IN DEPTH - Naval ship design WARSHIPS AND THE WAY FORWARD


Professor David Andrews of University College London (UCL), reports on this year’s RINA Warship 2025 conference, which covered areas such as autonomy, sustainability and effective work processes


T


he annual RINA Warship conference took place in two days (16th and 17th June) in Glasgow at


Strathclyde University’s Enterprise Centre in the heart of Glasgow. There were 137 attendees, and 25 papers were presented and discussed with each day’s session commencing with a dynamic keynote presentation.


The conference was welcomed by RINA president Cat Savage, and she thanked the three conference sponsors: BMT, ANSYS and SSI. Angus Watt of BMT drew attention to the UK’s Strategic Defence Review and the technological challenges, while Richard Harding of ANSYS emphasised its expanding role in modelling and simulation beyond its Finite Element Analysis origins to cope with an increasingly complex battle space, not least the threat of swarms of drones.


Keynote presentations Each of the two conference days commenced the paper presentations with a keynote presentation. Day 1’s was given by Annabel Ransome-Williams, programme director for SSN AUKUS, who started by saying that much of her career in the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) had been managing British naval decline, but we were entering


a changed era (due to the attack by Russia on the Ukraine in 2022) with a focus on the 


This notably included the advent of large language models (LLMs, like Chat GPT, for example), thus foreseeing: “remote everything”; AI being highly present; the need for resilience; and reacting to climate change. So, we are looking towards a single integrated force through the European, Atlantic and Australian project of AUKUS. Ransome-Williams saw programme outcomes for AUKUS as having the following emphases: “simplify”; ensure delivery is not late; and design for maintenance. The latter would lead to longer lifecycles with upgradeability  “the human is at the centre of design”.


Day 2 commenced with a presentation by Captain Mohayed Magzoub, R.N., head of force development in the UK MoD, who did not just talk about future naval force options but gave a vision of a possible  systems’ approach to capability development, he took the example of the Lego toy concept, launched in 1932. In 1947, the plastic connection was developed with the key being precise tolerances that controlled


RINA’s Warship 2025 conference, hosted in June, attracted 137 attendees


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THE NAVAL ARCHITECT


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