Andrew Craig-Bennett

The ship of the future, 2020 edition

Andrew Craig-Bennett ponders novel vessel designs

One of the few bright sides for those at sea during the pandemic is that there are no superintendent’s visits any more. You might think this is a bad thing, because the expletive deleted super cannot be shown what is wrong and what needs doing in person. But if we think more carefully, we can see that it is a good thing. As the ocean greyhound that the now-invisible super thinks he is in charge of gets less and less like the heap of rust that the crew are actually driving from no-shore-leave to no-shore-leave, the crew learn to relax and get on with making the best of the ship they have actually got, as opposed to the ship that the super thinks they are aboard, and instructions to do this, that, and the other with equipment that stopped working months ago when the super crossed out the indent for the spares, and was fixed in quite an innovative way, can be safely ignored. Or unsafely ignored, but either way, ignored they will be. Most ships can go on for quite a long time like this – indeed, most of them are doing so – which is just as well, because otherwise the world’s people would not get fed, clothed and kept warm.

Eventually, the ships and the men who man them will fall over. But let’s not think about that, because we will have time to design and build the ships for the new normal.

Like many of us, I had the pleasure of going onboard some of the ships built under the German Schiff der Zukunft programme in the 1980s. We need to do that again, but rather differently.

Let us assume for a moment that the prophets of doom are correct, that a vaccine for Covid-19 is not found, and we have to go on like this for a while. What does a ship for the new normal look like?

There won’t be an accommodation block. There will be two, and both will be very large. Since the crew won’t be getting off for years at a time, they may as well have their families with them

Well, quite different. There won’t be an accommodation block. There will be two, in the manner of the oldstyle tankers; one aft and one under the wheelhouse, and both will be very large, because whilst the crew will be large, to include some spare ABs, a chief thief and a deputy ETO, we will still want lots of spare cabins. Since the crew won’t be getting off for years at a time, they may as well have their families with them, and when Wife A no longer gets on with Wife B, she can decamp to the other end of the ship. For similar reasons, there will be at least two galleys and at least two dining rooms.

The stores and spares, and the workshops and tools, will be beyond the dreams of chief engineers, because few more spares will be supplied for the life of the ship. There will be an entire hatch filled with cylinder liners, given the rate at which low sulphur fuel oil gets through them, and everything else in proportion.

The main engine, on the other hand, will be tiny, because if 11 knots was good enough for a Liberty ship, it’s good enough for us. This means that the fresh water capacity will be vast, because we won’t ever make enough.

There will be a separate weathertight door at the weather deck level, leading to a separate stairway to a hermetically sealed area of the wheelhouse, for pilots, with a similar hermetically sealed area of the ship’s office for agents, port state, surveyors and others. There will be a small airlock that doubles as a sterilisation chamber through which papers can be passed, and a coffee machine so they can make their own.

We will make a gesture towards green propulsion. Only a gesture. We are, after all, shipowners. ●