Vessel Design and Build
With an established history of designing, building and managing the integration of some of the world’s most complex ships, from small combat boats and rescue craft to naval cutters, offshore patrol vessels and aircraft carriers, Babcock is well placed to deliver the next generation of naval and marine vessels.
As well as an extensive track record, which includes a Scott Class Ocean Survey Vessel, Echo Class Hydrographic Survey Vessels and the LÉ Róisín and LÉ Samuel Beckett Class Offshore Patrol Vessels, our current design portfolio includes the Protector, Defender and Arrowhead series of ships, designs for inshore and offshore patrol vessels, multi role and general patrol frigates and a range of fast catamarans and other novel designs such as SWATH hulls.
Babcock’s 800-strong engineering design team provides all aspects of naval vessel design from first principle concepts, through modifications and capability enhancement of proven and existing vessels, to full ship design.
We offer expertise across an extensive range of disciplines including naval architecture, marine and electrical engineering, communications and mission systems integration and ship air interfaces. We are also able to draw on our ship support experience to provide designs that are both optimal for operations and support through life.
Our designs incorporate real time feedback from working with worldwide navies and commercial customers, lessons learned through our construction experience and use of internationally recognised military and commercial based standards to drive out unnecessary costs.
Babcock has also developed iFrigate a smart technology which seeks to ensure maintenance and upgrades are aligned, helping to meet the real needs of navies by increasing platform availability and readiness.
iFrigate harnesses innovative technology using sophisticated new techniques to optimise engineering support. It does this through embedding technology at the design phase and capturing a wide range of data sources that are fused, modelled, and transformed to enable improved decision support and optimised planning.
This cleverly designed predictive analysis of equipment is a game-changer in informing future service and maintenance requirements and reducing through life costs.
Babcock offers a broad choice of design services, we can either provide our own designs that can be built in Babcock’s facilities at Rosyth or assist in designing and building vessels at a customer’s chosen location, including our own, via a technical collaboration. This can include licences and materials to build a vessel as well as assistance with yard upgrades and construction support through technology transfer.
Our vessel designs lend themselves to an efficient build strategy using the maximum of pre-outfitting. Utilising a modular build strategy can also allow multi-site building, a strategy that has been successfully followed by many naval programmes. including the Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers.