Especially in the shallow The helm of a supertanker lies about

one-fifth of a mile back from the

waters off shore and ship's bow, perched on more than
near harbors, large ships a million barrels of oil. From that remote
vantage point the ship's master navigates
can behave in the sluggish behemoth, and with each
unexpected ways. voyage he's aware of a few more sister
ships sharing the shipping lanes with
him, as well as of new bulk cargo carriers
loaded with the agricultural and in-
dustrial chemicals that are increasingly
traded internationally. As a result of
more traffic and bigger, less maneuver-
able ships, the world's major harbors are
being pushed to their limits.
Among these various kinds of deep-
draft ships, supertankers pose a particu-
lar problem, because more supertankers
mean more potential oil spills from colli-
sion or grounding. Yet traffic control in
most harbors today is hardly more so-
phisticated than at a small airfield, and
the knowledge underlying a thorough
understanding of the physical behavior
of such large ships remains minimal and
undeveloped. Especially lacking is de-
tailed knowledge of how full-form, deep-
draft ships, such as supertankers, behave
in "very shallow" waterdepths less
than three times their 60-foot and
deeper drafts. Indeed, the deep drafts of
supertankers redefine most of the world's
harbors as very shallow. Only a dozen
can even accommodate supertankers.
None of them is in the United States,
where strong local political opposition
has so far kept supertankers away, but
U.S. ports do accept other modern ships,
including fast, large (30-knot-plus, over
30,000 tons) container ships. They also
face the prospect of receiving large liquid
natural gas (LNG) carriers with their
fast-burning cargoes.

Rush hour. Traffic into New York Harbor,

busiest in the United States and physically
the largest in the world, funnels under
Verrazano Bridge and stearns through
the Narrows.

MOSAIC Jan/Feb 1975

 ffe

:-

* <*

MOSAIC Jan/Feb 1975 3

The hazards
Ships collide, run aground, or suffer
other accidents with astonishing
frequency. Among tankers, 1,556
accidents of all kinds (some minor, of
course) were reported in 1968, one for
every three vessels at sea (about 4,600
were in service worldwide). Projections
for supertankers predict an accident for
each 50 tanker-years of service, with one
or two strandings a year off Northwest
Europe. (Beneath the North Sea and the
Strait of Dover, through which more
than 400 ships pass each day, lie 5,000
wrecks.) For good reason, insurance
rates amount to about one-fourth of the
operating cost of large ships. The poten-
tial for disaster remains enormous.
Ship collisions have been studied for
some time, albeit with varying amounts
of adequacy of data. A recent British
study of 174 Strait of Dover collisions
between 1958 and 1971 showed that 82
percent of them occurred in poor visi-
bility, 66 percent in fog. Most ships
involved were aware of the other's
presence and, especially when radar
showed the other ship's proximity, had
plenty of time to avoid the collision
(even for ships of supertanker size).
Most collisions were head-on and avoid-
4 MOSAIC Jan/Feb 1975
able had appropriate maneuvers been
made. But control procedures and rules
of the sea did not prevent the mistakes
that led to the crashes.
An incident in San Francisco Bay in
January 1971 is not atypical. Two ships,
owned by the same company, were ap-
proaching each other in fog, each steam-
ing at about 10 knots. Visibility was
limited to about 300 feet. Each ship
knew the other was in the area, and
both were observed by the Coast Guard
Advisory Radar Service ashore.
Reporting the crash at a 1972 marine
engineering conference in England,
British navigation expert J. F. Kemp
noted: "On the Arizona Standard, the
chief mate was running the radar and
the master was at the conn [helm].
Imagine the scene, with the mate tired-
eyed from watching the radar scope and
the master peering out from the wheel
house window, a barely adequate field
of view on his old, wartime-built T 2
tanker, and nothing to see but a wall of
fog sitting across the fo'c'slehead."
On the outbound Oregon Standard,
the master divided his time between his
ship's second radar and the wing of the
bridge listening for fog horns. Yet,
despite his two radars, the other ship's
echo wasn't observed until it was eight-
World's busiest. Four tankers at Rotterdam
Harbor, an enormous oil port, in various
stages of unloading. Note how the heavily
laden ship in the foreground sits low in
the water, with much of its bulk below
the surface.
tenths of a mile away, approaching at
a closing speed of 20 knots. In his try to
radio the other ship, the master switched
to the wrong channel.
"Unable to make contact," Kemp con-
tinued, "he returned to navigating but
saw the lights of the Arizona Standard
too late to avoid collision. Right on the
noseslap, bang in the middle of the
channel."
Ashore, the Coast Guard observer,
limited to advisory functions, watched
helplessly as the blips on his radar
screen merged in collision.
While major disaster was averted and
the losses not spectacular, they might
have been. Stomachs of seamen and
environmentalists alike still churn with
recall of the fully laden 118,000-ton
Torrey Canyon crunching open against
rocks near the Scilly Isles in 1967, spew-
ing out much of her oily cargo and
fouling coasts of the English Channel
with a tenacious, ugly, and damaging
sludge.
Harbor control systems

