Career in Ship Design

To equip yourself for a career in design you must continually strive to collect data on weights, building costs, & operating costs. You must also continually develop qualitative methods & quantitative values for estimating all of those factors. Make sure your data bank is ready for action whenever you are suddenly called upon to make a withdrawal.

After learning what measure of merit the owner finds most convincing, you must try to pin him down on certain necessary details. Included here may be such things as tax rate (including zakat where applicable), depreciation plan, other tax considerations, interest rate, freight rates, charter rates, etc. If the owner considers some of these figures confidential, then you must treat them parametrically - i.e., try to predict the outcome over a bracketing range of values. He should at least give you the brackets.

Where cargo or passengers are limited in availability, optimal ship size is not easily found. You will be forced into the organized trial-&-error procedures embodied in the ship design spiral. In these you start with a methodical series of arbitrary displacements & horsepowers (kWs). Derive deadweight & speed for each combination.