Specialisation Foundation → Practitioner
Ship Technology Foundations
How a ship is shaped, resisted, driven and powered: naval architecture, hydrodynamics, the main engine and the generators beside it.
- Courses
- 4
- Lessons
- 35
- Time
- About 6 hours
- Price
- €519+ VAT
- Assumed knowledge
- Secondary-school physics: force, power, pressure. No naval-architecture or engine-room background assumed. Each course states its own starting point; the one real dependency is the generator course, which takes two Marine Engineering & Main Engines lessons, on the fuel curve and on the two-stroke, as read, and whose arithmetic needs a calculator and the workbook that comes with it.
€519 + VAT for the sequence
The 4 paid courses cost €686 bought one at a time; as a specialisation they are €519, a saving of €167 (24%).
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You own this specialisation. Every course in it is open to you.
The engineering ground floor, taught for the people who use the numbers rather than draw the lines. This sequence takes a ship from the design side to the engine room: the hull as a set of numbers, resistance as five components that a shared convention keeps apart, the propeller as the machine that spends the power, the engine room as an energy chain from tank to thrust, and the other engines (the generator sets that carry the switchboard) priced on the same page as the main engine. It is the background that makes every performance argument, commercial or technical, make sense.
What you'll learn
- Describe a hull in the numbers designers use: form coefficients, dimensional ratios, Froude number
- Break total resistance into its components and identify which ones can be influenced in service
- Explain how a propeller makes thrust, what changes when it works behind a hull, and what matching it to an engine involves
- Trace fuel energy from tank to thrust: the two-stroke's efficiency logic, SFOC in service, and the propulsive chain
- Size a ship's auxiliary fuel beside the main engine's, read a generator's fuel curve, and decide how many sets to run, how they share, and when the shaft generator or the plug should carry the load instead
The sequence
Each course stands alone; this order is the order the knowledge builds.
How the courses build on each other
The pair worth explaining is the first two. Ship Resistance Fundamentals comes first because it assumes nothing, and names and separates the five calm-water components that Naval Architecture for Performance then explains from the design side: where a hull's resistance numbers come from, form coefficients, scaling laws, model tests, and what a designer or superintendent can change about them. Same physics from opposite ends, in the order the second course itself assumes. Marine Engineering & Main Engines is the other side of the thrust: the machine that has to deliver the power the first two account for. The Other Engines: Diesel Generators and the Electrical Load comes last because it builds on that course's lessons on the fuel curve and the two-stroke, and prices everything against the main engine. The two or three generator sets that carry the switchboard burn up to 15% of a ship's fuel on IMO's reckoning, and more on a tanker whose cargo pumps run off the switchboard, yet few offices see that number as a line of its own. The course works the decisions that move it (how many sets run, how they share a load, when the shaft generator buys electricity at main-engine grams instead, and what the port stay costs with the main engine cold), and it does not teach how a generator works. Three boundaries are drawn on purpose. This sequence keeps its resistance in calm water: what the weather adds (wind, waves and current) has grown into its own four-course specialisation, Added Weather Resistance, and is pointed to rather than repeated. The propeller is the same story: Naval Architecture for Performance introduces it in three lessons, and the four-course Propeller & Propulsion sequence is where its geometry, its open-water coefficients and its match to an engine are taught in depth. Within this sequence the match is met twice, from the propeller's side in Naval Architecture for Performance and from the engine's side in Marine Engineering & Main Engines, which adds SMCR, NCR, the barred speed range and derating. And the machinery around the main engine (the pumps, boilers, coolers and shaftline) belongs to The Working Engine Room (available shortly): the generator course keeps to the fuel and the decision, not the machine.
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Paid Foundation
Ship Resistance Fundamentals
What actually slows a ship down in calm water: the five components of resistance, where each one comes from, and which of them you can influence from the bridge.
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Paid Foundation
Naval Architecture for Performance
The naval-architecture foundations under every fleet performance number: hull form coefficients, model testing and power prediction, the propeller and its marriage to hull and engine, hull-girder strength, ice class and underwater noise: taught for the people who use the numbers, not the people who draw the lines.
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Paid Practitioner
Marine Engineering & Main Engines
The machinery side of vessel performance: why the two-stroke diesel owns deep-sea trade, how its operating envelope and fuel appetite are set for life at the newbuild table, what the emissions rulebook does to it, and how the plant is kept efficient, compliant and running, from bunker quality to batteries to blackout prevention, and finally how to read the engine's own fuel signal and tell its drift from the hull's.
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Paid Practitioner
The Other Engines: Diesel Generators and the Electrical Load
Burning less fuel in the ship's electrical plant: the auxiliary tonnes sized beside the main engine's, the generator's curve and its expensive band, how many sets to run and how they should share, the measured load balance and its meters, the shaft generator priced at main-engine grams, the port stay with shore power as the limiting case, and the audit and SEEMP triggers that keep it all alive.
The specialisation certificate
Every course above ends in a graded final exam and a certificate. Hold the certificate for every course, and a capstone project unlocks: one scenario that draws on the whole sequence, marked on our server. Pass it and you get a second, separate certificate for the specialisation itself, naming every course it comprises: its own number, verifiable the same way.
Who teaches this
Common questions
Is this too theoretical for operations people?
It is written for practitioners. The concepts are tied to decisions someone has to make, such as a docking scope, an engine rating, how many generators run at sea or whether a shaft generator pays, and the mathematics stays at the level needed to use the ideas, not derive them.
Do the courses have to be taken in order?
No. Each course can be taken on its own; the generator course is the one that leans on another, and it names the two Marine Engineering & Main Engines lessons it takes as read. The order above builds the picture from what slows the hull, to the hull's own numbers, to the machine that pays for both, and last to the other engines beside it.