Local news said they were " . . . being assisted by a battleship."
I guess those mobile landing fields the Navy uses are now "battleships." (Apparently some 25 pallets of supplies came off a carrier.)
Heh, humorously enough, to get around a treaty prohibiting them from sailing carriers through the Turkish Straights, the Soviet's reclassified their carrier as a "heavy aircraft carrying battle cruiser."
Pop tarts and spam, does it get any better? It's interesting to note that I don't recall EVER seeing either spam OR poptarts served at any time EVER when I was in. Now I'm jealous. 
To be honest, I'd love to know exactly what it was that goes wrong to completely disable a ship that size. You'd think they'd have a few diesel generators stashed around here and there in case they lost the mains. Wierd.
They had backup generators and they were working, but those wont turn the screws, or produce enough power to run everything, just enough for basic systems (electric fire and potable water pumps, radios, etc.). There is a pretty huge power disparity between main engines and backups, so even if it was a turbo-electric design instead of directly geared (anybody know which?), it likely still wouldn't have been able to propel itself on backups. IIRC my ship's boiler plant could produce something on the order of a about a hundred MW, while the huge backup diesels could produce only a few tens of KW.
