Starting the engines is certainly the job of the engineers, if there is one on board, depending on the type of the ship. For small ships, pushbuttons would indeed be enough, with the huge cloud of smoke!
as long as the (becoming) compulsory filters are not installed.
For big ships, and not only steamships, it is a more complex and long task not to be simulated now?
At a certain point
of development of ShipSim (2012?), an engine room simulator will even allow revving up/down in a realistic manner, according to a simulation of torque and temperature control parameters, or at least like the controls in Poc3DSim
, but in a more realistic way.
Regards
Luc