Look at your car radio in a 90's car. You didn't need to look at it to figure out how to push the radio button, turn the volume, anything. You could even adjust the bass on the fly with a bass knob instead of navigating to your "eq" menu to do it.
Now, you've got to look away from the road, realize what "mode" your in, you can move the menu around to the "audio" section, then "fm", then select a channel. And of course, it's a touch screen so there's no tactile feedback. But at least it's got PRETTY ANIMATIONS!
My Toyota Corolla will blast audio out of the speakers as it boots but the volume knob doesn't respond till it completely boots up. So you may start the car and have 5-10 seconds of blasting radio that you can do nothing about. GREAT JOB GUYS. A volume knob that needs to boot.
This is what was considered not only acceptable, but a "Feature" in a modern vehicle with hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and NOBODY thought to see if the radio interface was actually... efficient? It's not like people interact with the radio/music console in a car on a regular basis...
Or my 2001 Jetta. It was one of the earlier cars with "climate control". What that actually means is that to set it to heat, you have to tap the "plus temp" button a literal 20-30 times to get it into "HI" to force heat on. And then the day warms up and on your drive home you want AC? Tap it 20-30 times on the "minus temp" button. There was no knob for AC temp. They gave you 1 degree precision on a car that couldn't guarantee 10 degree temperatures. Additionally, the volume control for the car had digital buttons. That's right. Enjoy pressing up/down 50 times. No ability to rapidly change volume. So when you switch radio stations or to casette/cd and the volume is highly different you have to sit there pressing the button over and over. But, even then, at least these were BUTTONS that you didn't have to look away from the road to use. They had little tactile notches on them so you could feel around for them.
https://ccco.s3.amazonaws.com/kb_photos/290/2284_1964_Cadill...
It has excellent thermostat-controlled AC and heat, and it was very easily controllable using dedicated buttons without looking away from the road at all. I wish modern cars (cough, Tesla) would put a tenth the care into UX.
I still can't tell if my computer monitor is on or off because I don't know the weird LED flashing code it uses to communicate that (Holy crap! appliances use something like morse code to tell you important information about their state! How did they get so needlessly cryptic? If there's no picture, I have to check all the cables and push the power button a couple of times to see what happens.
Web programmers are as much to blame too. Show me a web video player that has play and pause buttons that always do what they say when they say it.
The only player which ever worked properly — even allowing the user to step through a video frame by frame — was part of Apple’s QuickTime framework.
Fun fact: QuickTime will be 26 years old in December.
Not to mention the damn spyware that's included with it...
If your answer to the question "why can't a billion dollar industry provide me with instantaneous channel switching?" is "because they are lazy", you are severely misguided (at the very least!). There are hundreds of extremely talented engineers working full-time on these problems. If the solution were as easy as you propose, the issues would be solved.
> zero boot time
That's not going to happen, ever, but I'll assume you meant "faster" boot times.
Probably. Keep in mind that your average set-top box likely goes through a more complex secure boot process than most electronic devices you would ever interact with. Why? Because if people can run arbitrary firmware on a set-top box, your cable company would lose a shit ton of money.
> instantaneous channel switching
You are bound by the latency required to demodulate a signal being broadcast from some satellite ~30,000 km away from the receiver, decrypt the resulting stream, and finally decode it, all on the fly so you get a nice, continuous, stutter-free full HD broadcast.
I am no expert, so there is probably way more stuff happening behind the scene that someone else could probably shed light on. The point of my comment was to demonstrate that things can sometimes be more complicated than they seem at first glance.
The answer is never "engineers are lazy". The answer is, the company doesn't give a flying fuck about this problem and will actually prevent engineers from working on solving it, because they can sell you a TV perfectly well with this problem still present, and there's other work for engineers that makes TVs easier to sell than actually delivering a quality product.
Decrypting and demodulating have be as fast as the data is coming, otherwise the delay would grow until you never saw the end of the show. So that's not the reason either.
Your TV doesn't have the information it needs to start displaying MPEG-2+ATSC A/53 video for as long as 700ms. It needs to buffer quite a bit of timing information and at least an I-picture frame before it can start displaying anything: http://www.bretl.com/mpeghtml/startbuf.HTM
Not only that - the overall standard has tight timing tolerances to keep video arriving at the encoder/transmitter in-sync with audio/video leaving the decoder in your TV. It's not like MP3 streaming where every client has its own buffer size and time to start playing depending on network conditions, bitrate, etc.