The specter of a Torrey Canyon-

scale disaster in or near a busy
harbor, plus the proliferation of
such largeand vastly largerships has
spurred responsible students of naviga-
tion to seek vastly improved harbor
control. At Rotterdam, the world's busi-
est oil port, only two ships with drafts
deeper than 60 feet entered in 1970.
The next year, this rose to more than 80;
today it is in the hundreds.
The approach to Rotterdam Harbor
is overseen by two radars used to sup-
plement visual observation of traffic and
radio advisories to harbor pilots. Traffic,
separated into inbound and outbound
channels, is aided by a system of navi-
gation lights. Planned for this harbor is
a computer-assisted radar to provide dis-
plays of the positions of various ships
in the continuous rush-hour-like traffic,
plus an additional radar 11 miles off-
shore. Beyond this, acording to one
observer, the harbor authority is con-
sidering "traffic prediction by electronic done to learn how harbor control might
means," using the computer-assisted be improved. Work completed at Stevens
radar system. He adds that radio links and under way at Michigan is to com-
with ship bridges would have to be sub- plement the MIT study with data on the
stantially improved. Now, as is almost behavior of large ships, especially super- of cargo. A supertanker (250,000 tons)
universal, each ship lumbers in on its tankers, which were part of the MIT making the longer trip around the Cape
own, under control of a harbor pilot or model. Development of the model was of Good Hope reduced the per-ton cost
experienced master. Most don't have, hampered, in part, because large ships' to $2.40. (Since 1967, the increase in
or use, harbor control radio, though in hydrodynamic performance, especially in fuel prices has increased even more the
the harbors many of the pilots on the shallow water, had not yet been de- economic advantage of very large ships.)
bridge use radio to talk to each other. termined. Ironically, the same reasons that make
Others have called for a system much
The importance of supertankers is not such ships economical to run are those
like air traffic control, in which ship
only in their spectacular size but also that present maneuvering difficulties and
trajectories could be observed and pre-
in their proliferation. In the 1950's, a cloud their hydrodynamics. Despite their
dicted and appropriate steering and
28,000-ton (deadweight, or the weight 1,000-foot-plus lengths and wide, blunt
maneuvering commands given to pilots
of its cargo) tanker was considered large. bows, they move through the water with
and masters, to ease traffic, ensure
By 1955, this had doubled, and in 1968, great efficiency, with 80 percent of their
efficient use of facilities, and increase
a 326,000-ton ship entered service. bulk below the surface. Their drag, due
safety. Such proposals assume, how-
Today, some 200 ships of 200,000 tons to their length and relatively low speeds,
ever, that computer programs and hard-
or more ply the seas, with 600 more of is astonishingly smallabout 0.0005 of
ware can be developed to plot headings
this size or larger on order, to be their weight. Comparable drag for other
in heavy traffic, and that sufficient
launched within the next four years. At merchant ships ranges between 0.001
knowledge exists of ship maneuvering
upwards of $75 million each, shippers and 0.01 of their weights. (For railroad
and hydrodynamic characteristics.
contracted for the building of about $20 cars, it's 0.05; for a car, 0.07 to 0.1,
In the United States, a basic exami- billion worth of supertankers in 1973 depending on speed.) A supertanker's
nation of the possibilities of better ship alone, spurred by the world's increasing drag resistance is so minimal, it has
control and an investigation of the un- demands for Middle East oil. been noted, that if mobile on land, it
known hydrodynamics of large ships has Economics fuels the desire for larger would coast away on a grade too small
been sponsored by NSF. So far, work and larger ships. The larger they are, the to be perceptible.
has been undertaken at the Massachu- more efficient. In his book Supership, As a result, supertankers don't re-
setts Institute of Technology, the Stevens Noel Mostert points out that the 1967 quire much propulsive force. Most have
Institute of Technology, and the Univer- cost for a round trip between Kuwait very small engines for their size, because
sity of Michigan. At MIT, a computer and Rotterdam through the Suez Canal reducing the propulsion plant cuts the
simulation of a harbor situation was on an 80,000-ton ship was $3.67 per ton costs (about a fourth of ship cost is for

