Approach to Joining Multiple Displacement Hulls Together To Increase Speed

It has been well documented that the Navy's Seabasing vision for staging bases near the theater of operations calls for an extension of the distance offshore from the current two to five miles to one hundred to two hundred miles. Although the distances will be greater, response times and throughputs must remain the same or improved. This will consequently require heavy lift and high speed landing craft to transport equipment from the seabase to the beach. In response to this need, the Navy is looking at various ways to increase the speed of its workhorse landing craft, the LCU 1600 class vessel. This topic seeks to develop an enabling capability for connecting multiple LCU's, in line, with the expectation that the speed should be increased by at least 30%. The key enabling capability sought is the connecting device between the vessels. This project will investigate the adaptation of a flexible connecting device developed for the Improved Navy Lighterage System (INLS) to the LCU "In-Line" train concept. This "end connector", called the Flexor, has been utilized for two generations of Navy lighterage systems.