Book excerpt: This technical book presents in a concise and concentrated form all the essential aspects of operating a ship. These include the basics of buoyancy and propulsion technology, ship safety, occupational safety and environmental protection on board as well as important auxiliary equipment. These aspects are explained in more detail using numerous examples. The book is intended for ship's engineers at university, on board and in shipping companies as well as for design engineers in the shipyard. This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Schiffsbetriebstechnik by Manfred Pfaff, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2018. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.