Let's look at analogy. The Airbus A380 carries something like 500+ pax on board and cruises at 37,000 ft with four engines. If one engine fails it's no big issue because the aircraft can very safely fly on three. If two fail life gets quite interesting. The aircraft has a flight crew (excluding cabin crew) of two - a pilot and copilot. Guess what - no engineers standing watch and the engines are monitored remotely from the flight deck (and thousands of miles away by the manufacturer in real time). If the aircraft catches fire at 37,000 ft and a wing falls off, it is rather catastrophic for those 500+ bods on board - they have to ride it in having no choice.Alexsa has said most of what I was going to say. Cheers.
The MCR is usually also an important damage control centre. If there is no one there when things go wrong, that can't be an improvement. At least with a manned MCR there is a small team in the vicinity of the machinery spaces able to react quickly. If they are dispersed all over the ship - I dunno. Sounds like a recipe for disaster. That's putting an extreme amount of faith in a computer system / network to correctly monitor systems and take initial action.
Isn't one of the most basic military maxims "Fight like you train, and train like you fight" (which would seem to go back to at least Vegetius in 4th century AD Rome). Maybe we should just trade the frigates in for a cruise ship.: New RNZN motto: 'You bring the bullets, we'll bring the party!'
Expecting an enemy to give us ample warning of an attack so that we're 'ready' is a fantasy. With the rise in asymmetric threats (think USS Cole, plus the cruise missile attacks on Israeli, Egyptian & UAE vessels recently) it would foolish to not be prepared to take damage at any time or place these days.
On a RNZN warship if things turn to rubbish, a team of qualified personnel can be on the scene quickly to ascertain the problem and remedy or mitigate it as required. If perchance it really turns to rubbish and the ship cannot be saved then the crew can abandon ship, taking to liferafts. We trained for that and each time we went to sea, first day out we always had evolutions practising damage control etc. It's SOP. Hence I think your criticism of the RNZN is uninformed and uncalled for. In the old days it's have to be cannons at dawn preceded by rum :lol2
