It seems to me that these ships are built with zero power/vital services back-up or redundancy. Everything is a "single thread" leading back to the engines. When you lose the engines, you lose everything.

If this is so, IMO cruise ships need to be designed with some back-ups, e.g. generators to power the basic services (water, sanitation, some A/C). Oh yeah, also the bilge pumps. . .I would have thought this would be basic to the engineering of the ship. No single fault should cause this much trouble.

When I had my sailboat, I had various back-ups in place for just about everything; some were pretty basic, but they were there.

In some ways, the folks on board would be in better circumstances if they had abandoned ship in lifeboats, and the ship let to sink. They would be at home by now, instead of suffering for 2 more days.

I can see no reason that I would want to go on one of these things.