Smart Ship Project

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The test ship Yorktown

The Smart Ship Project is a United States Navy program that aims to increase automation on board its warships. The USS Yorktown (CG-48) was selected as the prototype in which the system was installed .

technology

A local area network based on fiber optic cables will be set up on the ships to connect several workstations . These workstations, which run on a dual 200 MHz Pentium Pro on Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 , offer access to all systems on the ship, including the bridge functions, the damage control system and the machines. This enabled the bridge crew to be reduced from 13 to three, and the entire crew by around 10%. In addition, the paper nautical charts are being replaced by digital maps.

The use of commercial systems "off the shelf" should primarily serve to reduce costs. According to the Navy, using the system on a Ticonderoga-class cruiser will save $ 1.75 million in personnel costs for seafarers and $ 2.76 million in reduced maintenance and repair work.

history

In 1995, the Smart Ship Project Office was set up which set up the Ticonderoga-class cruiser Yorktown as a test ship for the system. However, some of the technologies had been introduced earlier on the Sea Shadow (IX-529) .

The first new class that will benefit from the results of the program from the start will be the Zumwalt class , which will only need 140 crew members per ship. The system or parts of it can also be retrofitted to existing units. The USS Cape St. George (CG-71) , a sister ship of Yorktown, and the submarine USS Oklahoma City (SSN-723) were the first ships in the fleet to be certified for the exclusive use of digital nautical charts in 2005 .

Problems

A highly publicized incident occurred on September 27, 1997 on board the Yorktown . When a crew member entered a zero directly into the database (entries directly into the database are not actually intended), the result was division by zero , which crashed the entire system and paralyzed all ship functions, so that the ship floated in the water without propulsion. Some reports, as well as the official report from the Navy, say that the crew was able to fix the problem themselves after 2 hours 45 minutes, while newspapers wrote that the ship had to be towed to Naval Station Norfolk . These reports were later contradicted, but the newspaper stuck to its story.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Smart Ship" initiatives successful . ( Memento of April 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) US Navy (English)
  2. ↑ gcn.com ( Memento from July 1, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ gcn.com ( Memento of September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive )