You are splitting hairs just because the only piece of wired electronic or electrical equipment on our boat that survived was the refrigerator? If that had also gone, would it qualify as a larger strike? Our house batteries shorted and boiled - 6 220Ahr 6V Trojans! Our windlass motor literally burned in situ, as did an alternator - just black char came out of them when disassembled. Much of the wiring was slag. The entire fixed VHF exploded and flew across the cabin. Smoke filled the cabin from everything frying - I ran around with an extinguisher tearing things apart looking for fire. Absolutely nothing was left except our refrigerator (go figure - their control boards are suppose to go bad by just looking at them).

So one single piece of equipment was the dividing line between catastrophic and just a minor brush with lightning? Perhaps that IP30 didn't have as much equipment as we did, and we actually lost more?

I have come to the conclusion from actual experience in weaning off paper charts that what you call necessary for the "big picture" is actually an old learned response. Pavlovian. Yes, a globe is nice, and everyone enjoys looking at one, but for practical "big picture" awareness, you just haven't trained your brain away from your present preference. Once you do, you realize that that big picture remains intellectually just like it did before. You are just comprehending and processing the data differently now.

Picking out isolated (and endlessly hashed) incidents like your example of the California sailors is a nonsensical and invalid argument. How many paper chart sailors have come to grief (the answer is more)? How does someone who doesn't use their tools properly have any bearing on your argument?

Nobody has lost their life because of electronic charting - only because of not using the tools correctly. Same for sextants - lots of lives lost there also. Same for paper charts - remember the young family that bricked their big catamaran in the South Pacific because they plotted their course wrong on their paper chart? Remember all of those stories in the past of coming to grief and dying? There weren't any electronic charts then, so what is the excuse?

Both our two computer charting programs, as well as our fixed chart plotter "run" routes for you and warn you of dangers. Both also warn of charted dangers while you are following a route, unless you purposely turn off that function. I can't imagine that we somehow have the only versions/models that do that.

And do some research on Retina displays - they are at or beyond the resolution of the human eye (particularly those of many of us here). Size does not matter - density does. DPI is meaningless in displays - it is PPI or PPD, and these are not the same thing and can not be used in comparison like you did.

Zoom an electronic raster chart out to show the same area and no information or data is lost at all. No rocks disappear, no depths change - nothing. The fact that it is 15" diagonal rather than 30" is meaningless. Vector charts, yes - but that is the designed goal and purpose of them.

Mark