In a hundreds-of-million USD war vessel, LIDAR-or-some-other-clever-tech-based collision sensors sounds like a well spent couple-of-hundred-k. Probably not-too-hard to upgrade the fleet for a few billion USD.<p>Just spec it to GD like "y'know that beep that I get on my car when I'm about to backup into a tree? Let's get that on these boats."
This article contains yet another beautiful visualization by the NYT team. Really adds to the article and gives insight into how this incident developed and how to assess it in the greater picture.<p>Convinced me to think about it as an accident instead of some conspiracy to hurt us navy through various merchant vessel crashes.
makes me wonder how much they're really paying attention if they can be hit by a 30,000 ton tanker without anyone so much as sounding an alarm.<p>If that tanker were loaded with explosives and had malicious intent, we'd be missing a lot more than 10 sailors.<p>edit: changed 12,000 ton to 30,000 ton. It was carrying 12,000 tons of fuel oil but is a 30,000 GT vessel.
I expect the navy to adopt slightly modified SOPs to prevent this from happening in the future.<p>In a less friendly neighborhood of the ocean no vessel would be allowed anywhere near that close to a navel vessel without permission. It's not like they don't already know how to protect themselves.
Could it be possible there was hostile action aboard the US Navy vessel? There may have been a (possibly classified) incident in progress at the time of the collision. If there were truly no confounding factors... this should be massively embarrassing and _at_least_ career-ending for those who failed to act while on watch.