Having a reliable buffering process to keep receivers in-sync is a feature, not a bug.
You're sure this is engineering laziness? How much extra would you pay for a TV with faster channel changing?
Simple solution: just put 10x decoders/tuners for most recently used channels. I don't think it's really an engineering problem but more about cost-effectiviness, i.e. not enough consumers are willing to pay the premium.
However, even if the read-ahead tuner was perfectly predictive you'd still need to flip through channels fairly slowly, otherwise you'll outrun it - about a second a channel.
What some people do is make an audio file consisting of several seconds of silence, and do whatever is needed (call it "AAA.mp3", or put it first in a default playlist) to have it play while the player boots.
But yeah, it's really messed up that that should be considered acceptable.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Cookmatic-Radarange-Made-by...
As cool as my friends' new car's features are, I still love my Acura RSX. I can reach from the steering wheel to adjust anything on the console without taking my eyes off the road. No fuss, made for human hands, knobs and buttons.
This was used on the America's Cup New Zealand hydrofoil [1]. Conventional designs gave a helmsman a wheel to control the rudder with a twist grip on that wheel which controlled the angle of the hydrofoils and therefore the ride height of the boat. On the New Zealand design,
> they've got control of the boat divided between three people, so that Peter Burling is just steering. You can see he's just driving Miss Daisy when he's going down the run. And there's a guy trimming the wing sheet [adjusting power], he's doing a relatively conventional job. But then the third man forward in the boat has got his arms in what look like biathlon bars and he's controlling both the daggerboards all the time. He's in charge of just keeping the boat ride height at the right level, whereas on the other boats it's the helm with his buttons and paddles on the wheel who's actually having to fly the boat up and down and do the steering.
This does leave just one person - the helm - with real control of the boat. The others are just maintaining the ride height and maximum power from the sail. In the naval model, the helm doesn't actually have control of the boat.
But I think that you're correct that a naval ship which would allow electronics to maintain speed and bearing doesn't require that, and the primary reason for retaining it is political desires from the brass.
Do you think it's mainly bureaucratic inertia that keeps it separate? Or is there something more complicated about controlling engine power than I imagine?
On a modern diesel or gas turbine ship, no there's not. Obviously there are limits to what the engine can do still.
Right, this is why when BAe lied to the UK claiming that the QE class carriers could easily be converted to cats'n'traps every engineer in the country said WTF? Because with no nuke where do you get either the steam for the catapults or the surplus electrical power for EMALS when you want to steam directly into the wind for deck operations? But our idiot PPE-educated politicians lapped it up and signed cheques for billions anyway...
Looks like some of the most modern or in-design classes are using electric drive, but most things out there are using direct mechanical linkage to the turbines to drive the propeller.
Or does it directly power the engines? This would mean that your entire control loop would include the latency of the steam generation process. Move the lever, wait for the water to get hot, wait for the turbines to spin up, and then the screws would start to turn faster. Like the throttle response in an ancient diesel truck.
Given that the original diesel submarines used giant battery arrays to power the electric motors while the engines were off, and that the former gives much better control response, I'd assume that there are still large batteries in the loop. This paper [2] supports that assertion:
> The nominal cell voltage is 2.0 V. [1] The PDX-57 cell designed for Ohio-class submarines weights 2,100 pounds with a capacity of more than 10,000 Amp-hours and stored energy of 2.6 MWh. [1] The ASB-49 cell designed for the Los Angeles-class submarine weights 1,300 pounds with a capacity of 7,200 Amp-hours and stored energy of 1.8 MWh. [1] The LLL-69 type cell weights 1,500 pounds with a capacity of 8,100 Amp- hours and stored energy of 2.0 MHh. [1]
A couple megawatthours is plenty to run the screws while the steam loop and nuclear reactor respond.
Therefore, toomanybeersies comment:
> On a nuclear powered ship, yes, since you still essentially have a steam engine, the engine telegraph (throttle) isn't actually linked directly to the engine.
is technically correct but actually irrelevant. The nuclear reactor telegraph does control the steam turbine and eventually the battery charge, rather than the engine. But somewhere there's an electric motor controller which responds instantly.
