Boat design, claims British ship designer was stolen by US Navy

This has not been a great season for the US Navy ships. Four boats in the Navy’s two classes of Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)–both the high tech, modular warships that were presumed to be the future of naval war in regions near shore–have endured major engineering difficulties, including breaking down at sea. Three of those LCS ships that endured engineering failures were out of your Freedom class, ships built by Lockheed Martin for the LCS application: USS Freedom, USS Fort Worth, and USS Milwaukee.   The application also has seen other setbacks, including the USS Montgomery (a Freedom-class LCS built by Austal USA) enduring a cracked hull following hitting the wall of a Panama Canal lock.

However, the LCS’ engineering woes may not be the close of the trouble its shipbuilding applications are currently confronting. As defense author David Axe reports, David Giles, a British aerospace engineer-turned-marine architect, has filed a suit accusing the Navy of concealing elements of the Freedom‘s design from job he did to commercialize a wave-piercing, “semi-planing” scale–work Giles patented in the early 1990s.

Giles’ design was originated from work his firm. The patents were registered for a design to get container boats, called Fastships. Giles formed a firm to construct them. The layout patents expired in 2010, but Giles’ company–that is bankrupt–filed suit against the Navy in 2012 later years of trying compensation.

Lockheed Martin had formed a “strategic partnership” with Giles’ Fastships in 2002 as the Navy began looking at LCS designs, Giles informed Axe. And he maintained that design information from his Fastships designs–for container boats capable of speeds between 40 and 50 knots (46 to 57 mph)–had been discussed with confidence with the US Navy before that.

The Navy passed on Giles’ Prelude hull design because it wanted something quicker and bigger. Its mind subsequently changed altering the design requirements into the dimensions and speed group coated by Giles’ patents. Fastships was kicked by Lockheed off the undertaking but went ahead and integrated much of Fastships’ design components into the Freedom class hull, Giles has claimed. Lockheed wasn’t named in the suit.

This isn’t the only suit the Navy faces over accusations of stealing intellectual property. Bitmanagement Software filed a federal lawsuit earlier this season accusing the Navy of pirating the company’s software, installing over 558,000 unlicensed copies of its BS Contract Geo geospatial visualization software once the service just had permits for 38 computers. In that episode, the Navy has responded that it received authorization to run the further copies.

Too hot to handle

The Navy’s newest destroyer is with its technology phobias. After being commissioned in Baltimore in October, the USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) began a journey to San Diego, its assigned home port, for final equipment matching.

Even the Zumwalt comes with an all-electric driveway system with electricity supplied by gas tanks. The problem with the boat was in the heat exchanger that cools the gas tanks. A Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) spokesperson told Ars within an email today that information on the origin of the collapse wasn’t yet available.

However, several of the British Royal Navy’s newest destroyers, the Type 45, endured crashes operating in the Persian Gulf that summer because the intercoolers to their gas tanks engines failed in the Gulf’s warm waters. All of the Type 45s are currently getting engineering overhauls to correct the problem. The system had design changes that are late and was not tested before deployment. It is possible that the heat exchanger of the Zumwalt also failed due to the temperature of the water in the Panama Canal.

source http://www.artingerdesigns.com/boat-design-claims-british-ship-designer-was-stolen-by-us-navy/