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Just occurred to me that making the billionaire-killing mini-sub out of carbon fiber made no sense at all. Carbon fiber's virtue is its strength to *weight* ratio. You use carbon fiber when *weight* is the important factor. When you don't care about weight, good old steel is stronger, less brittle, more durable, and much, much cheaper.

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in reply to Jef Poskanzer

Mr. Completely
mastodon - Link to source
Mr. Completely
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@pluralistic there was a superb thread on /r/AskScience about the engineering of that vessel that went deep into the many reasons that the carbon fiber choice was insane, including the fact that delamination from the adhesive layers after an accumulation of microfractures is a known and expected failure mode of such things under repeated exposure to high pressure. It was the best informed discussion I saw on the topic, sadly demonstrating the value that's being destroyed by Reddit
@Cory Doctorow
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