What principles affect the design of a ship?

Question

What design principles do we look out for (e.g. drag etc)?

Answer 1

Design work, also called naval architecture, may be conducted using a ship model basin. Modern shipbuilding makes considerable use of prefabricated sections; entire multi-deck segments of the hull or superstructure will be built elsewhere in the yard, transported to the building dock or slipway, then lifted into place. This is known as Block Construction.

Shipbuilding (which encompasses the shipyards, the marine equipment manufacturers and a large number of service and knowledge providers) is an important and strategic industry in a number of countries around the world. This importance stems from :

* The large number of trade persons required directly by the shipyard and also by the supportting industries such as steel mills, engine manufacturers, etc.
* A nation's need to manufacture and repair its own Navy and vessels that support its primary industries.

Historically, the industry has suffered from the absence of global rules and a tendency of (state-supported) over-investment due to the fact that shipyards offer a wide range of technologies, employ a significant number of workers and generate foreign currency income (as the shipbuilding market is dollar-based and a global one). Shipbuilding is therefore an attractive industry for developing nations. Japan used shipbuilding in the 1950s and 1960s to rebuilt its industrial structure, Korea made shipbuilding a strategic industry in the 1970s and China is now in the process to repeat these models with large state-supported investments in this industry. As a result the world shipbuilding market suffers from over-capacities, depressed prices (although the industry experienced a price increase in the period 2003-2005 due to strong demand for new ships which was in excess of actual cost increases), low profit margins, trade distortions and wide-spread subsidisation. All efforts to address the problems in the OECD have so far failed, with the 1994 international shipbuilding agreement never entering into force and the 2003-2005 round of negotiations being suspended in October 2005 after no agreement was possible.

In 2003, the European Community took the Republic of South Korea to the WTO, in order to have a ruling against the subsidisation of Korean shipyards. The WTO found that the Korean Export/Import Bank had, in numerous individual cases, provided prohibited export-contingent subsidies to Korean shipyards which explains to some extent to enormous success of Korean shipyards in the world market. South Korea has very limited domestic demand for merchant ships and, therefore, aggressively targets the international market in which European ship owners dominate. Korean yards systematically offer ships at prices below construction costs and compensate the losses through subsidies and measures that temporarily increase the cash flow. Korea is home to the world's 3 largest shipbuilders (Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, Hyundai Heavy Industry, and Samsung Heavy Industries), accounting for almost half of global orders.

The world shipbuilding market will continue to be imbalanced as long as no international trade regime can be established.

Answer 2

Stability and floatablity are the two more important design considerations. Then speed and agility. After those four principles you can add aesthetics.

Of course you would need to consider the choice of power in the design.

I assume that slave galleys are not in vogue.

Answer 3

size weight ballast. use of the ship, ie:cargo,pleasure. hourse power.

Answer 4

Displacement and buoyancy