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Comment by Tuna-Fish | Hacker News Reader

Near a harbor, ships with azipods or other similar rotating propulsion units are steered by joysticks instead of wheels. I've seen a reasonably large ship like that being steered with a mass-market gaming joystick. It plugged in through usb.

Feeling a mountain of metal the size of an apartment block move under you to the tune of a plastic consumer toy that looks like a cheap replica of a fighter jet stick is surprisingly disturbing. I asked them why they used it -- they wanted a mobile wired stick so the guy steering the ship can move to a good position where he can see whatever he's approaching, and for that kind of thing, apparently consumer toys are more reliable than specialist marine equipment. Go figure.

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And spares are easy and cheap to obtain and keep a few on hand.

Though the idea of losing my steering on account of a joystick or USB fault ... is a bit terrifying.

Yeah, wouldn't this violate tons of labor laws? Perhaps not on the high seas?

I can't imagine what kind of law you have in mind.

Using equipment that was designed under the assumption that the worst fail state is a frustrated gamer, to operate a leviathan cargo ship, seems like a huge liability.

If a ship were to crash, can you imagine the headlines or accusations in court?

"Video game controller was used to operate billion-dollar crashed cargo ship"

It doesn't matter if it's a video game controller or a high-grade steering wheel, as long as it works.

Knowing that they've built the ship to operate using these devices tells me that they have trust in them.

Those things don't fail like that. When you're looking at big projects it seems you should delegate more and more money as you go closer to the control, but it turns out you can't affect the reliability of those measurably with large sums of money: a specialized joystick isn't guaranteed to last a ton more than your avg gamer one. But it should make sense to also make a specialized computer, usb connection, ... It's easy to see the optimal is really the consumer grade stuff, you can just replace broken parts, quite differently from say a satellite, where once it's broken it's done.

That's... not what labor laws cover.

These ships also have an electronics engineer aboard to take care of such stuff. That's aside from the usual team of marine engineers handling the heavy equipment. In this context, the electronics engineer handles everything from the office equipment to the deck cranes. The engineering team handles the actual engines. They kinda step on each other handling the smaller equipment around the engines (steam plants, pumps, etc -- yes they have steam plants).

And they have excellent machine shops. I expect a consumer joystick to be a) simple to fix and b) cheap and small, so plenty of spares on board.

Source: sailed aboard oil tankers.

Why labor laws specifically?

And it can happen, there was an accident, as a ferry crashed into the pier when the joystick malfunctioned.

http://www.infomarine.net/marine-accidents/119997-27-injured...

That is amazing. Please share more of those experiences :)

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