OT: US navy collisions

Apparently they don't *know* that there is a ship within 500 yards.

Coffee hits keyboard.

(Drat; hit return too soon)

Coffee hits keyboard - due to the neat response to that notable absence of joined-up reasoning!

As someone else noted, we're always being hit mid-ship... we're being hit, not vice versa... smells. ...Jim Thompson

It does indeed stink - but of what?

Any warship that, while underway in the open sea, can't avoid being hit by a merchantman is clearly a /very/ sick or smelly ship.

Over-reliance on automation, overwhelmed by blinkenlights and an excess of information, brain shuts down.

Improbable explanation? The Navy already came up with one. They're looking into the possibility the ship was attacked by EMP.

Radar bearing is not constant when trajectories are perpendicular and range is close in. This scenario may also cause problems with tracking, if they have any at all, especially big targets which span many range and angle cel ls. If their little kluge, designed by pretentious rubes posing as engineer s and tested by in-house mental midgets, doesn't track, they have no target history and a fortiori they damned sure have no trajectory prediction and no prediction means no reliable data based collision avoidance warning. The whole process of producing these systems is rife with so much corruption a nd incompetence, the serious navigation incidents are really just the tip o f the iceberg. Wait until a shooting war breaks out, all this junk is headi ng for Davey Jones' locker.

The Chinese and Iranians don't have to spend big bucks on missiles or torpedoes... they can just ram our warships with rusty old cargo ships.

Yep. But WHY aren't we seeing them coming... something lacking in our close-in/surface radar? ...Jim Thompson

Unlikely. The supertanker was most likely just under way on a straight course when a US warship unwisely played chicken just in front of it. They got skewered exactly like the last one to play this game.

A fully loaded supertanker takes an age to turn when it is under its own steam and at full cruise speed. They really don't have much choice about where they are going. One would hope that a US warship would be somewhat more agile iff the watch was awake and even remotely competent.

I see another embarrassing courts marshal in the offing.

Backward thinking, from downunder. There's someone in the navy ship looking ahead at what they'll hit if they don't dodge. And, someone in the commercial ship doing likewise. Which one caused a nose-into-flank collision? You'd usually call it the fault of the ship with the bow damage.

It's more complex than that, of course, and usually a port will have elaborate conventions on how ships approach and depart. Did someone do something unconventional? How far from port WERE these ships?

Complaint from my brother, who is captain of an ocean tow-boat: "these young sailors only look at their screens and never out of the window anymore"

Regards, Wim

They're looking where they're going, not what's coming at them from the side and can't stop. They need a spell riding bikes.

Cheers

Or, around here, motorcycles ;-) ...Jim Thompson

The Alnic MC was laid down circa 2008, basically brand-new.

In SF, there is every conceivable wheeled device zooming around in the streets. Cars, motorcycles, open tourist things, busses, trucks, scooters, all sorts of bizarre bicycles, trikes, streetcars, trains, cable cars, cranes, fire trucks, UPS trucks, regular and powered skateboards, hoverboards, roller skates, shopping carts, razor scooters, unicycles... we thought we'd seen them all. But one day last week we were driving uphill on Swiss Street and were almost taken out by a blue wheeled recycling bin that was tearing down the middle of the street. Luckily, it veered off the centerline and hit a parked car before it got us.

Like this.

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This wasn't some kind of active rubbish-seeking garbage bin? And if so, why would it have targeted you? Your attitude to anthropogenic global warming does make you an active danger to the environment, but there must be more p ersuasive peddlers of denialism.

The Zumwalt class destroyers (no, this wasn't one) don't have anything to "look out" of. "Looking" where you're going is so overrated.