Concept Studies for a Joint Support Ship

Abstract

While all the major NATO navies have been under considerable pressure to downsize following the end of the post-Cold War, the higher degree of political instability world-wide has led to a desire to increase the deployability of the reduced number of naval assets. Thus there has been an increased interest in providing a new generation of naval support vessels as part of each navy's contribution to Coalition peacekeeping. These new support ships are often also required to provide a contribution to amphibious capabilities, including humanitarian tasks, in littoral operations. This means there is a challenging combination of capabilities being sought from the current replacements of traditional afloat support ships.This paper describes the design work undertaken by the Design Research Centre at UCL, as part of a bid team responding to a Canadian National Defence Department requirement for feasibility studies into a "Joint Support Ship" programme. The UCL task consisted of designing a range of possible design options, to investigate the impact of capabilities on the configuration of this innovative concept, exploring the requirement's two levels of capability, namely, "shall" and "should" as part of designing to cost and capability. A range of concepts was designed using the UCL Design Building Block approach, using the SURFCON module of the Graphics Research Corporation PARAMARINE ship design system. The advantage this approach gave in designing these novel solutions is shown through the ability of the DBB concept approach to balance both technical and configurational features, thereby enabling significantly different ship styles to be readily produced and compared.