Towards unsinkable ships

Damage stability is the "Achilles" heel for all ship types, responsible for 90% of the risk to human lives in maritime accidents of large passenger ships. "Unsinkable" ship is treated as a misnomer in the maritime industry after the Titanic disaster, which marred the idea for ever. However, Titanic was designed using one damage scenario whilst designing modern megaships necessitates tens of thousands of scenarios and forensic detail of the whole flooding process within a detailed internal ship model environment. Combining this with recent technological innovations, enables methodological treatment of damage stability, supporting systematic identification and consideration of Risk Control Options (RCOs) to curtail and control flooding by passive/active protection, leading to ships that are unsinkable in all practical terms. Developments in the subject are critically reviewed, leading to the realisation that Naval Architects have been trying to address damage stability by treating some key elements of the problem with naïve approximation, leading to solving, often, the wrong problem. Moving forward, the paper describes the renewed effort in the EU-funded Project FLARE (Clarkson, 2019), to make amends and presents an application to a large cruise ship to demonstrate that using available knowledge and technology today, designing unsinkable ships is within grasp.