I was also asked to comment on the ‘short fat ship’ controversy of the mid 1980s, which I suspect many naval officers, without the benefit of naval architectural theory or subsequent practice in ship design, may feel shows a resistance to innovation by the constructor fraternity. Leaving aside the clear evidence that, historically, the British naval record is one of innovative technical adoption rather than resistance to it, any proposal has to be qualified by a clear demonstration that a given proposal is technically justified and good value for money.
So any new ship design proposal needs to follow the scientific practice of being presented, preferably in an open forum, to a suitably broad range of informed professionals able to objectively assess its merits from the evidence. The proponents of the ‘short fat frigate’ proposal never presented this proposal to the naval architecture discipline, as can be seen from the written discussion to Admiral Sir Lindsay Bryson’s
paper on ‘The Procurement of a Warship’ in the 1984 RINA Transactions. While the public debate about ‘short fat’ turned on a legal issue, the private debate in the pages of The Naval Review was technically illiterate. In fact the hull form drew on small craft practice, namely the published National Physical Laboratory’s guidance on such (Marwood Bailey) planing forms, which are valid up to 200 tons displacement but not for frigate-size vessels operating at typical frigate speeds when the vessel is over ten times heavier than the NPL limit. Elementary knowledge of the effect of Froude number (V/√(gL)) on a ship’s wave-making resistance would have ruled out such a form for frigate size and speed. Furthermore, the dynamic stiffness of frigate-sized vessels, given such a wide beam and a practical weight distribution, would have been such that the configuration would be highly likely to have too stiff a motion to operate in a seaway.
The whole saga was more an example of the low status professional engineering is given in the UK when compared to our continental Ingenieur equivalents, plus the manner in which miracle cures are grasped by peacetime governments under fiscal pressure. In this case it was doubly ironic that the first scientifically (if not technically) educated Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, fostered a government attitude that positively distrusted professional advice, especially if the experts were in public service. That neither the Navy nor the MoD seemed to strongly support its own professionals, when (as I observed at the time from my NATO colleagues) no professional ship designer could understand the lack of official support for the professional engineering advice, says more than a little about the UK’s decline from its former position of being the leading industrial power.