Hacker News

It was 155m long and the ocean was 108m deep, in case anyone else was wondering.

I think I read something similar about the Edmund Fitzgerald i.e. it sank in water that was less deep than the length of the ship.

And yet even in that shallow of water the pressure would have been around 10 atm. It's amazing how dangerous something as mundane as water can be.

Similarly, a human can drown in only a few inches of water, not even enough to fully submerge you while lying face first in it, let alone while standing.

Water is not to be trifled with.

nuclear submarines are first and foremost built as a protective sarcophagus for the powerplant, and that's on top of submarines being designed to compartmentalize damage, anyway.

i.e. if it could totally destroy itself with a full payload that'd be a very bad design choice, not that there wasn't plenty of bad choices wrt the kursk.

It's stereotypical now but I remember at the time this was taken as a kind of confirmation that russia had been coasting on and also neglecting a lot of the soviet-era infrastructure. It's hard to reflect back now but in 2000 the soviet collapse was recent memory and the role and effectiveness of its successor was an open question, internationally.

I do remember that in the 90s the "russia understanders" were split into two camps: now that russia is free of the shackles of communism it will step into its destiny as supreme global superpower vs the soviet system was actually quite effective at large scale mundane infrastructure & logistics in a way the russian federation isn't.

By 2000 the weight of evidence was already fairly strong for the second view but this disaster, and especially their response to it, really settled the matter. This is how I remember feeling about it all anyway.

He had the same dead look as he does today.

Reading a note written by a sailor, in the dark, by feel, estimating his changes to be 10%, certainly felt haunting to me.

Chomsky wrote that Western media publishes only what is "useful" for certain ends, usually political. So you think the article is useful, don't you?

I found the story and photos entirely haunting. Those sailers had no chance.

Found it pretty haunting myself. You could pick a different descriptive word but haunting fits.

I found several photos haunting.

Being able to look at a full actual likeness of a person who is dead is incomprehensibly novel to human experience. It has never stopped giving me chills.