Gun Boat Surface Visibility Viewing Options in Fastship Software

Today I am not going to discuss reviews about cruise ship. I will talk about ship or boat design from the perspective of a naval architect. In this post, I want to explain a little bit about Surface Visibility Viewing Options in Fastship. Fastship is a ship design software for naval architects. In naval architecture, the software that are usually used for designing ships are Maxsurf, Delfship, Autoship, Orca, and Fastship. For home design or BIM architecture, such softwares as Revit Architecture, Archicad and Sketchup are the most common tools. I wrote some articles about Archicad in this blog. If you are looking for tutorials on the use of Archicad, please, check the old archives of this blog.
Fastship - as ship modelling tool has been developed by Proteus Engineering. If you have never heard about it, you can go to proteusengineering.com and download its demo version software to see how it works. When a ship has been designed from NURBS curves and surfaces, her whole drawings can be presented on the computer screen using several surface visibility option toolbars such as perimeter, sections, intersections, mesh, solid, and lights.
By pressing each toolbar, we can see the appearance of the fast patrol boat on the computer screen.
The first toolbar that I pressed is the Mesh one. When the Mesh is activated, the hull of the boat is presented in isoparametric lines that have been computed directly from the control points (Net).

As you can see on the above image, the hull of the boat is shown on the profile plan where only the curves or contour of her buttock lines are visible. Her waterlines and sections can only be seen as grids.

Then I go further by pressing the Solid and Lights viewing options located on the toolbars of the Fastship software. Now the gun boat design looks more 3 dimensional if the toolbar button of solid and lights are pressed as shown on the following picture of the hull design.
Gun boat is a type of fast patrol boat that is used by maritime countries to protect their waters against pirates, smugglers or foreign fishing vessels. To achieve high speed, the hull has smaller block coefficient and knuckle lines. In modern warfare, sometimes fast patrol boat is not only equipped with guns but also torpedoes. Another software that is good for designing hull, superstructure and appendages of ships and boats are delftship.
Propulsion unit
Today, most gun boat and fast patrol boat are powered by at least 2 marine diesel engines with 2 small diameter propellers to boost the speed of the boat of up to 30 knots. Marine engines are small and reliable in all operational condition of the boats. In certain designs of naval vessels, the exhaust pipes are installed on both sides of hull plating below the water line to avoid the heat of the exhaust gases from being detected by heat seeking missiles. Special valves are installed on the hull plating of the boats to prevent sea water from entering the exhaust pipe to the marine engines.
Piping Materials
Naval vessels use high quality pipes to save weight. While in most merchant ships the pipes are made of steel, the piping system in fast patrol boat uses CuNiAl pipes that are more resistant to corrosion and are light.
Also read: Fastship and Delftship for Naval Architects