@flaperon Also sure I read something about flying stations and the need to keep the ship moving forwards no matter what, until the aircraft were recovered or diverted.

I’m a marine engineer and this caused long discussion in the office yesterday, the consensus  reached was that the auxiliary DG tripped and caused a blackout resulting in loss of steering and the turn probably caused by a combination of current/windage and possibly the rudder being locked in an off-centre position when the blackout happened.

The only time I’ve ever seen smoke like that was when a turbocharger suffered a catastrophic failure. You wouldn’t see that much from a normal start up  or reversing a two-stroke engine.

So DG breaks, blackout occurs, loss of steering and subsequent impact. As someone mentioned above these ships will have 3-4 diesel generators but as far as I know there’s no requirement for two to be online when manoeuvring, its best practice but not code. Alternativly it could have two online and one failed and the load-shedding process didn’t function as it should, causing the other to trip. The emergency DG should be capable of accepting loads very quickly (~45 seconds), but that might have no functioned as intended or it was simply too late.

Of course the above is entirely speculation based on the grainy videos of the collision so I may be way of the mark.

In this situation the choice would be between running the engine with intermittent loss of oil pressure or drifting into a rocky shoreline under a severe gale and losing the ship. I know which one I’d choose.

Yes but building a facility to override safety/integrity critical alarms rarely goes well as it would just be abused. The emergency generator serves this purpose and will likely have less automatic protections for this reason.

The only time I’ve ever seen smoke like that was when a turbocharger suffered a catastrophic failure. You wouldn’t see that much from a normal start up  or reversing a two-stroke engine.

Yeah, either that or the auxy blowers weren’t running and they tried to struggle through a manual start from the engine side. Time frame is about right that they could have got the manual governor engaged if it was an MCC, I don’t know how that’s done on an electronic camshaft type but again, speculation.

It’s only the emergency generator that is designed to run to destruction, IE it has no protection systems fitted.
There should never be overrides fitted to any protection systems on either Main Engines or Auxiliary generators.