[1] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1177196/?reload=true&tp=... [2] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph241/ditiangkin1/
Both the Ohio and Los Angeles class submarines use mechanical linkage propulsion, not electric, if I understand correctly.
Source: https://www.defensetech.org/2013/09/27/ohio-class-subs-to-sh...
They're not direct driving the screw with steam power from the reactor heat-exchange, surely.
You've probably seen aircraft carrier decks covered in smoke. This is because the Nimitz's catapult system is directly steam powered, service steam is widely used on the class. I can't find a citation for this now (this is from memory) but I saw some documentary on it once where it was mentioned in passing that even the washing machines on the ship were steam powered. There's service steam everywhere on the Nimitz.
Having steam power everywhere introduces a lot of complexities, which is why the Navy's moving away from it with their new carrier class[4]. The Gerald R. Ford-class does away with service steam in favor of more powerful electric generators. There'll be no service steam, just steam to drive the electric turbines.
1. http://www.nimitz.navy.mil/FACTS.html
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier#...
3. https://www.marinelink.com/news/dresserrand-propulsion302604
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford-class_aircraft_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_Aircraft_Launc...
Basically they spin up flywheels that then dump their kinetic energy back into electric power as the catapult is released.
And it allows them to finely adjust the speed of the catapult depending on the kind of aircraft they are launching.
Yes, they are, for the simple reason that it's more efficient. This is beginning to give way to a series electrical design, but that's for reasons of increased stealth and other concerns, at the cost of overall thermodynamic efficiency.
On all existing nuclear carriers steam is used for the catapults (and this is much more demanding than many people are aware of). The Ford class is developing electromagnetic catapults, which are also proving to be demanding to perfect.
Can you not vent some of the steam, so the same volume of steam is being produced and the temperature the same but only some of it goes to the drive?
The comment was about the ability to vary power at all, not doing it efficiently.
Are you going to choose to crash into something because it's wasting fuel to vent part of the steam?
The ship command structure was a form of information hiding, whereby the commander only worried about the speed, whilst the engineer worried about how to efficiently deliver the requested speed.
Under emergency you will vent, but under normal operations where you just want to slow down you care very much about efficiency.
Not just for monetary reasons either (though that's a factor) but because the lumps of coal you're not burning now could save your ass in bad weather and make you reach safety instead of being stranded in the middle of the ocean.
Large marine diesels such as used by container ships do need to follow a procedure to change out of the cruise rpm. I don't know how much that can be skipped/abbreviated in case of an impending collision, but I do know that generally it takes more than just someone on the bridge changing a control setting.
When maneuvering, you are watching obstacles and can see how much you need to turn to avoid them. So you give rudder orders. Your actual heading is only a secondary concern.
When navigating, you simply order the desired heading (for minutes, hours, or days). Then you focus on other things while the helmsman sweats the details.
Maintaining a ship's heading is a full time job. If you get distracted, you get off course pretty quickly.
Speed isn't even really handled on the bridge. The engine order (ahead full, back half, emergency stop, etc) goes to the engine room where multiple people do the work.
Note: This is in the context of oil and nuclear steam-powered ships. Gas turbine ships may well have an actual throttle on the bridge. Whether the bridge has a throttle or just an engine order telegraph, the helmsman can often have their hands too full to deal with it. But someone else can do it along with their other duties, as speed control is not so intensive.
Somehow in airplanes a single pilot manages to control not only the rudder, but throttles, ailerons, elevators, flaps and whatnot while also yakking on the radio. And airplanes zip along at 500 knots rather than 20 like a ship.
Larger ship - water is never still, and any vessel's helm left untended results in drift, both in heading and real speed vs ordered. Depending on traffic and the reaction time of the hull, corrections need to be made immediately or even well ahead of time. So helmsman watching constant compass shifts and adjusting steering is a full attention task. As is monitoring speed made vs speed ordered. Still need more eyeballs to keep a full 360 visual watch, radar watch, and a quartermaster to plot position against nav hazards and boundaries and warn against the 'invisible' navigation issues.
If a destroyer could respond to control input like a plane, there would need to be a single person at the helm/throttle.
Entering/leaving any decent sized port that handles larger vessels is a much more intense collision avoidance situation than any airspace management situation I can imagine.
Reducing the reaction space from three to two dimensions and extending the reaction time from control input -> output by a factor of 100 to 1000 is part of it.
