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Comment by ARandumGuy | Hacker News Reader

That's a good argument for independent throttle control being possible, but it's not a good argument for that being the default. When working with safety critical systems (which throttle control absolutely is), it's important to have sensible, easy to understand defaults. The more steps you have to take to do the "correct" thing, the more likely it is that someone screws up one of those steps.

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Seems to me a technically advanced enough system like this should probably combine the independent throttles with the steering to some extent? I'm talking out of my rear possibly, but like if a severe enough turn radius was used, maybe then automatically adjust the throttles to make it possible in combination with the rudder?

(as a default)

I think designing a system like that that gave the control necessary and worked predictably would be difficult. I'm not a navy person (the closest experience I have is driving fishing boats on a lake), but I do know that steering a big boat is complicated.

Steering via the rudder, via controlling the different throttles, or some combination has different characteristics. And which one is best would depend on the ocean and weather conditions, overall speed of the ship, as well as many other factors I don't know about.

A computer is unlikely to be able to properly account for all of this. And if it did, it would affect how the ship controls, something that you really don't want to do on a large ship.

Combining multiple controls into one computer managed control can be a good design. But I think it's the wrong design for large ships.

Yeah, I was in the navy actually, but my lane was purely electronics, I too only drive a 15' fishing boat.

The article does address this. The system did have a computer-assisted driving mode but it was always turned off into manual driving mode as the sailors either didn't understand or trust the automatic mode.

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