Trans RINA, Vol 153, Part A1, Intl J Maritime Eng, 2011 Jan-Mar


engineering sciences which naval architects, as dare one say “hull engineers”, are responsible for in ship design, whereas Style is something different. I have tried to list the main topics I consider this term covers, as broader issues that are relevant to the naval architect in his role as the ship design architect and engineer (analogous to a mix of the built environment’s architect AND the civil engineer). Naval architectural education has not addressed these issues in the same depth as the “first four Ss” for good reasons and cannot yet devote much more effort to them. However, it may be that more than just an awareness of some relevant theory and tools, associated with, for example, human factors aspects, may start to be incorporated in the typical Masters’ level ship design exercises. I have propounded this need for expanding the ship designer’s knowledge base as a logical consequence, I believe, of the necessity of the opening up preliminary ship design, which itself arises with the adoption of the UCL Design Building Block approach, referred to in the third paragraph of Section 4.7 of the paper.


I support Cdr Dicks’ suggestion that, separately from the need for new areas of knowledge, the history of ship design should also


be incorporated in maritime


engineering courses. We have, in the field of ship design, D K Brown’s strong plea to that effect in his 1993 paper, also referred to in Section 4.7, and furthermore I recall his strong injunction to “remember the HUNTS” as a salutary lesson of what can all too readily occur when a design organisation fails to maintain independent design checks, even in the throws of a war of survival [6]. There is


also no reason why historic lessons cannot be


introduced into the body of general teaching, such as referring to casebook examples like “Vasa”, “Captain”, “Titanic” and “Estonia” when introducing topics in ship stability. Whether UK engineering courses as a whole should have a larger element of general education, such as philosophy and general economics, which are core to the French Ecole Polytechique’s curriculum, raises a question well worth a wider debate, particularly if one believes the British Engineer lacks


commensurate


influence and status vis a vis his or her Continental cousin?


This leads nicely onto Cdr Dicks proposal that a (eminent and media savvy) submarine designer presents submarine design to the next available Royal Institution Christmas Lecture series. It is a topic that would certainly show the intellectual challenge in designing an excellent example of a Physically Large and Complex System [7]. I would not dismiss the idea for security reasons, as both the short UCL Post-Graduate Submarine Design Course (www.mecheng.ucl.ac.uk/learning/short- courses/submarine-design/) and the text book by the late Roy Burcher and Louis Rydill [8] show this can be side stepped. However an alternative might be “Design in the Age of the Computer” with ship (and submarine) design (as PL&C System Design par excellence) at the apogee, rather than aerospace or software – ‘though, I am sure, both could be included en passant.


Dr Buxton’s comments add immensely to the value of the paper, especially his insight that the sister institutions in the North East of England and Scotland have more readily provided design details than generally occur in the Transaction papers. The naval equivalent of Bocler’s note book were those of the many naval constructors, which still provide real design details but only once they have been declassified and held by the National Maritime Museum at Woolwich.


I am grateful also to his


description of the essential synthesising role of the naval architect starting with the metaphorical blank sheet of paper. His pertinent observation is that Design Authority in the merchant ship field has tended to be retained at the top end of the complexity spectrum. Interestingly in the naval domain the issue of transfer from the owner has been addressed by Dr Gates in his 2006 paper (see Section 4.7) although it now seems to be returning back to the naval owner, the UK MoD, for similar reasons. However such moves are only sustainable if such “owners’ are prepared to employ sufficient properly educated and experienced ship designers. It is not just in defence that the consequences of not doing so can be seen for the tax payer (see the Audit Commission’s critique of the Antarctic Survey’s purchase of the James Clark Ross over a decade ago [9]).


I feel, as the project manager who started the original design studies for the new Queen Elisabeth Class aircraft carriers in 1992, that I must comment on Dr Buxton’s remark on the length of the naval ship design process. Of course naval ships are different – they are not driven by commercial necessity to get a more commercially efficient product into service as soon as possible. Such an imperative, outside a clear threat of major hostilities, only arises in naval ship design if a brand new feature must be got


to sea (for example the Type 45 weapon


system - due to its predecessor’s obsolescence - or the Type 23’s significantly new sonar capability). Otherwise the need is to meet wider imperatives of government, which in the case of the QE Class seem to be both to preserve the national naval shipbuilding capability and to have carriers available once the appropriate aircraft are in service. This stretching out of a construction programme is not unique to the UK, France did the same in the 1990s with its Porte Avion Charles de Gaulle. Fiscally it means the individual total programme costs are more, but expenditure less annually; the latter being attractive to the Treasury, if not the navy. This has little to do with design timescales, ‘though sometime the major steps in decision making are prolonged for similar current fiscal imperatives.


Dr Buxton’s final comment on welcoming recent design papers being presented by the “true authors” is valid to a degree, and as the junior author of the 1980 Transaction paper on Invincible Class (see Section 4.3), co-authored with the late Arthur Honnor then the Project Director, I greatly appreciated the recognition of my authorship. However, the old practice that every RN design was presented to the Institution by the DNC was, in no small


©2011: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects


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