Something about many comments rub me the wrong way, which seems common on hackernews on some topics --lots of speculative or "why don't they just.." comments wh

Something about many comments rub me the wrong way, which seems common on hackernews on some topics --lots of speculative or "why don't they just.." comments when one can easily look up the reasons for cable ferries existing. Cable ferries (which this is) are simple and well-established. Cables guide the ferry from one side of water to the other, making operation safe, simple and repeatable, even in fast moving water. They deliberately have the cables lying on the floor. This keeps them out of the way of passing ships, and is the simplest solution. The winch part of the system must be on the ship, not the shore. It's very efficient for the ferry to pull itself along the cable. There have even been handcrank operated cable ferries. It has some other benefits, like acting as an anchor perpendicular to currents. No take up is required on the other side. It's scalable to long distances without having to add piers or towers. In this case, a power cable from one shore was simply added to replace power from diesel generators. This seems to throw people off into a tangent about batteries. Why don't they just put batteries on the ferry? This mostly assumes that the ship is driven by a propellor and the cable is adding an unnecessary tether. But cables are already there serving other purposes, so it's a simple solution to lay a power cable along the same route and no real benefit to use batteries instead. Why don't they just pull it from the shore? You would have to overcome the drag of the cables all the way from the shore to the ferry, the power and size of the cable would have to increase dramatically and it would be impossible to scale beyond some (short, I suspect) distance. Why don't they just make the cable higher like a ski lift on each side to pull the boat? This would require a massive amount of tension, again increasing the size of the cable required. Like a ski lift, in practice you'd need the cable to go from one shore to the other and back in a continuous loop. This is definitely more complex, and loses some benefits of the cables, especially easily letting them rest for passing ships. The engineering problem and safety aspects, considering water level and side load from current would be much more difficult. It's not scalable without adding something like towers or piers.