MOSAIC Jan/Feb 1975 5

propulsion machinery). Nearly all are
single-screw and single-rudder ships.
While adequate for normal cruising,
they leave little or no margin for hard
emergency maneuvering. "Such an out-
landish hull," Mostert says, "maneuvered
by one propeller and a single rudder, is,
on the face of it, ludicrous."
Supertankers have no need to hurry,
usually plowing along at 16 knots. This
makes the trip from the Persian Gulf to
Europe a month long, but keeps fuel
costs down to about $150,000. Even at
16 knots, masters must peer far ahead
for safe passage. If a supertanker master
orders "full astern!" from this speed for
a "crash stop," as the rules of the sea
dictate and admiralty courts demand, his
ship will not stop dead in the water until
it travels another three miles or more
in some 20 more minutes. Moreover,
because engine reversal destroys rudder
effectiveness, the ship will usually slew,
like a car skidding on ice, up to several
thousand feet to one side or the other
of its original, straightline path.
The forces on ships
Understanding ship maneuvering
and hydrodynamics requires the
application of both Newtonian
mechanics (the inertia of ship motion)
and complex fluid dynamics equations
(the hull and rudder exhibit the char-
acteristics of an airfoil moving through
a fluid). The pressure differentials cre-
ated by varying speeds of flow set up
forces against the hull or rudder which
act to turn the ship, obeying the same
Bernoulli principle (the faster a fluid
streams past a surface, the lower the
pressure on the surface) that sent the
Wright Brothers aloft.
The rudder, its area about two to
three percent of the ship's profile area,
acts as an airfoil in the prop wash and
slipstream of the ship. To turn, the
rudder is angled from the amidships
(straight ahead) position and, because
of the pressure differential on the rudder,
draws the ship into a yawa longi-
tudinal (or bow-stern) angle with respect
to its previous path. Then the varying
rates of flow along the sides of the ship
in effect push it around in a turning
motion, with a side-slip motion like a
race car in a controlled skid. Because
much of the pressure on the rudder
comes from the screw, the faster the
6 MOSAIC Jan/Feb 1975
screw is turning, the more sharply the
ship can be yawed.
In turning, however, the yawed hull
creates considerable additional drag,
which slows the ship sharply. Thus, a
supertanker entering a hard turn at full
service speed (16 knots) can complete
the turn in about two ship lengths, its
speed dropping to about five knots at the
end of the turn. A three-ship-length
turn is typical for most modern, single-
screw, single-rudder ships. Such a turn
requires more room for supertankers
than for conventional ships simply be-
cause they are so long.
It might seem that the turning radius
could be reduced if the ship's speed were
greatly reduced, but the lateral force to
turn a moving body around a given
curve depends on the speed. As the ship
slows, the forces against the rudder
decrease, as do the hydrodynamic forces.
Thus, any ship has a fairly constant
turning radius.
However, because of its low resistance
and great inertia, the supertanker takes
longer than other ships to respond to the
helm. At service speed, the helmsman
may set his rudder into a turn and wait
patiently for up to a minute or two
(and as the ship travels through its own
