I’ll add two pence as well. We could get rich.
I worked at Vickers/British Shipbuilders towing tank at St Albans in the early eighties (440ft x 20 x 10). Our bread and butter was testing models of cargo ships, but we had interesting work from time to time. This included semi-submersible drill rigs, submarines and patrol boats.
A fundamental limitation in a tank is that each test must be followed by ten minutes to allow the water to stop moving. A healthy order book dictated that we ran twenty four hours a day and the result of that was that there was no time to play. Even then, each run must have been worth hundreds of Pounds.
A relevant example was patrol boats. At the time there was a new Dutch design which was ‘short and fat’, and was fundamentally different to our own increasingly long and thin types. We decided to ‘play’, and devoted some time to testing a short fat boat, which proved to be inferior to our long thins. Ordinarily that would have ended research, but a couple of us thought that a quick and one-off mod to the stern might be worth a look. It cut 15% from the high speed drag! Congratulations came there none, and it was never pursued. The Hurricane wing question got me thinking about this, and I realised that if a customer had asked about a short/fat boat at the time, senior management would have said ‘that won’t work, forget it’.
My office had all the records of the management of the facility since it’s inception in the twenties, and fascinating reading it was. In hindsight I can see that the overriding motivation had always been the improvement of corroboration of model/full-size results. That continued in my time as computers were being introduced to the modelling (early CFD). Despite the fact that we were among the most able and qualified people to come up with new hydrodynamic thinking, we knew that there was neither time or money to allow it. Hard to believe really, when I tell you that the overall boss was the man who invented the bulbous bow. And I’ll bet he did that in ‘playtime’.
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