Question: Do you like repairing ships for the navy?

Alexander Zacheshigriva answered on 12 Mar 2012:

Yes, very much so. This is bread and butter of my work. Navy ships are very interesting. The accommodation is quite basic but there is a lot of clever machinery and for me as an engineer this is most fun. The only bad thing is probably that many of the ships are quite old now, so it is not the cutting edge technology that we are working with, however we often do upgrades during the refits, which means that we install new equipment that makes them work better and these bits tend to be very new.
Repairing is in some ways harder than building new ones because, A) you have to work around what is already there and sometimes you need to dismantle half of the system to get to one item that you need to change and B) the original design documentation is not always there so we have to do quite a bit of investigation to work things out. But I do enjoy these challenges, they make the work more interesting.