long length) before the rudder forces
build up sufficiently to overcome inertia
to produce a significant change in com-
pass heading. If engine speed changes
are part of the maneuver, the wait may
be even longer, some of the delay trace-
able to the time it takes propulsion
equipment to respond.
Many supertankers have been found
to have what naval architects term
"directional instability," which means
they tend to yaw without rudder changes.
Some of this is good, in that it makes
turning easier than for a ship with di-
rectional stability, which would tend to
steam straight ahead. But instability
also produces hysteresis, a lag in re-
sponse to rudder reversals once the ship
is into a turning maneuver, and a
tendency to overshoot, or to turn more
than the rudder setting would lead the
helmsman to expect. Stevens Institute's
Haruzo Eda points out that just how
much overshoot is optimum is not known
for a supertanker and that it should be
studied at the design stage so that the
best rudder and stern design for opti-
mum maneuverability can be determined.
The laws of physics also legislate why
larger ships require longer to stop.
Their masses (and, hence, their inertias)
increase generally with the cube of
length, but the resistance of the hull
increases with only the square of length.
Arbitrary rules of the sea calling for
crash stops, while barely adequate (in
the face of better options, such as turn-
ing) for smaller ships, are increasingly
inadequate as ship length grows. Yet
the arbitrary rules stand.
Each new ship undergoes sea trials
from which its handling idiosyncracies
are determined and recorded in a manual
for its future masters and helmsmen. So
does a supertanker. Its hydrodynamics
can be determined from similar but more
extensive tests or in elaborate and time-
consuming model research. The evo-
lution of supertankers, however, was
originally an extension of the technology
of their tinier forebears. As Mostert
notes, in the '50's and '60's, they shot
from 25,000 to 50,000 to 100,000 and
250,000 tons simply by strengthening
and lengthening parts proportionately.
Little engineering experimentation or
design testing by models was under-
taken.
"Most engineering work is based on
what you did yesterday," Michigan's
T. Francis Ogilvie notes. "Very seldom
do you go to the Moon, and this has
been especially true of naval architecture.
Like building apartments, you didn't do
it with the laws of mechanics, you de-
signed by the rules."
But then, others have noted, in the
late '60's, the "rules," now in the form
of computer programs for ship design,
"began giving nonsensical results." There
were reports of some of the newer super-
tankers, then reaching 250,000 tons,
cracking up and sinking, at least one
directly after launching. Shipyards and
ship buyers sent naval architects pack-
ing to their towing tanks, notably in
Japan where the most intense super-
tanker construction was taking place.
In the past few years, the results of
such research have been available to
designers. But the natural emphasis was
on structure, with maneuverability al-
most an afterthought. Insurance rating
organizations care much more whether
a ship can weather a sea intact than how
well she can steam through it.
Moreover, the tests and research that
were carried out almost exclusively con-
cerned handling and hydrodynamics in

