I know a bit about ships rather than yachts, and they're quite complicated to start.


Firstly, the bridge does not allow you to control everything.  Critical alarms and warnings are repeated at the bridge, and critical controls can be operated from the bridge, but the equipment will have a local control panel that allows you to do much more. To start up you need to interact with the local control panels for much of the equipment.


Also, there a re a lot of systems that you need to get up and running. For a cold start (very unusual) with no power at all it's quite complicated.


For example, you need to have cooling water, ventilation (air for the engines), lube oil systems, instrument air, hydraulic systems etc all running. Engines can run a short time without some of these systems, and the start sequence is important to make sure that you don't damage anything.


The key issue is power.  With no main engines you have no main power.  With no power you have no utilities.  With no utilities you can't start the engines to generate power.


Ships have an emergency generator, with some critical systems powered from the emergency board. This usually means that some parts of the critical startup systems are powered, but not all. So, if you have several pumps you might find that only one is powered from the emergency board and if you need one of these pumps to start up then you need to know which pump is on the emergency board and go and turn that one on locally.


Some of the crew will know which systems to use, the chief engineer and the second engineer should both be intimately familiar with the systems and limitations. New crew members will take time to get up to speed.  Manuals and written procedures should be available, but sometimes they don't quite keep up to date with modifications and repairs.


As an aside, the first mate is deck crew, focussing on navigating and cargo handling. The deck crew can drive you from A to B, load and unload cargo, dock and undock the ship etc.  The engineering crew will make sure the ship systems work properly. Without both you won't be going anywhere.


I'm sure yachts are simpler, but mega-yachts will have some of the same problems you get on ships.


Cheers,


James






From: xxxxxx@simplelists.com <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> on behalf of Timothy Collinson <xxxxxx@port.ac.uk>
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 1:28 AM
To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
Subject: [TML] starting your ship
 
OK, this was weird, I had a really lucid and long and detailed dream this morning about being in the water of a Florida marina (no idea why), knowing a worldwide catastrophe meant that nearly everyone on the planet was dead or gone (no idea why or where or what).  I was being dragged by tide & current out to sea and my wife was in the water too.  "Ahead" of us was a superyacht (probably more a megayacht) also being dragged by tide [1] and I just about managed to swim to the rear end where the garage for toys was open with so I could climb up and use a jetski to go back and rescue wife who was struggling.  Back on the yacht we were then faced with how the heck do you start this?  (There was also a bit in the dream about rescuing three complete airheads from the water [2] and an orangutan (I really really have no idea...) but that's not germane to this.  We did work out that there was no power throughout the ship as the generators weren't on.  Presumably they would be step #1 as I'd guess that the engines might need 'starter motor' power???

*Fortunately* in the dream we eventually found a very drunken/unconscious 1st mate in his bunk who could help, but it did make me wake up thinking about these questions:
- just how do you start a megayacht - can you do it from the bridge alone?  do you need someone in the engine room as well?
- presumably the electrics on board are separate generators (pretty certain about this!) - can you start *them* from the bridge?
- am I right in thinking all this would be pretty much impossible for someone totally non-skilled?  Or could you work out with reasonable intelligence and some time (and maybe a manual kicking around in a locker...)
- would it be typical that such a ship would run most economically in terms of fuel usage going at, say, 1/2 speed? [3]

I did find this:
http://rogernorton.net/blog/2013/work-on-super-yachts-advice-on-everything-you-need-to-know/
rogernorton.net
In the summer, the yachts head North. Either up the US coast to Boston, Maine and Newport (Newport is the place you want to be) or across the Atlantic to the Med.


which doesn't answer the question at all but might be of interest to those looking to have PCs 'working passage' or just starting a job on a Free Trader.

I also managed to find this, which didn't really answer the questions either but is a rather fascinating 4 minute review of the engine room of a yacht much much smaller than my dream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7O2omzSnM8
www.youtube.com
For more tests, reviews, captain's report of Hatteras Yachts go to http://www.boattest.com/boats/boat_video.aspx?SubID=2439&ID=2039


fascinating in that the guy clearly knows his stuff and enthuses about in such a way that although I don't really care about the engine room of a Hatteras 60, I found it quite engaging!

While, I'm moderately interested in the answers (not detailed engineering spec obviously, just a kind of 'overview') and I thought that TML might be the one place where there's bound to be *someone* who actually knows, it also occurred to me that this would be quite relevant to how things might equivalently work on a starship should PCs be in any kind of similiar(ish) situation.  (Though maybe without the orangutan... then again, uplifts...)

Oh, and I'm pretty sure in any post-apocalyptic scenario this dream would be fairly useless as fuel and drinking water would be a hugely limiting factor.  Unless of course they were obtainable from sea water.  :-)    That would just leave food.  So a final question might be, what kind of fridge/freezer/larder capacity does a megayacht have?!

tc



[1] Would a body (i.e. human) be 'dragged' by current/tide faster or slower than a megayacht?  One's lighter obviously but the other has a lot more surface area once it's going.

[2] Completely useless in terms of skills they were too - although one had a mother who was a midwife...   I told you there was a weird amount of detail in this dream!

[3] I ask this because evidently my subconscious was remembering the (very very old) ship I spent two years on (which I'm pretty sure could NOT be started from the bridge!), got best fuel economy at something like 12 knots instead of the 20(?) I think it was capable of.
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