Okay, Sorry, But I Need One More Rant For The Night.

Okay, sorry, but I need one more rant for the night.

One of the podcasts I listen to is a sci-fi one called "Derelict." This rant is specifically about the first season of the show, "Fathom", a prequel of sorts to the main plot of Derelict in season 2.

So, Fathom takes place in an underwater base approximately 20,000ft (>6000m) below sea level on the ocean floor. For all intents and purposes, it's a good show. I certainly prefer the sci-fi heavy first half over the more action focused second half, but it's science, and AI and underwater and ticks off a lot of boxes that make my geeky self happy.

But!

There's one bit of it, that's repeatedly used and brought up, that almost instantly pulls me out of the story every. single. time.

Leaks.

Spoilers ahead

The igniting incident of the story is that a tidal surge hits the base and knocks out one of the support pillars, causing an area to collapse and water surges in parts of the base flood before watertight doors seal off the worse of it.

Bitch. I'm former Navy. We got trained on things like crush depth, and older vessels had a crush depth of not much more than 500ft. Ships and submarines only few hundred feet down have sealed bulkheads IMPLODE at those pressures.

YOU ARE 20,000 FEET DOWN!!!! That means you're under almost 9000 POUNDS of pressure PER SQUARE INCH!!! 61 MEGAPASCALS!!! More than 6 HUNDRED ATMOSPHERES!!!

You don't have a leak; YOU HAVE AN IMPLOSION!!!!

The water isn't going to flow in and slowly fill a room. It's not going to trickle in. As soon as a portion, even a pinhole, gives way, water is going to rapidly enter the space in an attempt to equalize the internal and external pressure.

There's only air outside of these vessels. Now imagine there are a few miles of ocean overhead trying to get in.

In Bioshock, sure, it could be a leak. Because of the gardens grown via sunlight, Rapture has to be firmly in the epipelagic, or sunlight, zone and less than 200 meters down. Even at the maximum 200m depth, you'd experience 291psi (~2MPa). Dangerous, but doable, and vessels can be designed to withstand high pressures.

But those also rely a lot of using a cylindrical or spherical shape to evenly distribute the pressure. Ideally, the base would be hemispherical and placed directly on the ocean floor to disperse as much pressure as possible.

Except the base is built on multiple pylons. All the pressure on the top and sides of the base is now being concentrated onto the pier. So now, you have 9000psi over however many inches, plus the weight of the structure all being concentrated onto one much smaller point, increasing the pounds per square inch on the pylon.

And the bulkheads in the base are flat. Which does not withstand pressure nearly as well. Any corners or sharp changes in geometry create areas of localized stress that are going to give out a lot sooner.

But even more damning! Is the fact that seawater at the bottom of the ocean is only a degree or two above freezing. In Fahrenheit (33-34°) or Celsius (1-2°). So when a vessel fails, you're not experiencing ductile failure; you're experiencing brittle fracture, which is so much more catastrophic and dangerous.

Now, ductile failure means that the metal will experience plastic deformation before it breaks. It'll stretch, sometimes a lot, and that gives users warning and time to reverse whatever is causing the deformation before the metal fails.

Brittle fracture is sudden. Catastrophic. There is zero deformation prior to the break, meaning there's no warning, and brittle fracture is much more likely to happen at cold temperatures.

Okay, Sorry, But I Need One More Rant For The Night.

Add to that, that hypothermia will set in a LOT faster in frigid water than frigid air. There are a number of characters who have to move through partially flooded areas, and even at the surface, hypothermia can become debilitating in as little as 20 minutes and death can set in within 1-2 hours.

So, yeah, no, everyone is dead. The bulkhead ruptured? No, that water didn't trickle in. You didn't have time to make it to the next room and shut the bulkhead before the room flooded. That room imploded near instantaneously. The bulkhead failed and the entire unit imploded. Dead. Guy had to crawl through a flooded tube? People with injuries are wading through flooded areas for hours? Nope. Hypothermia. Dead. Everyone's dead. The story's done by episode 1.

And I will continue to scream at the podcast every time the water trickles in.

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