deep water. Only a few studies looked
at shallow water characteristics, a long-
standing practice since traditional ships,
smaller and of less draft, seldom were
in what was, to them, shallow water
and could handle it aptly if they were.
The effects of shallow water
The fact is, however, that shallow
water produces dramatic changes
in hydrodynamic characteristics
and ship handling. The effects are first
noticeable at about three times ship
draft (or 180 feet for a 60-foot-draft
ship) and become pronounced at 1.4
times draft (about 85-foot depth). This
makes even the English Channel shallow
for some ships; 326,000-tonners avoid it,
skirting the north of Scotland from the
Persian Gulf to Rotterdam. And the
million-ton tankers due on the oceans
soon, with their 120-foot drafts, will
render most continental shelves "shal-
low," often putting these ships in "shoal
waters" while still hundreds of miles
from land.
The reason ship performance degrades
in shallow water is the hydrodynamic
interaction between seabed and hull.
Masters and pilots notice two key ef-
fects: increase of directional stability
and "squatting" riding substantially
lower at the bow.
At the conn, the sharp rise in di-
rectional stability shows itself in a turn
the turning circle may be as much as
doubled. In part, this occurs because of
the ship's "added mass," a fluid dynamics
concept that refers to a part of the sea
moving along with the ship. In effect,
this gives the loaded ship greater inertia
resistance to changes in speed and
coursein shallow water than in deep.
"Squat," like shallow water effects on
steering, has been recognized for years
but could almost be ignored for smaller
ships. However, with a 65-foot-draft
supertanker traveling in a 70-foot chan-
nel, it can be critical. The bow of a
900-foot-plus ship moving at 14 knots
can be sucked down by as much as six
feet at the bow, scrunching into the
bottom.
The degree of squat is related to the
speed, so the solution is to slow down.
However, as speed goes down, steering
control, already more sluggish in the
shallows, degrades further. The master
or pilot must be prepared to make
prudent compromises. Squat appears to
be worse for full-form ships (typified by
the boxy tankers) and is being studied.
For ship masters, squat is a serious
phenomenon. Most channels aren't even-
bottomed. "Sand waves" 20 and even
50 feet in height have recently been
reported in the English Channel, and one
captain radioed he'd struck bottom where
Riding high. Relatively small by
supertanker standards, the 55,000-ton
liquified petroleum gas carrier Esso Fuji
changes heading.
charts showed he should have had 20
feet of water beneath his keel. In spite
of this and in spite of variations in ac-
curacy of up to several feet in tides
and tidal charts, one major shipper as
recently as 1967 demanded that his
skippers maintain no less than a mere
two feet of water beneath their keels.
Another and perhaps more insidious
hazard exists for the supertanker master
in the "bank suction" effect, the tend-
ency of a ship moving near a bank to
be drawn into it by Bernoulli forces.
In such situations he must steer care-
fully to keep his ship away from the
bank without inadvertently swinging his
stern into it. In many large harbors,
preparing for supertankers, underwater
channels are dredged far out to sea.
Their banks lurk beneath the huge ship,
invisible to the bridge. Recent studies
at Stevens indicate that banks should
be separated by three times ship breadth
to minimize steering difficulties. Such
determinations are extremely important
economically; Rotterdam, for example,
has spent hundreds of millions of dollars
dredging its approaches and harbors to
accommodate increasingly larger tankers.
The process continues today.
An effect similar to bank suction can
be set up between large ships passing,
calling for adept helmsmanship. In head-
to-head passing, bow waves tend to turn
the bows away from one another. As the
helmsman corrects, turning his bow to-
ward the passing ship, and the two
vessels' midpoints approach, pressure
differentials tend to push them together,
and he must turn away, taking care not
to pivot his stern into the passing ship.
Again, during this correction, opposite
reaction will occur, tending to bring the
sterns togetheranother quick spin of
the rudder. Lastly (and weakest of all)
as the stern waves react, they'll tend to
push the sterns apart. One final cor-
rection. (Imagine this occurring in shal-
low water with sluggish steering, or in
an underwater channel.) These effects
also have been studied recently at
