Special Plates

The description above is applicable for ‘normal’ plates in the shell of a ship. However, the development function has been adjusted to cope with more complicated plates as well, like (closed) cylindrical plates (for example, in the bow thruster funnel) and (closed) generalised cones. For such and similar plates it obvious that unrestricted strip planes have multiple intersections with the plate edges. The special circumstances related to these types of plates are taken care of by the program.

For a closed plate there must always be one seam along which to ‘cut the plate open’. This seam must then be referred to twice in order to create a closed definition of the plate, cf. the figure below. It is also necessary to tick the box Create Closed Plate in the input form otherwise the program will not accept that a seam occurs twice in the definition of a plate.

To define this plate the seams (A, B, C) in the figure should for example, be given in the following order:

B /A /B/ C

It may be necessary to use certain development options, for example, regarding strip direction and development method. for example, for a cylinder it may be convenient to let the strip planes either be parallel to its axis or perpendicular to it. In both cases selecting strip control method Perpendicular or Distributed may be a good choice.