

The French School Where Panama Canal Pilots Train in Cute Little Ships (2014) - samclemens
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/panama-canal-pilot-training/

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new1234567
John McPhee write an excellent article about this: "The Ships of Port Revel"
by John McPhee. It was an atlantic article and is included in his book
"Uncommon Carriers".

[https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0865477396](https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0865477396)

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pstadler
I had the opportunity to cross the Panama Canal on a 48ft sailing yacht,
starting on the Atlantic side. Inside the watergates we were tied together
with two other yachts, one on each side (ours had the strongest engine, so we
were in the middle). The canal itself is mostly surrounded by jungle, and you
get a specific time slot for crossing it because the traffic is usually quite
high, and the watergates need some time to get filled. During the trip it
didn't really feel like there was much going on, even though many large
vessels crossed us in both directions.

Thanks for posting this and bringing back some memories.

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ghshephard
This is one of those things that pretty much is guaranteed to be replaced with
VR simulations in 10-15 years. I have to believe that the challenges
associated with doing "true to life" simulations of waves, wind, and impact of
tugboat, will benefit greatly from a half dozen (remaining?) iterations of
Moore's law.

Though - I'm also wondering, is there an opportunity for automation here as
well?

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steve19
I doubt it. I visited an operational naval submarine simulator recently. It
was basically the electronic guts of the actual submarine, hooked up to sensor
simulators and wired into a replica of the bridge (or whatever they call it on
a sub). If they wanted to replicate a ship, they could. there must be a reason
they prefer to simulate it in the real world on a smaller scale.

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ghshephard
My understanding is that simulators today aren't powerful enough to provide
real-world acuity, so, that even though these smaller-scale models come with
their own artifacts (including time compression, and in the case of the
panama, unrealistic visual comprehension of the environment) - the scale model
is still significantly more realistic than what you can do in a simulator.

They probably won't be powerful enough in 5 years, or perhaps even 10 years,
but I wouldn't take the bet that in 15 years they won't be able to simulate,
with sufficient fidelity for pilot training, a ship moving through the panama
canal.

I'm guessing the complexity of the ship-in-panama model environment is a
couple orders of magnitude less than what the first officer of an airplane has
to deal with; it will be a lot longer before we'll be able to faithfully
replicate _that_ environment - if ever. (Far enough out that I can't even
begin to guess if it's 50 or 100 years from now).

Now, the wild card is, that even though you might be able to do the Panama
simulation in 15 years from a computing perspective, it may still be much
cheaper to simply do your 25:1 replica, particularly as you don't really need
to train all that many pilots in the big scheme of things...

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matthewmcg
Do all of the ship handling parameters scale in the same fashion as the size
of the ship is reduced? The article doesn't elaborate on this, but I bet there
are some interesting technical considerations involved in ensuring that
everything is "true to scale" (or even in defining what that means!).

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phdp
No, they would have to do some interesting things to the density or viscosity
of the water for the handling to be similar. Or they could operate at 25x the
speed that they currently are, but that doesn't seem feasible. See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number)

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samuel1604
This seems perfect for illustrating my docker container slides!

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CodeSheikh
Pilots?! Where are the aircrafts?

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stephanimal
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_pilot](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_pilot)

