Ship Characteristics Board

Project SCB 1 result: the USS Norfolk (CLK-1/DL-1)

The Ship Characteristics Board was a unit of the United States Navy.

The purpose of the Ship Characteristics Board was to coordinate the creation of 'ship characteristics' that are essential to the design of naval combatants and auxiliaries. Coordination was required because the operators and the designers of ships had different interests, perceptions, concepts, and constraints: as summarized by the naval historian Norman Friedman, "How to achieve the best possible compromise among competing bureaus has been one of the great dilemmas of 20th-century U.S. naval administration."[1]

This list of SCB projects is a useful exposition of the U.S. Navy's shipbuilding priorities in the first half of the Cold War.

  1. ^ Friedman, Submarines, p. 7