Back in the Navy on my last tour, I was attached to ships company. That means I was not flying with a squadron but was ships crew instead. Mostly, I worked in Air Traffic Control but I also stood a watch as Bridge Crew.
As OOD (Officer of the Deck) my job was to manage the Bridge crew, the course of the ship, direct reactor changes, etc.)
This post will be about navigating the ship.
When you recover aircraft, they land on the angle deck. The problem with that is the vector analysis that you have to do. Each aircraft has a windspeed min/max and a crosswind min/max. If you want more wind, make the ship go faster. If you go faster, you introduce crosswind. So you have to adjust your course to minimize the crosswind. It’s a skill that you develop.
They had a tendency to team up aviation officers with the nuclear engineering officers. In aviation we are used to things happening fast. We adjust and reassess. With the Nukes, they had a tendency to calculate the course of the ship to the tenth of a degree. It took forever.
They taught us accuracy and we taught them how to use ‘rules of thumb’. It’s the balance that made us efficient.