Port and starboard vessel's starboard side by green and its port side by red. Aircraft are lit in the same way. Port and starboard Port and starboard are nautical and aeronautical terms of orientation that deal unambiguously with the structure of vessels and aircraft. Their structures are largely bilaterally symmetrical, meaning they have mirror-image left and right halves if divided long-ways down the middle. One asymmetric feature is that on aircraft and ships where access is at the side, this access is usually only provided on the port side. To understand which is which, when a person is facing the bow on a
Battle of Savo Island flooded compartments because of lack of power. Since all of the Japanese ships were on the port side of "Canberra", the damage to the ship's starboard side occurred either from shells entering low on the port side and exiting below the waterline on the starboard side, or from one or two torpedo hits on the starboard side. If torpedoes did hit "Canberra" on the starboard side, then they may have come from a nearby Allied ship, and at this time the U.S. destroyer "Bagley" was the only ship on that side of the Australian cruiser and had fired torpedoes moments