It appears they are suing OceanGate, the company that made the submarine. The use of cheap, consumer grade hardware for critical functions (literally controlling the sub) is one of their criticisms.
Yeah, but if you’re going to use a wireless controller, don’t fucking skimp and get some cheapo device, at least buy a goddamned 1st party controller. Not that MS/Sony don’t have lemons too, but Logitech controllers are like a half step from the crappy MadKatz controllers from my childhood.
This had to be a project costing somewhere in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, and they’re trying to save $30 on an aftermarket controller?!? That’s the literal embodiment of Penny Wise, pound foolish.
The complaint does not allege that the Logitech wireless controller, the carbon fiber construction, Titan’s innovative porthole, or the use of disparate materials with differing expansion/compression coefficients—four main areas of criticism—were individually responsible for the sub’s implosion. But it does suggest that these systems could have together contributed to a “daisy chain of failures of multiple improperly designed or constructed parts or systems.”
It’s using the fact that it was a wireless controller used over Bluetooth as part of the evidence that they created a bunch of unnecessary points of failure.
Titan was an implosion, so the pressure hull failed at some point, we just don’t know what. While the Logitech controller is indicative of the decision making process, it’s one component we can comprehensively rule out as causing the failure.