[Marine_Uncle]

Gondring:
Pulling their leg is putting it mildly. There is so much bull shit circulating about the Internet regarding the spill I am fast reaching a point where I am going to just ignore the crap and watch the increased activities by the twelve ROVs.
As far as I am can see, BP is working around the clock to get every last little thing in place in order to cap the well shortly.
And one can with an honest mind discuss why they where not allowed to reach this point way sooner, but the point is they may soon effectively install a leak proof cap and simply pump oil and gas to the surface vessels in the remaining days before the final dead kill is performed.
There will be plenty of time for debate once the final verdicts are shown as to who screwed the pooch.
But since the cat is out of the bag.....Happy Birthday Ernest. May the good Lord give you many healthy ones to yet be.

[Cold Heat]

What do you think about the ROV's video capabilities. It's all 2D, and makes it really difficult for them to have any sort of depth perception in 2-D. We have had 3-D camera's for some time and even 3-D rendering from stereoscopic camera setups.

They waste so much time without depth perception and that could be fixed for a fee that is.....LOL

[CharlesWayneCT]

From what I understand they have had to build this new cap pretty much from scratch, designed to handle the cold, based on the lessons they learned first from the failed “big box” fix, and the current cap.

in fact, they were originally going to get this new cap in place I thought right at the start of the month; my GUESS is that the failure they had last week when the rover ran into the hose has caused them to make some sort of design change — I don’t know this, maybe it’s just taking longer than expected.

As to why it took so long, ignoring the interference of our government, my guess is that at the start they didn’t really know they had such a problem, and they didn’t really understand that their traditional methods wouldn’t work. I think they were pretty sure dropping that big box on the well was going to stop the leaking, so they hadn’t put a lot of effort into any special caps (which at the time they couldn’t use because the pipe was still attached).