Page 17: of Marine News Magazine (March 2012)

www.marinelink.com MN17Architect is able to better utilize space, resulting in a noticeable increase of the cargo capacity. The crew work, as well as the need for maintenance and repair, has diminished because of new technolo- gies on these systems. Many opera- tors have realized that you do not need a PhD graduate to run such a vessel. If you mentioned diesel-elec- tric systems a while back, everyone believed it to be rocket science. It is not. As time has passed, shipyards better understand the advantages of the installation of these systems com-pared to a standard shaft system and can estimate better prices for the con-struction. Overall, when you add material, equipment and labor costsfor both systems, the diesel-electricsystem is comparable to the standard shaft/gearbox/diesel system and in some cases, it is even better. Although wind farms haven?t taken off here as they have in other places, maintenance vessels dohave unique mission sets. Tell us about some of the challenges thatwill be involved with designing thisnext generation of specialty ton-nage.Price dictates many things and that has been one of the major factorsdriving this industry. Another one is that this industry is still not well established and some operators feel itis a fad and may not last that long.This is changing a little at a time, butit is not proven and there is a risk in putting too much money into it ornot enough. You can find yourself with too much equipment or not enough.Some operators are still waiting for things to coagulate a little more. Here is where my father?s saying, ?The second mouse always eats the cheese? is very applicable. Thus, the Naval Architect needs to find ways of providing the proper design at an affordable cost. Another area is ship motion and maneuverability. For some of the maintenance operations of offshore windfarms, ship motion and maneu-verability is very important and a good practical design is very valuable because it brings a safer and reliable craft to the system. MN#3 (1-17):MN 2011 Layouts 3/2/2012 10:55 AM Page 17