The other complication is having a magnitude or more of different classes of "threats", from unexpected solid objects ( chart errors or new items unreported), other vessels both larger and smaller with faster or slower response times of their own, errors in SA... eyes and professional judgment help immensely. Thus the focus on keeping the OOD watching the whole SA.
My sub had at least a dozen people involved in building the "picture" around the boat, visual, sonar, radar... plus two or three of us collating that into displays and reports the OOD could see immediately.
Rather, I'm doubting that going in a straight line at a target speed is correctly handled with a three-person steering wheel. My understanding is that the current OOD already has a trajectory planned through the workspace coordinate system (space, time) and gives orders in workspace coordinates ("go this fast") that are then translated into low-level control outputs ("set the rudder to X"). It sounds like in some cases the OOD even gives direct control outputs - "Prepare for X thrust in Y minutes". Certainly these low-level controllers can't be a good thing for the OOD to be spending cognitive resources on, and I'd be astounded if we can't replace that with a computer that translates directly from that trajectory to the control outputs.
That's why I used airplanes as my example, rather than, say, autonomous vehicles. A commercial airliner's path through the air to a safe landing is basically hard-coded. The task of the airplane's autopilot, then, is simply to follow that trajectory - and I'd guess that it's far more difficult for an airliner to follow a workspace trajectory than it is for a ship to do so.
Really, the hard part is going to be getting the trajectory out of the OOD's head. And even then, it'd be so much easier if the helmsman could execute "go this way" by punching "this way" into a computer instead of staring at a compass and directly and continuously controlling the rudder.
The OOD is estimating a best trajectory given an analysis of the navigation constraints and the behavior of every possible contact in the vicinity. Orders at every level of detail are possible at any time... from 'resume best course for point "X-Ray"' to 'allaheadflankfullrightrudderbraceforimpactport!'. That is the point of resistance to most levels of automation past 'ship's wheel mirrors rudder angle' and 'engine order repeater indicates desired engine rpm'.
A ship just can't have as much obstacles as tank negotiating battlefield.
The UK's Warrior armoured personnel carrier is an example of what I guess you mean by 'Infantry Tank'. It has a Commander, Gunner and Driver (plus the 'dismounts' - seven guys in the back who get out to fight on their feet). The driver - as the role name implies - does all the drving. The commander (who is also the loader, incidentally) directs the driver where to go. He does not have duplicate driving controls. If the driver is very inexperienced, the commander will give him very precise direction. If the driver is experienced - in the sense of understanding tactical movement considerations - the commander can be much more hands off.
If the vehicle commander is also a platoon commander, he is also giving orders to the commnanders of the three other vehicles in the platoon. He is much more likely to be paired with an experienced driver so he can focus more on the overall battle than control of his own vehicle.
The Wolf Rock collision board of inquiry makes for interesting (and embarrassing) reading around what happens when assumptions are being made about who is doing what.
I wonder if there is enough information publicly available to compare the workflows on the McCain to the same workflows on the Zumwalt.
That's how Star Trek do it!
This reminds me of the Air France crash that was largely due to split control. The UX of transferring control of a system is difficult, and I don't know the details of what it looks like in an Arleigh-Burke.
Though the 2nd helmsman getting confused by having the throttles split points to training. That's ship control 101. I do think the loss of practical training is a root cause here. How many hours does the average helmsman have under their belt? It's just not that much.
After reading Ben Rich's Skunk Works memoire, and coming across some other references to the Navy's intransigence in some areas, this fits right in.
It seems similar to the whole democracy v. autocracy tradeoff. One optimizing for coverage of perspective, the other optimizing for efficiency of a perspective.
> Commander Alfredo J. Sanchez, "noticed the Helmsman (the watchstander steering the ship) having difficulty maintaining course while also adjusting the throttles for speed control."
If that's true and not just an excuse for an unnecessary command, then maybe it's still difficult trying to do both at once.
I do think the Navy has difficulty delegating and tends to try and focus power on a few positions.
It’s a habit that the organisation is used to, so there is resistance to change.
(I was born in one of those countries, and drove manual transmission for my first 10 years of driving, but am now a convert)
Even so, the stick driving reflexes only get dulled temporarily - within five minutes of driving stick, you're back up to speed again (pardon the pun).
