[Varley]

Support mid-ocean?

A kind Kongsberg technician, possibly engineer, gave me an introduction to the IAS system fitted to a steam LNG vessel I was visiting in Daewoo. It is the sort of wonderful stuff in which I would have reveled had I been sailing on her. But as someone who must provide such staff and answer their requests for assistance I was far from sanguine. In addition there is the lifetime question. With kit that is single failure prone (admittedly in each of its redundant identities) the only solution at year ten (arguable, but around then) to the kit running into the end of the bathtub curve is to replace it all. The silicon is not the issue it is the marrying of the new 'platform' (you don't expect it to still be Windows 10 or whatever do you?). Basically it may mean the re-engineering of the complete monitoring and integrated controls. Taking my ten years to heart Mr. K agreed saying that in ten years the kit would no0t only be expensive to support but 'fabulously' expensive. He went on to mention Autronica (as I told him I had had a KM2 operating well into this century). "Kongsberg own and still produce the later KM series - for those clients that are difficult for our technicians to access".

I would have imagined everywhere that was not liner run would provide them with such a difficulty. It certainly proved so with one Datachief we had.

I am quite impressed with the connectivity achieved but isn't she rather a long way off course?