[ 29 ] A double-ender please! Double-enders are as old as modern-day ferry shipping itself with the first double-ended railway ferries being introduced in Danish domestic waters in the 1870s. In the same decade, the double-ender design was also trialled on the Dover Strait, but the passenger steamers Castalia and Calais-Douvres were anything but a success on account of their unconventional catamaran-type design. All successive ferries operating Dover–Calais would be of the single-ender design. The dawn of a new era, P&O Pioneer and P&O Liberté are not an evolution but rather a revolution in the history of cross-Channel ferries. The largest ferries up till P&O Pioneer and P&O Liberté were the 160-metre-long Coastal-class of Canada’s BC Ferries. The Fusion-class takes a quantum jump in terms of dimensions, capacity and reduction of impact on the environment. OSK Design and the Fusion-class OSK Design played a key role in the design of the Ship of the Future, being selected as the ship’s principal naval architects very early on in the project. Besides the concept design, the Danish naval architecture consultancy was responsible for the tender design — this is the design sent out to the yards that are bidding — as well as the contract, basic and detailed design. The detailed design was primarily in the hands of SinoDane, a joint venture between Guangzhou Shipyard International (GSI) and OSK Design in which the former holds a 51 per cent and the latter a 49 per cent stake. Notwithstanding the close ties OSK Design keeps with GSI through SinoDane, the company remains fully independent, being heavily involved in ropax ferries built at other Asian yards. OSK Design was also responsible for the Ship of the Future’s crisp, contemporary interior design. Thus, the Fusion-class represented an A-to-Z project for OSK Design, following the example of Destination Gotland’s Visborg and Thjelvar, Moby’s Moby Fantasy and Moby Legacy, and Algérie Ferries’ Badji Mokhtar III, among other ro-pax ferries built by GSI. OSK Design: a one-stop shop With offices in Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark’s OSK Design was founded in 1966 as Consulting Naval Architects Ole Steen Knudsen A/S (hence OSK). It wasn’t until 2003 that naval architect Anders Ørgård stepped in. Anders was a senior manager at a compatriot naval architecture consultancy when approached to join Consulting Naval Architects Ole Steen Knudsen A/S. Up for a generational handover, Anders took over daily management of the company — then OSK-ShipTech — becoming CEO and majority shareholder and controlling 50.01% of the capital. In his CEO function, Anders was busy with the company’s development and strategy. However, his main interest was in passenger ships, ferries in particular, so he decided to step down as CEO, becoming the company’s CCO with Jacob Høgh Thygesen taking over the role of CEO in November 2016. Earlier in the same year, OSK-ShipTech had taken over Steen Friis Design, a leading ship interior design and architecture company founded by the Dane Steen Friis Hansen. Two years later SinoDane was created, a project-specific cooperation between GSI and OSK-ShipTech. As of June 2023, OSK-ShipTech, OSK-Offshore and Steen Friis Design became unified under a single brand, OSK Design. Still, SinoDane is heavily involved in basic and detailed design with OSK Design, primarily focusing on concept and tender design. OSK Design therefore meets its clients’ needs all the way from concept to detailed and interior design. SHIPBUILDING
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