Pelorus
Full Member
- Reaction score
- 442
- Points
- 780
Commercial shipping is meant to go from A to B in the cheapest way possible, in ships that are purpose-built to do just that. Part of that cost efficiency is having as few crew as you can get away with on board and as simple of machinery/electronics as possible. As such, the damage control standard on many merchant ships is incredibly basic (passenger ships would be the primary exception here as they at least need to keep things under control long enough to get passengers evacuated). In many cases, if your fitted systems don't work you're looking quite fondly at your lifeboats after one or two firefighting teams are unsuccessful, and responding to multiple incidents concurrently simply isn't feasible.
Two gas turbine engines and a diesel engine all feeding into a common gearbox that can independently drive shafts with variable pitch propellers is an order of magnitude more complicated than a low speed, direct drive engine/shaft combination. The same is true for a commercial Integrated Bridge System compared to warship combat systems integration. The comparison is apples and oranges regardless of hard we try to insist otherwise.
Notwithstanding the personnel shortages across the maritime sector which are rightly being focused on, people in general are complicated. Minimizing life support requirements, human resource issues, interpersonal conflict, human error, etc. is all something that anyone who works in a sociotechnical system is interested in.
The US and China are technological juggernauts. Do we really think the reason we haven't seen warship-sized automation fielded yet is that the world's Admirals and naval engineers are just a bunch of old curmudgeons who refuse to let go of the glory days of paint ship routines and manning the rails when entering port? Or is it because the technology isn't there yet despite what a bunch of defence companies' press releases and glossy brochures state?
I sincerely hope that automation technology matures to the point where we see significant adoption during my career, because if nothing else I think it would be an interesting problem set to work on. But to imply that the navies of the world are myopic to continue building crewed warships for the foreseeable future when we should just replace them with USVs has some strong "draw automate the rest of the owl" energy:
Two gas turbine engines and a diesel engine all feeding into a common gearbox that can independently drive shafts with variable pitch propellers is an order of magnitude more complicated than a low speed, direct drive engine/shaft combination. The same is true for a commercial Integrated Bridge System compared to warship combat systems integration. The comparison is apples and oranges regardless of hard we try to insist otherwise.
Notwithstanding the personnel shortages across the maritime sector which are rightly being focused on, people in general are complicated. Minimizing life support requirements, human resource issues, interpersonal conflict, human error, etc. is all something that anyone who works in a sociotechnical system is interested in.
The US and China are technological juggernauts. Do we really think the reason we haven't seen warship-sized automation fielded yet is that the world's Admirals and naval engineers are just a bunch of old curmudgeons who refuse to let go of the glory days of paint ship routines and manning the rails when entering port? Or is it because the technology isn't there yet despite what a bunch of defence companies' press releases and glossy brochures state?
I sincerely hope that automation technology matures to the point where we see significant adoption during my career, because if nothing else I think it would be an interesting problem set to work on. But to imply that the navies of the world are myopic to continue building crewed warships for the foreseeable future when we should just replace them with USVs has some strong "
