A powerless, 100's of tons, floating piece of real estate a little larger than three American football fields pushed along by the water current......no propulsion, no steering, no braking through any type of reverse thrust, no parking brake like a land-based vehicle, no rolling friction like a land based vehicle, just a massive, commercial cork bobbing along in the unrelenting flow of the water current like the unforgiving movement of a landslide crushing anything in its path, like a massive ice floe unforgivingly pushed down a river during an ice breakup, anchors that may slightly slow the massive cork.....

.......suggestions?.....should the crew run down and drag their heels on the water for brakes, like a scooter or skateboard rider may do on pavement?

Those crew members more than had their hands full of a great big handful of nothing when it came to options to exert control over that conveyor of a river carrying them in its massive, massive grasp, and an equally great big handful of nothing in options to exert control over that dead in the water mass of around 3½ acres+ in footprint size.

They did well in an extremely tiny window of time, to communicate to authorities who had to navigate the canyons of different emergency agencies on different radio frequencies clearly enough to get land-based responses in action to get the area as clear of human lives as possible.

They were like dust in the wind when it came to directing anything about the water flow and the crippled small town of merchandise they were riding.

Well we have the audio track from the bridge, the course, position, speed, probably rudder angle and that the anchor (at least on the port side) was deployed. We know there was a power failure, but it seems to me, the big question is what caused the electrical failure.

If I understand correctly, large cargo vessels have electro-hydraulic steering where electrical controls regulate hydraulic pressure on the rudder. From my understanding, there are one or two main diesel engines that drive the props and several diesel generators (typically 3) that provide electricity as well as a backup electric generator. What puzzles me is how all these electrical generators or associated switchgear failed, causing the crew to lose control of the rudder and the main engines so that could neither steer or reverse the engines. We’re “lucky” there was no fire and the vessel isn’t flooded, so hopefully the cause will eventually be found.

If it sounds like a provocative question, it was intentional.

A discussion took place recently on another thread that got me thinking about it. So I did some comparison's using a 24MP A7 III and a 45.7MP Z7 using each camera's 85mm f/1.8 lens (at f/2.8). Those lens resolutions are very close according to DXOMARK.

I viewed the results on a 2k (1920x1080, about 2MP) and 4k (3840x2160, about 8MP) monitor and couldn't tell them apart.

I printed the original full-size images on 8.5x11 Red River UltraPro Satin paper at their best settings. I still could not tell them apart.

Then I exported each image at a width of 1920 and 3840 pixels as well as at their full resolution. They will be attached to the next post.

The only time I could tell them apart was at the full resolution pixel peeped at 100%. But the only way anyone can see that is on a monitor where the magnified image is way too big to fit the screen.

There is a message here and some of you aren't going to be happy with it.