adopted the use of Xbox 360 controllers for a lot of things as well, because of the reasons you mentioned.
Ergonomic, comfortable in the hands, intuitive.
Another one for the military is that the vast majority of their recruits would already be intimately familiar with the interface, and not need to train muscle memory for it.
Is it just me, or does anyone else also do a double-take to this day every time somebody calls an Xbox controller “ergonomic,” because they think back to the original? It’s especially memorable to me because of how Penny Arcade lampooned it:
I very clearly said “Xbox 360 controller”
Not sure why you brought up the og.
Because it makes me think of it. Is that so wrong?
I was in the minority in that I loved those bigass controllers. GunValkyrie was also amazing once you learned that you’re supposed to be playing the game almost entirely in the air.
A wireless controller as well and no backup.
I wonder if they even had spare batteries.
The spare batteries were probably rolling around with the piss pitcher.
Ps5 controller nah, imagine getting stick drift 1 mile below the surface?
I would say exactly the opposite. There’s nothing wrong with that game controller as a game controller. Logitech’s pads were the gold standard for PC game controllers for years before XInput was released, and the F710 carried that design process forward well into the XInput era. It also has the advantage of having a dedicated wireless channel instead of relying on Bluetooth, which lowers latency and reduces the chance of pairing issues.
But no game controller should have been used to control a submarine at depth with people inside. It is not what they are built for.
Not even the N64 one, the analog stick ground down the surface material underneath the stick, with time leading to stick-drift. One could field-strip the analog stick and remove the ground materials from it, but the lack of material would have diminishing accuracy returns. The sticks wouldn’t necessarily drift but they’d be flappy as fuck. Reminds me, I gotta see if this random Internet seller is selling those again to refurb some controllers…
N64 recentered the analog stick on startup. If you were holding the stick in any direction when you started it then that position would be center and allowing the stick to return to physical center would actually be moving in a direction.
I get what you’re saying, but I would also suggest that submarines going down to the Titanic should probably not risk being built with off-the-shelf parts.
Custom components are more likely to be poorly tested, and to fail. The drivers are more likely to be unstable.
Off the shelf components are far less likely to have defects in them, far more heavily tested, and to be designed by people who specialize in designing that one thing, with far better documentation available.
Unless of course you’re buying them used off eBay for 10 bucks.
Personally, I would have gone with a Logitech G56 HOTAS set up. You don’t necessarily need all those buttons, but the drivers are designed to allow you to easily customize them (including with custom curves.) and the stick would give you 3 axis control (twist for use,)
There are also well-tested, robust industrial analogue controllers, but they were probably not on the radar of the guy building a submarine with factory-seconds carbon fiber.
I think the whole sub was build in. I trust more a controller made by big company mass production for angry kids that an custon one.
Modified gaming controllers are used for all sorts of things. But generally they pick ones that are good. The Logitech one that was used is known to be a pile of shit.