After Boating for 50 years with all types of boats, old and new, mostly power boats, you end up with lots of experiences good and bad. You learn that if you leave anything up to chance eventually anything will happen. You have to design out the problems you can with redundancy, protection and quality. Then plan for the worst, when the worst happens you are prepared and the consequences will not that bad because you have a plan. For almost 30 years I designed military systems at General Electric and Lockheed Martin. Most of those were US Navy projects. Radar, SONAR, automated ship systems, automated collision avoidance systems, ship's bridge configuration. I worked on the the Navy's most advanced ships created to reduce manpower by increasing automation. One thing I know about Navy ships, they are designed to run and keep running under all but the worst wartime conditions. Every known potential issue is dealt with in the design and operating plan. There is little chance for a Navy ship to be stranded; except of course the occasional "Act of God." That is beyond my scope.
