Time to draw
It can take a long time to plan something out in detail.
Our navigator has been rereading a set of books on ship design recently. Specifically, they describe how the US Navy came up with the designs for the warships it built during the twentieth century. There is a lot we could say on this subject, and we may return to it later. But what struck our navigator this time through was the time required to produce a detailed set of plans. It could take years to turn a rough design into something a shipyard could use to construct a ship.
There are two main reasons for this. First, a warship is an extremely complicated machine. It has many systems that all interrelate, and everything must be located in the right place and not interfere with anything else. Second, this was all done by hand. The highly-skilled draftsmen who produced the detailed drawings did it with pencils, rulers and a few other mechanical aids. And it was all done on paper. There was no calling up required information from your computer database: you had to go to the right filing cabinet and extract the needed file.
As a result, there were undoubtedly superior designs that were never built. A marked improvement in the next heavy cruiser class, say, simply couldn’t be made, because the drafting-rooms were busy with the secondary batteries of the battleship design. So the current class was repeated, even though everyone agreed that it had deficiencies. One could hope that eventually there would be a chance to put these right, but for the moment we’re stuck with them.
That’s a chilling thought for anyone with Navy sea time. To send a crew into a shooting war (alas, not rare during this time period) in anything less than a best-effort ship would seem to be an indictment of the whole process. That every other navy worked under similar restrictions is not much comfort.
It’s much better now, of course. Producing a detailed drawing on a computer is much faster than wielding a pencil by hand. More importantly, changes can be made in a trice, rather than requiring a whole new sheet of drafting paper and a fresh start. None of us has personal experience of the process, and of course the details of anything current are classified. But we’re reasonably confident that many more options are explored in depth, and that therefore recent warship designs are much better optimized than their predecessors.
We have, however, two concerns about present-day warship design. The first is rather nebulous and may not in fact be a problem: if it’s not in the code, it won’t appear in the ship. That is, the people writing ship-design software may not have thought of everything important. Manual ship-design certainly had its blind spots. Maybe we’re far enough along that this has been taken care of.
More important: optimized for what? None of the ships in the whole five-book series actually fought the war it was designed for. It’s not certain, of course, that they did better than the ships that were never built; but we’ve noted before that perfection is just one step away from extinction.
