So today’s the day of the 2024 UCL Submarine Design and Acquisition Course VIP presentations. Seven designs this year, developed to requirements produced by the staff: First up, MAGPIE, a small SSK intended for wolfpack / swarm attacks in coastal defence, where boats are coordinated via seabed comms and expendable buoys. Eight heavyweight torpedoes in external stowages.

It’s that time of year again when our MSc Naval Architects and Marine Engineers get to present their ship designs to navy and industry guests. Five designs in total, meeting difficult requirements set by the course staff: THREAD First up, a 60,000t 310m nuclear powered aircraft carrier, carrying 42 aircraft and with a flight deck layout ensuring CTOL launch and recovery after a missile hit.

And here we go, the @uclmecheng Submarine Design and Acquisition Course design presentations! A thread… First up, AGILE. An AIP SSK with the ability to change roles via an internal module bay that can be accessed via a bolted hull section.

Slanty ship analysis. Assuming watertight compartments A-M as shown - dotted line is where think the vic deck narrows. I've assumed the ballast tanks are divided into wing tanks and a centre tank. A lot of assumptions and a crude hullform but intact seems reasonable so OK... 1/n



Trying to match this image, opening wing compartments FGHJ is getting there (igore the port-stbd flip, that's for, err... highly technical reasons (I entered the wrong Y values at first and can't be bothered to fix it). 2/n

The running order for the @uclmecheng submarine presentations - follow this thread for info on each design! @uclmecheng First up; OBSTRUCTOR; an AIP submarine specialised in minelaying and also mine clearance. Stirling engines; up to 52 mines in tubes under the pressure hull; a saturation diver habitat in the sail with a combination of divers and ROVs for MCM.

So what were the submarines in the little cartoons? First up was USS Jimmy Carter, a Seawolf class attack submarine modified with a midships special forces space and other devices 1/5 Next up was the comically bulbous pressure hull of USS Halibut, the cruise missile submarine turned super-sneaky special forces boat. 2/5

Let's see if you can guess the submarine, from the little illustrations I use in my lecture today to show alternative pressure hull topologies. Red = weapons, control, Yellow = machinery, Green = accommodation, Orange = aux machinery. 1/5 Now this one should be obvious to oddball aficionados 2/5

Thread on reloading VLS? Thread on reloading VLS. 1/n

https://twitter.com/ryankakiuchan/status/1578151362218467331

Trainable launchers could be loaded by either stuffing new rounds down the rails, or a seperate built-in loader - the strikedown mechanism to the right of this USN image. Weapons would be brought aboard in travel containers and then fed into the below-decks machinery 2/n

OK. Some preliminary results. Any more detailed than this is work stuff and probably won't be put here. This is a very quick model using the published profile. Assuming a missile hit in the forward gas turbine room which floods that and the spaces either side 1/n (this is pretty typical) the ship trims by the bow. What gives us the list and level trim is firefighting water on No 2 deck. Using some standard NATO assumptions for a firefighting effort against a fire spreading aft, we end up with a reasonable match, for a first go 2/n

OK, first thoughts. I see four pairs SS-N-12 launchers seemingly intact. Major damage seems to be in way of the midships deckhouse with AK-630 CIWS. That's a fair amount of cookoff if the ammo catches. The black patches seem to be smoke from shattered windows. 1/n Discolouration on the hull at the waterline may be; side shell blown out by internal explosion; the hole where the missile went in; paint peeling due to the heat of the fire. I don't know what delay Neptune's fuze has, so it could have exploded deep in the ship. 2/n

On warship aesthetics. When this become a consideration to NATO navies in the 1970s, a few papers resulted. Roach and Meier reconstructed the Spruance to be a bit more mean-looking (Roach & Meier, “Visual Effectiveness in Modern Warship Design”, NEJ Dec 79) 1/10 Looking to future designs, Kell described future FFG-7 & DD-963 replacements with aesthetic considerations. Of course, they changed the equipment a bit as these were intended to represent the *next* ships. (Kell, “Engineering Aesthetics in Warship Design”, NEJ Oct 81) 2/10