Despite having sailed on them, I had no idea that the Wave class are so much larger than a Durance.

She is crewed by 50 people and of a night time only 8 are at work as there is a high degree of automation aboard.

That’s a big watch. Wave class have four on watch – 3 on the bridge, 1 in the radio room. The engine room is unmanned between 11pm and 7am – if there’s a problem the Duty Engineer will be called by an automated alarm system. It’s a very common Merchant practice on everything except passenger ships. Most cargo ships are probably running around at night with only two people awake, both of those on the bridge.

Fairly sure one of our tankers is currently spending most of its time in the gulf, so that is not exactly true. Anyway, the purchase of the Sirius/Delos has already shown a trend towards a larger replenishment ship.

At the time you posted that I am fairly certain that there were no Australian replenishment units in the Persian Gulf or Arabian Sea. I saw a lot of Warramunga and Toowoomba last year and saw no sign of an AUS replenishment unit. Toowoomba was frequently replenishing from the RFA station tanker in the GoA/HoA whilst on CTF 15X tasking and I presume also from the US tanker.