Stevens.
Ships at sea and in harbors must
contend with other forces as well. Tides,
currents, and winds all produce forces
on the hull. Tides and currents can be
MOSAIC Jan/Feb 1975 7
reasonably predicted and anticipated,
but wind forces are another matter. The
wind force on the side of a ship depends
on the square of wind speed (a gust
rising from five to ten mph increases
force on the ship 25 times) and it may
gust over several degrees and differen-
tially between bow and stern on a long
ship. The effects on an off-loaded super-
tanker or high-riding LNG carrier can
be enormous.
All of these effects on handling reflect,
or are a result of, hydrodynamic charac-
teristics. For a harbor control scheme
involving radar plotting and computer
prediction of ship passages, precise
knowledge of these peculiar hydrody-
namic behaviors would be critical.
A mode! harbor
The MIT project, which simulated
the simultaneous movements of
four and five ships in a six-mile-
square harbor, operated by estimating
hydrodynamic coefficients from physical
characteristics of the ship (length, beam,
draft, cross section, speed, RPM, shaft
horsepower, power, propeller and rudder
characteristics). Based on a model de-
veloped by N. Norrbin of The Swedish
State Shipbuilding Experimental Tank
facility, it derived values for velocity,
yaw, sway, thrust, and rudder flow and
angle.
The model worked well enough for
deep water, validated against at-sea tests,
but suffered from a lack of shallow
water values. Even though it used some
300,000 bytes of computer storage, it
still compromised evaluation of yaw
rates. In short, this relatively simple
model implied that considerable com-
puter capacity would be needed for real-
life, real-time harbor situations. To
refine the model for shallow water ef-
fects and to permit an increase in the
number of vehicles simulated, work is
being initiated at Michigan to determine
better values of key hydrodynamic co-
efficients, especially yaw rates.
Michigan marine engineers fitted an
eight-foot-long, fiberglass model of a
250,000-ton tanker with an electric motor
and a radio-controlled motor-driven
rudder so it may propel itself through
tests in a 60- by 100-foot tank with a
water depth of six inches. The model
will run through a series of trajectories
with varying impulsive forces placed on
it by the rudder engine.
"We're trying, in a completely analyt-
ical way, to work out the hydrodynamic
coefficients," Ogilvie notes, "after which
we'll devise critical experiments to assess
their validity. Before long, I expect that
one of the important problems we'll
want to deal with will be concerned with
bank effects: What's the best way to
dredge for optimum hydrodynamic re-
sults? What should width and slope be?"
It would also be worthwhile, Ogilvie
feels, to study barge systems on large
rivers. A single large flotilla of barges
canand docarry the tonnages of
supertankers, he notes, and often danger-
ous cargo as well. Many groundings
occur, although seldom serious, as well
as collisions"some horrendous," says
Michigan's Harry Benford. "The miracle
is that there aren't more."
Talking to each other
MIT's John Devanney, a native
of Ohio who is familiar with
Ohio-Mississippi barge traffic,
attributes their relative success to com-
munication: "Barge and tug captains
talk to each other. They're in constant
radio contact, telling each other where
they are, what they plan to do, even
negotiating with one another which
course to take as they approach each
other, unseen, around bends in the
river."
By stark and glaring contrast, sea
captains don't talk to one another, at
least about navigation. In the British
study of 174 crashes, the author states,
referring to all of them: "There was no
report of radio communication being
used as an aid to navigation."
Talking to each other would also be
cheaper and easier than installing ex-
pensive monitoring equipment, which
could be mistrusted or ignored. For
example, the initial Dover advisory sys-
tem would cost $7 million, and on-
board collision avoidance systems (CAS)
that track courses of nearby ships cost
$50,000 per ship.
"In some implementations/' an MIT
study points out, "the CAS comes com-
plete with audio alarms, with the impli-
cation that unless you hear an alarm
you have no problem. If the device is
actually used in this fashion, it might
be a good idea to hook the alarm up to
the abandon-ship signal."
But a good ship radio (transponder-
interrogator) system could be produced
for as little as $1,500; with appropriate
legal or economic incentives, every ship
