Page 30 - Practical Ship Design

1

Chapter 1

Introduction, Methods and Data

1.1 INTRODUCTION

1. I. I Design and naval architecture

There are many excellent books on naval architecture. Most of the recent ones have
been written by authors of considerable ability and handle admirably the highly
mathematical treatment that is demanded nowadays by the naval architecture of
advanced ship types.
The last chapter of most of these books is generally entitled “ship design”, but
unfortunately, in the author’s opinion, these chapters rarely show the same mastery
of their subject that the other chapters of these books do, possibly because most of
the authors have an academic background and few have worked for any significant
time as designers.
There is, in fact, a surprising dearth of books which specialise in ship design.
Presumably this is partly because practitioners in this field -whether they work
for shipyards, for shipping companies or consultancies - are usually too busy
exercising their skills to find time to write and partly because they, or the firms
they work for, are reluctant to give away what they consider to be commercially
valuable secrets.
This book’s thesis is that ship design although based on the science of naval
architecture involves something more. In the author’s view naval architecture
consists of a number of quite distinct subjects which are generally taught and dealt
with in almost complete isolation from one another - structural strength, trim and
stability, and resistance and propulsion being three such subjects. Design, on the
other hand (or it may be more correct to say ‘initial design’) requires the designer
to keep the essentials of all these separate subjects of naval architecture and indeed