Ship Shape & Running on Gas

The Ship Shape plans introduce Australian warships, museums, archives, and a rare collection of engines from vessels that served in the Crimean War.

A timeline from Curtis's 1899 patent to HMS Ashanti's 1961 commissioning shows why a promising engine did not quickly displace established marine power plants.

Gas turbines offer compact, smooth, high-power machinery, but early marine use had to contend with costly materials, poor low-speed economy, slow response, and noise.

A view of the machinery fitted to MGB 509 introduces the practical step from aircraft-style jet-engine architecture to a gas turbine that could propel a naval craft.

Whittle's struggle to enter the RAF and win support for fast, light propulsion leads to a counterfactual about whether an independent Royal Navy air service might have developed gas turbines differently.

Curtis patented a gas turbine in 1899 and lived from 1860 to 1953, giving one engineer's lifetime as a measure of the delay before gas turbines reached commissioned warships.

A gas turbine's light weight and high output made small patrol craft a more plausible early naval application than large fleet units.

CODOG uses diesel power for efficient low-speed cruising, then shuts the diesel down and substitutes a gas turbine when the ship needs greater speed.

CODAG keeps economical diesel machinery running while a gas turbine adds power for a longer, faster burst, at the cost of more complicated gearing.

CODLAG uses diesel generators and electric motors for economical cruising, then brings in gas-turbine power when higher speed exceeds the motors' practical range.

The Royal Navy planned more than twenty Type 81 general-purpose and anti-submarine vessels, but the programme fell to seven and inherited expectations created by their reclassification from sloops to frigates.

COSAG let Type 81 frigates use steam, gas, or both, but combining two turbine technologies imposed difficult gearing, maintenance, and failure-management demands.

COGAG uses separate cruising and high-speed turbines, but multiple engine types can multiply the spare-parts and maintenance burden aboard a warship.

American gas-turbine adoption accelerated after the Coast Guard gained operational experience, reducing the risk before the U.S. Navy committed major classes to the machinery.

Using gas-turbine exhaust heat to raise steam can improve efficiency, but the resulting marine plant introduces more systems and damage-control concerns than navies have accepted.

The Type 45's intended distributed turbine-and-diesel power packs were reduced when the programme chose a smaller hull, leading to later generator upgrades.

Distributed electrical generation can reduce shaft and bulkhead vulnerabilities, isolate machinery, and preserve the main power needed for pumping after battle damage.

A flexible generating network can charge capacitors for lasers and other power-hungry weapons, making propulsion architecture part of a warship's future combat capacity.