DHeckrotte
Guru
Please excuse the REALLY DUMB questions:
We have twin diesels with main instrument panels at the lower helm and much reduced panels on the flybridge. The helm position and panels include gauges, tach, alarm sounder, four idiot lights, keyed ignition switch, stop button, fuel gauge, and hourmeter, shifter and throttle. The flybridge position and panels include tach, alarm sounder, four idiot lights, start button, stop button, shifter and throttle.
How do you use these things? If on the flybridge, you couldn't start the engine w/o the key being on, and if it was on, the alarm sounder would be making a racket. If you're chugging along, the engine probably won't stall from any cause you could fix from the flybridge. So, if you needed to start the engine it would only have been stopped if you'd stopped it for some other reason.
As for stopping the engine from the flybridge, you would have chosen to for some emergency, pick up a person overboard, a pot warp around a propeller. And you'd be listening to the racket until somebody got the person aboard, or you got below, dealt with the problem and turned the key off. Only if a person below dealt with a short problem, would you need a start button on the flybridge.
All seems rather peculiar to me. But arranging true interchangeability between lower and upper helm would have been wonderfully complicated and expensive in the good old days of wires, relays and switches. I suppose it'd be a relative piece of cake with modern digital doohickeys.
We have twin diesels with main instrument panels at the lower helm and much reduced panels on the flybridge. The helm position and panels include gauges, tach, alarm sounder, four idiot lights, keyed ignition switch, stop button, fuel gauge, and hourmeter, shifter and throttle. The flybridge position and panels include tach, alarm sounder, four idiot lights, start button, stop button, shifter and throttle.
How do you use these things? If on the flybridge, you couldn't start the engine w/o the key being on, and if it was on, the alarm sounder would be making a racket. If you're chugging along, the engine probably won't stall from any cause you could fix from the flybridge. So, if you needed to start the engine it would only have been stopped if you'd stopped it for some other reason.
As for stopping the engine from the flybridge, you would have chosen to for some emergency, pick up a person overboard, a pot warp around a propeller. And you'd be listening to the racket until somebody got the person aboard, or you got below, dealt with the problem and turned the key off. Only if a person below dealt with a short problem, would you need a start button on the flybridge.
All seems rather peculiar to me. But arranging true interchangeability between lower and upper helm would have been wonderfully complicated and expensive in the good old days of wires, relays and switches. I suppose it'd be a relative piece of cake with modern digital doohickeys.