Great Ships are the ships that do the job the best, whether as row boats or aircraft carriers. And Great Ships are not the largest ships, or the ships with the most gold toilet faucets. We are in a creative industry and that means we do not create average ships, we seek to be part of the Great Ship Creation Teams. While we may prefer to be remembered as the Great Ship creation leaders (even though the public does not notice or care anyway), for those of us who aim to create Great Ships (and that includes among others, engineers, designers, ship building specialists, the actual customers, equipment suppliers, underwriters, regulators and financiers) there is only one place to be, and that is to be on the team that creates Great Ships. The path to Great Ships is a path littered with lots of single remarks by lots of individuals, leading to a place where the “Yeah, no way that could ever work” opinions are converted, silenced, sidelined, ignored, or overpowered and what emerges is a Great Ship.Īlmost always there is a nominal leader for such a project, but if you listen to the great leaders on such projects, we often ignore the one thing they always say at the christening or commissioning: “It could not have happened without this great team.” We would go home and forget about it, and then a year or so later someone else would mention the same problem and we would say: “Have you read so and so’s paper?” And the cycle would continue until after many years somebody else implemented the idea. What I see today I often first heard 25 years (or longer) ago when attending a paper presentation in an almost empty SNAME meeting room, where a young and naïve (or old and grizzled) engineer presented a paper on a subject where some of us were skeptical, but then thought: “Wow, they may be on to something.” After the presentation we would go to the front of the room and thank the presenter, while others walked out the door mumbling: “Yeah, no way that could ever work.” Oftentimes the success of the idea did not rely on people that worked on the project itself, but on other, possibly even more visionary people who labored at softening resistance to a certain innovative approach. Once we go down the forensic rabbit hole, it becomes apparent that their achievements relied on a large number of participants who brought the idea to fruition. While notable, even those luminaries were very capable, but small cogs in large machines. Often the conceiver, the inventor, gets credit: think Robert Fulton, or Isambard Brunel, or John Erricson, or James Buchanon Eads, or Nat Herreshoff, or Hyman Rickover. I know some great ship designers, but the public, and even our industry at large, knows very few, if any. In this regard, the world has changed a lot, and ship designers have become more anonymous. and globally.īut behind every Great Ship there are a lot of great people that stood at her cradle, so instead of focusing on the ships, it occurred to me it makes more sense to focus on the people behind the ships. I created that list to avoid having to judge today’s Great Ships, but the second time around I suppose I cannot evade my mission and should focus on present day vessels, and there is a lot of interesting stuff being produced in the U.S. Even though I received some pushback on the list, I see no need to amend it. Last year I provided a list of my favorite historical ships as my contribution to the Great Ships issue.