I know this is a stretch for an O.U. tie-in,but I was trying to get some insight into the destroyer crash last week.

According to the news,the Japanese ship went past the destroyer,made a U-turn and "T-boned" it at high speed.

To me,even at night,that seems hard to do accidentally.

I've never been on anything bigger then a 100' pleasure boat,so I wondered if someone who did serve either on a Naval vessel or even a merchant ship could provide some enlightenment

I served aboard several ships in the U.S. Navy; however, I was not involved in navigation in any way. So, I only have a general sense of these things, no great expertise. I worked as a Navy journalist, so my instrument was not a sextant but a typewriter! Given those disclaimers, if the Japanese ship acted as described, it almost certainly had to be deliberate. However, I'm sure the captain of the U.S. vessel will be up for a court martial. He may or may not be convicted depending on the exact facts of the case. If the smaller vessel was able to out maneuver and ram the destroyer, it'll be interesting to see if they can establish that this maneuver should have in some way been interpreted as hostile in a timely enough manner to sink it before it rammed into the destroyer. The destroyer captain, if alerted to a hostile intent, would have no other choice than to sink the other vessel with whatever weapons were available, as there would not be time to maneuver out of the way if, indeed, the other vessel was smaller and more maneuverable. I'm assuming here that the other vessel was smaller, though I haven't seen a statement to that effect. If the other vessel was larger, than it's a whole different story.

You do realize that the "smaller" ship here was the destroyer, and smaller by quite a bit!!! The destroyer is also quite a bit faster and more mobile than the container ship. In short that container ship should never be able to purposefully ram a fully functional destroyer in the open seas.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/19/politics/uss-fitzgerald-cra...

Similar to trans-oceanic jets that go missing these days, I find it amazing that there are so many questions that still surround the circumstances of this collision. I've seen costs estimated at 1.5 billion for the Destroyer, and while I'd imagine a lot of that is related specifically to missile or very expensive defensive technologies (beyond being rammed by another ship), I find it amazing you wouldn't have monitoring that would capture video of an incident like this to be analyzed in the aftermath to prevent repeat mistakes. Or sensors that would tell you the exact time of impact and when various areas of the ship were breached with water. In that regard, the more plausible explanation to me seems that the US Navy does have that information and it hasn't been shared with the Japanese Coast Guard or the media. Which is reasonable depending on what they believe happened that caused this.

I have no clue what the outcome of this will be, but multiple somethings aren't adding up here.