ABSTRACT
As the demands for future ships become ever greater, due to economic pressures to achieve “value for money” and due to assumptions of more precision in potential ship solutions, then the question to be addressed is whether the naval architectural profession is still best placed to lead in designing complex ships. Other disciplines might be seen to be more relevant in meeting specific ship demands, such as the marine engineer in achieving better fuel efficiency and greener solutions or the combat systems engineer for future naval vessels. Beyond these two disciplines the complexity of particularly naval ship design has led to the generic project management discipline of systems engineering being promoted as more appropriate than naval architecture as the lead discipline. Thus the naval architect becomes a mere “hull engineer” practicing the specific “naval architectural” sub-disciplines, instead of being “primes inter pares” in managing ship design and acquisition. Such a proposal arises both from a belief that the whole ship safety issues need the senior most naval architect’s main attention and that skills in systems engineering rather than the naval architect’s design skills are best for the overall management of design and acquisition, due to its agnosticism with regards to the cross disciplinary conflicts that arise in such a highly interactive multi-disciplinary exercise.
This issue is explored by considering what are the essential engineering skills employed by a naval architect as the ship equivalent, for large constructional projects, of a terrestrial civil engineer and whether this is just “hull engineering” or something more like the ship equivalent of an architect for major constructions, such as airport termini. This leads on to consideration of the whole ship designer being both the creator of an initial design synthesis as well as maintaining downstream the overall design coherence through exercising design authority for the design’s existence. A series of pertinent views on ship design and relevant case examples are considered in order to address these issues beyond broad generalities. These examples include historic cases of “good” and “bad” ship designs and what might have contributed to such subsequent conclusion as to those designs’ veracity. Beyond actual built ship designs, case studies produced at UCL both by MSc student and by the author’s Design Research centre are presented to provide the basis for refuting the view that disciplines, other than naval architecture, can effectively lead future ship designs. However such a conclusion is only seen to be defensible if the naval architectural profession gives as much emphasis to its understanding and practice of ship design as it gives to its traditional “hull engineering” responsibilities.
“He ends, of course, by satisfying neither the Commander who is responsible for the men’s living conditions nor the Gunnery Officer who is responsible for the guns, but that is the natural fate of the designers of ships – the speed enthusiasts, the gunnery experts and the advocates of armour protection, the men who have to keep the ships at sea and the men who have to handle them in action all combine to curse the designer.
Then comes the day of battle and the mass of compromises, which is a ship of war, encounters another ship of war, which is a mass of different compromises, and then, ten to one, the fighting men on the winning side will take all the credit to themselves and the losers – such of them that survive – will blame the designer all over again.”
C.S. Forrester “The Ship” (1942)