That said, the automatic might beat a manual in other metrics.
* i.e. it doesn't have a torque converter, since it basically has two separate gear sets with two separate clutches. To switch gears it seamlessly moves between gear sets via the clutches. There is no interruption in power.
But yes, after owning manuals for years I would never go back, an automatic allows you to be so much more focused on the road and enjoy it more - I love driving and have a sports car, would never ever swap the transmission in that back for a manual.
At the end of the day I think manuals are great fun but automatics are more practical. An automatic will never stall out in a safety critical moment, as I always worried I would do in the manual. I've also pondered that if I was ever to sustain a serious injury to an arm or leg, I would probably be able to drive an automatic in an emergency. Driving stick with a broken arm would be substantially more difficult. The fuel economy advantages enjoyed by manuals seem to have dissipated at this point as well.
Automatics in UK certainly cost more, if one doesn't ride the clutch I imagine the manual will have lower maintenance costs?
The Apache Attack Helicopter is renowned for being especially difficult to fly [1], and I wonder if Navy wished to avoid having a similarly single, not-so-easily-replaced bottleneck.
[1] https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/hardest-to-fly-8713...
Which is why pilots in modern air forces are officers. It isn't about guarding traditions. It's about the level of training and responsibility needed when navigating a vessel. The Albacore operated in a totally different environment. Its "pilot" wasn't navigating in a busy shipping channel and could turn on a dime. The reason that the watch officer doesn't operate the control is because that frees him/her to concentrate on actual navigation, the forward thinking needed when operating a huge object that cannot turn on a dime. Civilian vessels at sea are going from A to B. For a military vessel (ship or aircraft) the A->B navigation is one of many different missions going on simultaneously. That's why they need more heads making decisions.
" ... did not have the right type of watch on duty for navigation in congested waters ... "and neither attempted to make contact through Bridge to Bridge communications."
The system did not fail. The system wasn't implemented. UI issues were secondary to the fact that this was an undermanned ship with an unconfident crew.
Think about operating this turkey. This car ferry docks nose into the dock, not parallel to it. You're coming into the dock, and have to stop and reverse the engine to slow. If the stopping and reversing operation results in the engine stopped at dead center, there's no power until the crew frantically gets the pry bar and levers the engine into a position where a power stroke is possible. Screw up and you crash into the dock. It's a ferry boat, so it docks a dozen times a day.
Now that's a control problem.
The Eureka is the last surviving example of this design. Other paddlewheel ferries were built, but usually with multiple engines or multiple cylinders.)
http://www.ussalbacore.org/html/virtual_tour.html
http://www.ussalbacore.org/img/img_virtual_tour/32-lg.jpg
But it was modified several times, so that doesn't really contradict the story.
Albacore was very maneuverable, probably more so than any large sub before or since. The term "hydrobatics" was used. Probably too maneuverable for a ship of that size, since it wasn't configured for operation with everybody strapped in.
A great reminder that "the way things are" often are just accepted, never questioned, even ritually enforced; all while drifting further and further from better ways.
This is bad design. All the controls that can steer the ship should be tied together and move together. How to do that was figured out decades ago.
The Navy still has this thing where they hate to give control of both speed and steering to the same person. The helmsman and engine room take orders from the officer that has the conn. But that officer doesn't actually operate the controls. Some enlisted sailors do. This dates from the age of sail and steam. Merchant shipping gave this up decades ago.
Back in the 1950s, the U.S. Navy built the USS Albacore. This was an experimental submarine to test out the teardrop-hull concept. It wasn't nuclear; it was just a test vehicle to see how such a hull form handled. It was expected to be more maneuverable than previous designs, so it was set up with aircraft-like controls. One person sat in the pilot's seat, strapped in facing forward, looking at aircraft-type instruments, and controlled all the maneuvering controls. It was a very agile craft.
The brass hated it. The person in the pilot's seat was really the one in charge. The officers were just back-seat drivers. To this day, the Navy sets up nuclear submarines so that different people steer, control power, and control buoyancy.
(The British in WWII tried to control aircraft with multiple people. As bombers got bigger, they wanted to put a senior officer in charge, but younger people were better pilots. So they had an "aircraft commander" back-seat driving, as well as a pilot handling the controls. This did not work out at all and was rapidly dropped.)
[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/PR20140408c.a...