"What Now Skip?" is just getting worse

[fireball]

Re: \"What Now Skip?\" is just getting worse

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Ask anyone who has entered Chichester harbour in those conditions close to low water!

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Erm - that'll be me then /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif .... and having entered on Sunday afternoon (Ebb tide against 24 knots SW) .... I'd much rather enter under engine with a strong northerly!! There is not enough room for the water in the harbour to get into a serious swell - certainly nothing that comes close to the SW wind against Spring Ebb in the same location! (but that is the great thing about the forum - we can have these discussions!!)

 

[jfm]

Re: \"What Now Skip?\" is just getting worse

Tony, thanks for background. To call a spade a spade though, the genre just doesn't work.

OK you had in mind that it might be a hardover steering failure. But a boat has a dial on the dash saying rudder hard over (most boats have 2 - one built into the ST60 as well as the main dial), so the helmsman would know the rudder position. Or, urgh, are you expecting people to write "check the rudder gauge and if that's ok then do such and such and if it's not ok do a different such and such"? You're going to get a very complex decision tree if you do that... And anyway when it's already been established that the shaft isn't turning so that's the first line of enquiry. How incredibly unlikely it would be to get a gearbox failure (or whatever it is that makes the port shaft not turn) and a hard over steering failure -two unconnected items, engineeringwise- at the same moment.

Fundmentally the genre doesn't work becuase you don't give the information that the skipper would actually have in real life, and so us e-skippers can't tell you the answer. You need to provide all the data that the skipper would have. Say whther there is a bow thruster becuase that would do some steering while you build up speed; say what the rudder guage reads; and the second gauge on the ST60; and whether the gear shift leaver feels suddenly loose (implying a cable break) and whether the EVC is flashing an error (on an electronic boat); and what does the gearbox oil temperature read; and does the steering wheel feel normal to turn (implying no failure); and are any abnormal noises are coming from all the components; and so on. Becuase if the situation you describe actually happened all of us would look for all those data items (would only take a few seconds to grab all that data) before deciding what to do.

What you're doing is like posting on a doctors forum "Patient has a headache - what now Doc?". Well, the doc wants to know age, sex, temperature, history, bp, any nausea, whether pregnant, taken any drugs, allergic to penecillin, etc etc, before he/she can diagnose/prescribe. Otherwise the only "correct" answer is to write decision tree, but who can be bothered...

So my suggestion is write a scenario with ALL the data, or junk the whole thing

Not picking a fight, just saying it candidly as I see it

 

[Major Catastrophe]

Re: \"What Now Skip?\" is just getting worse

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What you're doing is like posting on a doctors forum "Patient has a headache - what now Doc?". Well, the doc wants to know age, sex, temperature, history, bp, any nausea, whether pregnant, taken any drugs, allergic to penecillin, etc etc, before he/she can diagnose/prescribe. Otherwise the only "correct" answer is to write decision tree, but who can be bothered...

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Summed up in a perfect nutshell.