The Ship to Shore Connector (SSC), a replacement for the Landing Craft, Air Cushion (LCAC), is the first government‐led design of a ship in over 15 years. This paper will discuss the changes that a government‐led design presents to the design approach, including schedule, organization structure, and design methodology. While presenting challenges, a government‐led design also afforded the opportunity to implement a new technique for assessing various systems and ship alternatives, set‐based design (SBD). The necessity for implementing SBD was the desire to design SSC from a blank sheet of paper and the need for a replacement craft in a short time frame. That is, the LCACs need to be replaced and consequently the preliminary design phase of the SSC program will only be 12 months. This paper will describe SBD and how it was applied to the SSC, the challenges that the program faced, and an assessment of the new methodology, along with recommendations that future design programs should consider when adopting this approach.
The ever increasing complexity of ships coupled with cost, schedule, and resource constraints require innovative methods by the Naval Sea Systems Command's ship design community to meet this challenge. This paper describes the effort by the NavSea Ship Arrangement Design Division to dramatically improve its ship design capability by the use of a system of computer‐based design tools called the General Arrangement Design System. The General Arrangement Design System (GADS) is based on the engineering requirements of the ship arrangement design process. GADS is currently being used as a production engineering tool.
This paper is organized into two parts. Part I describes the General Arrangement Design System, and Part II describes the general arrangement design methodology.
The paper begins with a description of access design as a key element in effectiveness of the naval ship. The process of integrating access requirements with competitive subsystem requirements is then discussed. Next follows a discussion of the design methodologies used in each aspect of shipboard access which includes analysis and evaluation of the network of passages, vertical accesses, and access openings with regard to personnel flow, equipment removal, stores “strike—down,” emergency egress, and unique requirements for specific ship types.
In addition to discussing existing methodologies, the paper concludes with a summary of potential areas of further improvement in access design.
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