You're right, I have a hypothesis, nothing more or less.
Never mind that at least my hypothesis is consistent with the location of the damage on both ACX Crystal and Fitzgerald, since it's possible that the location of the damage was a result of last-minute maneuvering and not the course of each ship in the minutes before the crisis.
But let's look at your hypothesis:
> As the stand-on, they did everything they could to hail and signal to the navy boat. The navy boat kept coming across their bow. At the last moment, they turned hard to starboard.
You say this is "100% corroborated by AIS", but working to try to hail a Navy warship and then choosing to make a last-second attempt to turn is completely inconsistent with their AIS track that shows them not turning back to investigate until 30 minutes after the collision, and only once they spotted the ship they hit, did they turn back to resume course and report the collision to the Japanese Coast Guard.
If they were that busy trying to hail turn to avoid the Navy warship, then there was no need to double-back to figure out why their bow sustained damage, nor a reason to delay an hour to make the report to shore. Their AIS track is consistent with a cargo ship on auto-pilot (which to be fair, is the normal and expected mode of operation), with the computer auto-pilot encountering an unplanned navigational issue that it then piloted through to get back on track, with a human crew following up minutes after and then turning around to see just WTF had happened.
On top of that, the captain of the ACX Crystal claimed to use "flashing lights" to signal the Fitzgerald that she was standing into danger. But the COLREGS demand the use of an audible danger signal (5 or more short blasts), and no other signal. The captain also claimed to start a hard turn to starboard, but then says that it took 10 minutes to hit Fitzgerald from then.
But even for a container ship, if you were in the middle of a hard turn for 10 minutes you'd have turned all the way around. In fact if you look at the AIS track https://twitter.com/imgregorous/status/875905972924948480/ph... they make a sharper turn after the collision (presumably when the human crew turned off the auto-pilot and made a hard turn to quickly get back down the original track and figure out what happened).
Fact is, if the ACX Crystal crew were really so in tune with the traffic situation as to be able to watch the Fitzgerald make a turn, spend minutes on bridge-to-bridge VHF trying to warn the Fitzgerald, and spend "minutes turning" to avoid a ship traveling on a single course and speed, they're going to be found liable as well. If they really had so much awareness of the ongoing situation to watch it unfold in the way their captain is said to have relayed it to investigators, they also had enough time to unilaterally avoid the collision as they were required to do by COLREGS.
> The navy will never release any of their own records, because such would only make the obvious, more obvious. It's not as though there haven't been other navy boats doing similar stupid shit over the last few years: Porter, Port Royal, etc., not even to mention the problems that their subs keep having. Ask a merchant mariner about navy safety. Their motto is, "if it's gray, stay away!"
Definitely not an axe to grind here, is there? I guess it's a good thing we already know what happened then, I guess we can tell Japan to call off the investigations?
P.S. the Navy has released many of the records for "similar stupid shit" you mention (e.g. audio from the bridge of USS Porter in the most recent destroyer-involved collision), so I do not understand why you say the Navy would not here.
> In most of those cases they've been able to claim extenuating circumstances. That won't happen here: the cargo ship was operating exactly as one would expect, in a busy shipping land, in clear weather.
The Navy itself doesn't absolve its ship captains due to "extenuating circumstances" so there's no need to try to apply that as a mitigating circumstance. Either way there weren't extenuating circumstances with USS Porter, or USS Port Royal, or USS Hampton or many of the other ones before that, so that's no different here. Fitzgerald should have avoided the collision. The question will be how much ACX Crystal should have, or could have done to avoid the collision on her own.