afloat over 500 tons could be equipped
for the same money one would spend for
one harbor advisory system. And radios
would be useful in at-sea situations as
well as in harbor traffic.
For most ships, hydrodynamic data,
such as that being developed to better
understand supertanker and container
ship performance, simply do not exist.
But communications between ships would
eliminate the need for developing such
data for all ships, because there would
be no need to predict their trajectories.
Research efforts might better go into
specific data for refining and enhancing
ship design for better control and ma-
neuverability.
"In summary," the MIT study con-
cludes, "there are a number of other
approaches to ship collisions besides
shoreside control, including doing noth-
ing after the ships have been made to
communicate."
Evasive a c t i o n
But even if shipmasters do improve
their foresight in perceiving
trouble, they need better guidance
in what evasive action to take. Both
the courts and insurers should be heed-
ing the results of engineering research
too. Even though it has been recently
revised, (seamanship) Rule 8 (e) still
states: "If necessary to avoid collision,
a vessel shall slacken her speed or take
all way off by stopping or reversing the
means of propulsion."
The MIT engineers comment bluntly
on this: "Once you get in trouble,
sharply reduced or astern throttle is lousy
seamanship. The larger the ship, the more
drastic the advantage of full ahead (for
hard-over-turning evasive maneuvers)
Full astern, helm hard to port
Stop, helm hard to port
Half ahead, helm hard to port
Full ahead, helm hard to port
Stop
Evasive
maneuver
begun
here
over reduced throttle. The rules of the
road and the principles by which ad-
miralty courts operate should be changed
to encourage full-throttle maneuvers in
close quarters and to discourage zero or
astern throttle once you get into trouble."
Model simulation, towing tank tests,
and sea trials of all ships verify the
validity of this advice. Even large
tankers can "get rather close to each
other on collision course and still miss
provided the maneuvers are coordi-
nated," they emphasize.
Stevens' Davidson Laboratory Direc-
tor J. P. Breslin suggests another use of
ship hydrodynamic data, a use that
addresses the question of ship owners'
and operators' mistrust of data and
reluctance to change. The Army Corps
of Engineers, which maintains a one-
hundredth-scale physical model of New
York harbor (in Vicksburg, Miss.) now
can incorporate towing tank data on
supertankers and new cargo ships into
its harbor studies. "This couldn't have
been done three years ago, because we
didn't have the hydrodynamic data,"
Breslin says.
"Demonstrating what we learn on
such a model would be useful. Ship
owners think seeing is believing. They
can't see [their ships] in a computer
model. They can see them in a physical
model like the one in Vicksburg."
Such model research is also essential
to predict performance of new ships.
For example, the Stevens work shows
that in designing the forthcoming mil-
lion-ton supertankers, care must be taken
in how the ship is extendedthe com-
bination of length, beam, and draft.
Simulation
stopped
here after
10 minutes
1,000 2,000 3,000
meters meters meters
Widening the beam saves construction
money. But tests show that a wider
beamed ship at sea will suffer more
hysteresis in its turning, thus a greater
tendency to overshoot. A compromise
must be found between shipbuilding cost
and ease of handling at sea.
Results of this series of studies so far
show the value of coherent, coordi-
nated research in marine engineering.
If, as Ogilvie wistfully noted, marine
engineers don't get a chance "to go to
the Moon," they clearly can work to-
gether fruitfully to advance both their
technology and its application by the
users. Obviously, this is not an easy
jobthe inertia of seamanship practice
and law must seem to them as great as
the gigantic vehicles they study. Yet
their work shows the value of the po-
tential of making simple changes when
complex ones offer themselves. The
extraordinary number of ship collisions
and strandings that now occur, plus the
vast potential for social and economic
damage to be expected if the trend con-
tinues and involves larger ships, demon-
strates how important their work is.
Finding simple and inexpensive answers
to problems that appear intractable is
good engineering. Refusal to heed good
engineering is not only irresponsible
politics and bad economics; it is also,
in this case, "lousy seamanship."*
MOSAIC Jan/Feb 1975 9