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In plain terms: U.S. yards build complex, custom ships, but the knowledge and data behind that work is scattered and aging. Forge exists to pull it together so yards can move faster without losing accuracy or institutional memory.

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The setup

Naval and commercial demand has centered on complex, customized vessels. At the same time, the workforce and the data infrastructure behind that work are aging. South Korea and China dominate high-volume commercial shipbuilding through highly automated facilities, while U.S. yards mostly execute low-volume custom builds. Closing that gap means modernizing how domestic yards work, with more speed, precision, and consistency.

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Two constraints hold yards back

1

A shortage of skilled naval architects and engineers

Technical knowledge is scattered across spreadsheets, old design files, and veteran engineers who are approaching retirement. When they leave, decades of unwritten troubleshooting knowledge leave with them.
2

No shared operating system for the yard

Even when teams use the same CAD software, there is no shared place where a change made by one team automatically updates for everyone else. Coordination happens through manual updates and constant back-and-forth.

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Where the pain actually shows up

Engineering leaders we interviewed described the same recurring bottlenecks:
  • Reusing prior designs for new bids. Each new contract starts close to scratch, because yards rarely build repetitive vessel classes. A proven blueprint for a 1,000-foot carrier cannot simply be scaled down to a 300-foot vessel with different cargo; it takes manual, case-by-case extrapolation from old drawings.
  • Converting designs across rule regimes. Adapting a European design to U.S. Coast Guard and ABS rules means engineers manually altering blueprints, and small differences cascade into large layout consequences.
  • Keeping distributed modules in spec. When separate yards fabricate submodules and bring them together, a drift of a few inches is often not caught until the modules physically meet at the drydock.
  • Preserving class and USCG evidence. The reasoning behind a compliance decision is often lost in email threads and meetings.

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Why software alone has not fixed it

The problem is not that yards lack software. The problem is that the existing software stack does not preserve the reasoning chain between design intent, which rule applied, what prior vessel it was based on, the material and vendor choices, the geometry, and the later production consequences. That reasoning chain is exactly what Forge is built to capture.

Read the full background essay

The longer argument, including the strategic and competitive case, lives on our blog.