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Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)

Austal Ships, 100 Clarence Beach Road, Henderson, Western Australia, 6166  www.austal.com

Littoral Combat Ship - US Navy

Austal Ships has developed an impressive reputation as the world's leading designer and builder of fast ferries. In recent years, Austal has turned its attention to the naval market with a range of new patrol vessels for the Australian and other Navies.

Now they are setting their sights even higher with a radical new trimaran for the US Navy. Following on from the commercial success of their trimaran platform for the Fred Olsen express, the new trimaran is one contender for a new range of littoral combat ships.

The basis of Austal's seaframe design is the 127 metre trimaran hull 'Benchijigua Express', recently delivered as a passenger-vehicle ferry to a leading Spanish ferry operator. The benefits of this hull in commercial service are better seakeeping, passenger comfort and efficiency. For naval operators these features and a beam (width) of 31.6 metres combine to provide a ship with superior speed (in excess of 40 knots / 74 km/h), flexibility, shallow draft, payload and significant aviation capabilities over conventional designs. In the naval form of the vessel, the ship carries two large helicopters which can be operated in adverse sea conditions because of the extremely stable trimaran hull.

The LCS will be the most advanced high speed military craft in the world and are intended to operate in coastal areas globally. As a key part of the US Navy fleet, they will be highly manoeuvrable and configurable to support mine detection / elimination, anti-submarine and surface warfare. The trimaran hull form permits the ship to carry a large capacity of weapons packages.

• Maxsurf has been used to design this impressive trimaran.
• Hydromax has been used for all intact and damaged stability calculations and submitting the stability booklets.
• The plate stiffening of the LCS have all been created in Workshop and exported into ShipConstructor.
• A team of 50 naval architects, structural and mechanical engineers and other designers are working on this project. ShipConstructor is being used at two remote locations simultaneously - Henderson, Australia and Alabama, United States - for all structural detailing, piping, HVAC, equipment and delivering production information to the US yard.

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Maxsurf Applications

Maxsurf has been used for major naval projects by the following organisations -

• US Navy, US
  
• Bath Iron Works, US
  
• Australian Department of Defence, Australia
  
• Austal Ships, Australia
  
• Tenix, Australia
  
• ADI, Australia
  
• Pt Palindo, Indonesia
  

See the Naval Launchings pages for more information on these projects.