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Where visions and reality meet
As a child in the 1960’s, I remember reading exciting stories about the world’s first nuclear merchant ship Savannah. The future prospects of employing nuclear-powered ships seemed to be unlimited after the US nuclear-powered submarine Nautilus made her spectacular voyage to the North Pole in 1958, submerged under a thick cover of Arctic ice. The stakes were just rising when the Soviet icebreaker Lenin was commissioned as the first nuclear-powered surface ship in 1959.

Both the Nautilus and Lenin saw a long service career in their respective fleets, but Savannah was laid up in 1970 only five years after entering service. Being one of the most technologically advanced merchant ships ever built, she would certainly have been entitled to all possible awards of her time – if there had been any. Still, she never became commercially successful. And commercial success is what merchant shipping is about.

If I had to choose the most advanced merchant ship design of the year, it would certainly not be an easy task. It would be even more difficult if there was an additional requirement of outstanding commercial success. No matter how advanced the solutions are, the commercial success of a vessel may never be taken for granted.

It would be considerably easier to award existing ship types, which already have proven themselves on the market. One of the nominees would certainly be Stena’s well known Searunner-class, those rather ugly but very efficient ro-ro vessels, built in South Korea in the late 1970’s. Still in “front line”-service with many owners on premium markets, there was a lot of flexibility included in the design. This flexibility has enabled various upgradings and conversions, making the Searunners adequate on many routes still today.

The secret behind the Searunners’ success is that the designers created a hit product. The vessels were in most respects built as rather ordinary ro-ro vessels, but the designers focused on the essential, i.e. rational and efficient cargo handling in combination with powerful machinery. This made the vessels fast both at sea and in port.

Successful ships are not only ships of the year when they are delivered – they should keep that status for several decades.

Even if successful ship designs are often quite advanced, they are seldom pioneering. The ship owners prefer state-of-the-art technology and solutions, but they still do not want to be ahead of their time. Everything, from deck layout to technical equipment, must work smoothly year after year in the weary traffic on demanding routes.

Call the shipowners conservative, but honestly, who would spend tens or hundreds of millions of euros on new and fantastic ideas, with no guarantees that the ideas will also prove to be commercially outstanding?

The investments in newbuildings are so huge that the owners have to be absolutely sure that the solutions work in practice. It is less risky to stick to well-proven concepts than to build floating testbeds for new technology.

Still there is a continuous development in ship design. But it is moving forward by small steps rather than making giant leaps.

When a Scandinavian shipping company orders a new class of vessels, one thing is for sure: experience gained from operations with the previous vessels will be utilized in the new project.

Even during the building stage the owner may come up with some improvements. One could state that on every new vessel there are at least some improved details compared with the previous ships. The demand for constant improvement is not always that easy for shipbuilders in other parts of the world to understand. Especially some shipyards in Asia are extremely unwilling to make any alterations at all to their standard designs.

The virtually unlimited creativeness of some leading consulting marine engineering and design companies is important for the development within ship design, too. Even if the shipowners stand more with their feet on the ground, the designers’ visions are important for the whole shipping industry.

They simply have to come up with new and radical ideas, even if the ideas are not applicable here and now. Without new ideas there will not be any development. And without development there is no success.

The Savannah included too many new and radical ideas to become commercially successful. Still, I am sure that the shipping industry learnt a lot also from this particular ship. At least it proved that nuclear power cannot successfully replace the well-proven diesel engine in commercial applications.

Pär-Henrik Sjöström Special Feature Editor

The art of combining well-proven concepts with new ideas in ideal proportions is extremely difficult, but the Scandinavian owners are really good at this. Those owners who have the ability to apply new ideas to such an extent that their ideas immediately work become commercially successful.

This is even harder than to present futuristic visions of the ship of the future. Successful ships are made only where visions and reality meet.