4 ms·
Aside from the lack of clarity about which station has control over what, which should be made really obvious, with additional warnings when someone sets a cont
by Zak 9y ago
Aside from the lack of clarity about which station has control over what, which should be made really obvious, with additional warnings when someone sets a control input on an inactive station, this seems bizarre to me:
While the Ship's Control Console has a wheel for manual steering, both steering and throttle can be controlled with trackballs, with the adjustments showing up on the screens for each station.
I've never been on the bridge of a ship, but I've operated a lot of vehicles including boats, ATVs, snowmobiles, cars, bulldozers and once, an army Blackhawk helicopter simulator. These very disparate vehicles had one thing in common: there's a relationship between the position of any movement-related control and the movement commanded, and there are stops at the limits of control input.
Trackballs do not have either property, and I'm having trouble thinking of advantages they might offer in this application.
- csours 9y agoNone of those operate on the open ocean. There's a wheel there for steering; from the article it sounds like the trackball is used with a menu system of some type, not directly to set the steering angle.
- mjlee 9y agoI have been on the bridge of a ship, as an Officer of the Watch in the Royal Navy. Ships have both open loop and closed loop control systems. Closed loop is the normal mode of operation, but there are open loop systems to fall back to. The procedure tends to involve sending someone down to the rudder to communicate back the actual angle of the rudder. The difference between a warship and a most other vehicles is that you can't simply stop a warship and get out. You need to be able to fight even if you've lost the feedback loop from the bridge to the rudder. For the comparison to the blackhawk, in a ship you can at least do something about mechanical failures in control systems.
- noobiemcfoob 9y agoYou use trackballs to input relative movement commands. The position of the ball doesn't need to relate to the position of the cursor. It's like a mouse if you picked it up and replaced it after every stroke. They have a couple nice properties in that they can be fixed in place and offer more freedom of movement to a joystick.
- azernik 9y agoThese are all multi-purpose consoles - the trackballs are general-purpose input devices at what looks kind of like a desktop computer setup. The helm station has special-purpose steering input devices, but it just so happens that all the things those special input devices control can be controlled also by the general-purpose desktop setups at other stations.