The head of the Russian Maritime Board, Nikolai Patrushev, demanded to exclude haphazard changes to the designs of ships and ships. He also stated the need to move to the construction of ships in series. The experts interviewed by Mashnews agree with the official, but do not really believe in the prospects of these initiatives.
The larger the series, the cheaper the vessel
On October 3, Assistant to the President of the Russian Federation, Chairman of the Russian Maritime Board Nikolai Patrushev visited the Zelenodolsk Plant named after A.M. Gorky (part of the Ak Bars Shipbuilding Corporation) and made several statements. He demanded to exclude "haphazard changes" to the designs of ships and ships and ensure serial construction.
Of course, large-scale production reduces the cost of construction, he says. But this works on civil projects that are narrow in profile, for example, ships for transporting passengers along rivers. RSD59 bulk carriers in Russia have built 50 vessels of the same series at different plants. And large naval vessels are produced in series of 2-4 vessels.
In China and Korea, serial production is better, if you want a tanker for 120 thousand tons, you were given a ready–made project, Buyanov continues. If something needs to be replaced, they change it, while the tanker remains serial.
Large series are also difficult because they are long construction periods, during which the requirements for the vessel may change.
In civil shipbuilding, the problem of interfering with the project during construction is generally not worth it, the expert believes.
According to him, the issue of approving the ship's design and changes to it for the needs of the customer is fully regulated by the current legal norms. Customers of civil vessels, as a rule, do not interfere in the construction after the approval of the project, they just need to get a vessel with the specified parameters within the agreed time frame.
Standardization will save shipbuilding
"Shipbuilding needs a uniform format both during construction and completion. We need unified catalogs, unified collections. Theoretically, the role of such a single center for defining concepts in all these areas should be played by the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC). I believe, taking into account new approaches in management, with the arrival of a new team from VTB, such principles will finally come to the corporation," said Mikhail Danilenko, owner of the military–industrial holding Kingisepp Machine–Building Plant (KMZ).
USC declined to comment on Patrushev's statements.
Vessels should be universalized and put into production in small batches for running-in to current technologies that should meet the scale of the vessel, says Elena Tkachenko, Professor of the Department of Economics and Management of Enterprises and Production Complexes at St. Petersburg State University, Doctor of Economics.
She sees a way out of the problem of low serialization in the creation of the following mechanisms:
- a strategy based on a balance of resources and capabilities;
- unification and standardization of all ship components;
- intersectoral balances that align the shipbuilding development strategy with those industries that are needed for its development, for example, engine building.
"It is not uncommon for us to have five built ships at the pier, but there are no diesel engines for them," explains Tkachenko.
The series can't keep up with reality
Lev Zasypko, First Deputy General Director of Marine Integrated Systems LLC, sees the reason for making changes to the design of ships and ships in the fact that reality is rapidly changing.
But it may be not only that something has improved, but also that new threats have appeared, against which no protection was laid down in the old project.
This happened to the ship of the Karakurt project, it was designed a long time ago, then there were no weapons systems that need to be installed on it now, Tkachenko agrees. Who thought about protecting against drones then?
Another reason for the revision of the projects is that many ships were designed before the introduction of anti–Russian sanctions, they included foreign components that are now inaccessible to domestic shipyards.
Russian power plants have other mass-dimensional characteristics, it is not always possible to fit them into the existing ship design immediately, which affects the timing and cost of ship construction, said the top manager of the Marine Integrated Systems company.
Approval issues
In addition to the issues of the relationship between the project and reality in the Russian military shipbuilding, another problem is the approval of changes by the customer - the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
In the course of making changes to the project, it is necessary to talk about two contours – engineering and financial, Tkachenko says. Almost every shipyard has its own design bureaus, which make edits to the project according to the wishes of the Ministry of Defense, often this happens at a high technical level.
It is quite another matter to coordinate changes from an economic point of view.
This practice of reviewing projects during construction leads to the fact that large series of ships of 15-20 pieces turn into small series of 5-6 ships, or even into single ships in general. The complexity of refinement in this case can be about 200 thousand man-hours, that is, 20% of the complexity of manufacturing a ship, its cost will increase only by 15% during design, and in general it can grow by 20-25%, and sometimes the price tag will double, explains Professor Tkachenko.
