# A shipowner's dream coming true?



## MikeGDH (May 10, 2014)

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/drone-ships-move-closer-reality-184533496.html

Interesting.
Mike


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## Barrie Youde (May 29, 2006)

One day, perhaps.

But the avoidance of piracy is a most unworthy reason; if only because two wrongs don't make a right.


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## trotterdotpom (Apr 29, 2005)

When the emergency crews fly out and parachute onto a ship in mid-Pacific, I hope they don't forget their tents.

John T


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## James_C (Feb 17, 2005)

I like this quote from that article: "While crews could still be needed for complex operations such as docking, when a ship is in the open ocean they have little to do other than navigate and monitor systems, tasks which can easily be automated.".
Written by and perhaps quoted from someone who obviously has absolutely no idea of how a ship is run - perhaps they haven't heard of concepts like routine and planned maintenance, painting, attending to errant or broken down equipment etc. Perhaps that can all be achieved by satellite too?
Just imagine a situation where an unmanned ship is the nearest craft to a vessel in distress, yet it will be unable to assist that vessel nor take part in any search and rescue activities as there'll be no people onboard to do so!


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## ChasH (May 23, 2014)

*crewless ships*

they have done a good job of destroying our M.N. up to now, i see they want to go the whole hog and have no crew, give me a good old cargo boat/ tanker, up to my eyeballs in muck, paint, and siht, windsails for gas freeing and venting tanks, tank diving, and greasing topping lifts and runners stinking of fish oil and Stockholm tar, cleaning under steam winches, hated it, but loved it at the same time because i was a crew member at sea.
chas


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## Kaiser Bill (Jun 28, 2006)

Controlled by a captain "hundreds of miles away" ? these scientists are idiots, all you need is a 12 year old schoolgirl with a computer and a hairy ars*d deckboy aboard to feed the ship"s cat, imagine the cargo you could cram into the redundant crappers and showers. (Smoke)


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## tiachapman (Mar 25, 2008)

its  been on the cards for a long time
ship owners were always looking for ways to cut running costs the first ship i joined had a crew of 48 a old x Empire boat. every one had a job to do do. plus plenty of overtime and the owners still made money. then along came the time and motion men with their little note books. on one ship i was on . one was on the foc.el head observing the depature .. end result carp stood next to the windess doing nothing. bosun the same. mate like wise. as the mate said when we recevied the results some time later. dont know how the shifting boards will be put up us 3 have been lined up for the beach


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## Varley (Oct 1, 2006)

James_C said:


> I like this quote from that article: "While crews could still be needed for complex operations such as docking, when a ship is in the open ocean they have little to do other than navigate and monitor systems, tasks which can easily be automated.".
> Written by and perhaps quoted from someone who obviously has absolutely no idea of how a ship is run - perhaps they haven't heard of concepts like routine and planned maintenance, painting, attending to errant or broken down equipment etc. Perhaps that can all be achieved by satellite too?
> Just imagine a situation where an unmanned ship is the nearest craft to a vessel in distress, yet it will be unable to assist that vessel nor take part in any search and rescue activities as there'll be no people onboard to do so!


That highlights another issue. Just for the sake of argument let us say the technology forces the adoption of the unmanned ship. When all are unmanned then lifesaving of fellow seafarers becomes irrelevant (and for yachties, bathtubbies and asylum seekers much easier to ignore).

What about the period when both manned and unmanned vessels plough the seas together? A legal and practical mayhem.

(I saw a so called 'learned' Ejournal heralding the technological leap of being able to image the inside of the combustion chamber when the engine was running. This, they said, had hitherto been impossible because it was "dark inside". Dearie me!)


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## alaric (Feb 27, 2012)

I can't open the link in post#1, but I guess it covers the same ground as a recent article in The Engineer magazine; http://digitaledition.theengineer.co.uk/TE0815pwj/files/1.html?cmpid=tenews_1551427
I believe Oskar Levander of Rolls Royce is correct. unmanned ships will take a while to become established and accepted, but it WILL happen. The potential savings are so great it is inevitable, in particular on bulk carriers and tankers.
Remember, not all types of ship will be unmanned, as much as Costa management might wish!


