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Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Calculating power curves

I have a Smalltalk "program" (actually, a group of Smalltalk classes) that calculates power curves for ships, given their characteristics. The only problem with it has been getting the residual resistance graphs from David W. Taylor's book, Speed and Power of Ships, into a usable form. I have done some of that work, and then put it down, as it seemed as if I didn't have the right representation for the graph in my program.
The idea is to bring up a simple user interface, enter the ship characteristics, and then generate a power curve (SHP needed to drive the ship to a range of speeds). It is necessary to use a sparse graph representation, as it seems to be the obvious approach.
I am seriously thinking of doing a rewrite in a different language. I really want a program to do this. It is so time consuming to do the work, even with an Excel spreadsheet.

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