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## ART6 (Sep 14, 2010)

According to GCaptain (http://gcaptain.com/royal-navy-could-have-unmanned-3d-printed-surface-ships-by-2030/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_campaign=0&utm_content=261222#.Ve721851Mu0)
the RN is looking at 3-D printed ships by 2030. Logic would suggest that those ships (well, more like boats by the sound of it) would be unmanned drones, although they might need some crew for damage control etc. That leads to to suggestion of 3-D printed crews that would also be robots under the control of an armchair admiral somewhere in Whitehall. Obviously, for reasons of gender equality, some of the robots would have to be male and some female, and the admiral would have to consider the possibility of some regrettable coupling of her crews, which could lead to the embarrassment of little 3-D robots running about in a warship.

Other countries will, of course, counter these initiatives with 3-D printed ships of their own, fully automated and with 3-D printed crews. All of these warships from various nations will then run around the high seas engaging in missile strikes at each other for no better reason than that the satellite that is supposed to control them has burned up in earth orbit, so they have been forced to make autonomous decisions.

And in the middle of all of this mayhem there will be drone merchant ships, stuck in a firing line that their computers don't recognise and from which they will not attempt to escape. In London, New York, Las Vegas, there will be registered masters who will be tasked with controlling not less than four merchantmen at a time, so each master's computer screen will have to issue a warning to her "You are under attack!"

She will have to get out of bed with alacrity to deal with the matter, but when she tries to log into the web site that controls her charges she will be told that her Internet site is not recognised, and she will be advised to review her access arrangements or consult her administrator. This problem will be resolved, in fact, without any action from her, as the autonomous warships of the various nations will have decided that all of her ships are potentially hostile -- after all, they strayed into a battle zone --so they will all have been sunk.

In order to deal with this Microsoft, whose embedded software will control both the belligerents and the wandering merchantmen, will issue patches and automatic updates, some of which will make the problem worse and might even cause the "blue screen of death" on the master's or admiral's computer, requiring either the attention of the system administrator who is fast asleep in Alaska or the taking of the computer to PC World for a technician fix, and that will take three days.

Ship losses will, invariably, mount. In the United States the shipyards will start to turn out ships rather like the WWII Liberty ships in vast numbers -- three a week in the expectation of losing two and so staying ahead of the game. In Britain long-closed shipyards will have the blocks of flats and offices that were built on their slipways bulldozed in order to make way for a new ship building programme. These rejuvenated shipyards will be owned by Fincantieri and by Daewoo -- at least as long as the UK remains in the EU. 

China will corner the market in steel production in order to accommodate the resurgent world demand for steel to replace sunken ships, and the Chinese economy will rise to the point where the Yuan competes with the Dollar in the money markets and, possibly, surpasses it.

Meanwhile, a generation of people who would be seafarers will be reduced to tying up those ships that ever managed to reach port or, for the more adventurous, being parachuted onto a deck to reboot the control computer or reinstall its operating system --at which point the computer will freeze for three days while it downloads the latest Microsoft error reporting updates. Those adventurous souls will, of course, need to take with them sufficient food, water, and sleeping bags, and they might need some form of defence against 3-D printed robot crews that might not be welcoming. After all, who is to know that the robots might not have organised themselves into some sort of National Union of Robotic 3-D seamen? If they are autonomous and possess artificial intelligence, that might be a logical outcome. They might even each be printed copies of the master who sent the boarding party, so then who does one obey?

Looking on the bright side, all of this technology is not necessarily a bad thing. Ships might continue to sink or spread containers and oil slicks all over the oceans, but few human seafarers will lose their lives. Some ships might even arrive at the destination for which they were programmed while steaming at full speed through fishing vessels filled with Libyan refugees in the Mediterranean. At least that is a solution to the refugee crisis. 

Sadly, some countries with a history of exporting seamen will suffer. People from the Baltic states and the Philippines will experience some deprivation, but that is not a long term problem because they are all coming to live here anyway.


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## China hand (Sep 11, 2008)

Said it before, still believe it. When it becomes economically viable to trade with unmanned vessels, it will happen.


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## MikeGDH (May 10, 2014)

China hand said:


> Said it before, still believe it. When it becomes economically viable to trade with unmanned vessels, it will happen.


And that, of course, is the real 'bottom line' for most things in our lives!
Mike


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