It's also a matter of speed. Bulbous bow is still, as far as I know, unbeatable at high Froude numbers. However, it increases the wetted surface area and thus a slender bow might be better for relatively slow vessels.

Also, the smaller flare of this vessel means that it does not suffer from speed loss in waves as much as conventional bow forms.

When I look at it,,it seems that the whole bow is a kind of "elliptical" form, and possible by that means better then ships with the bulbous bow. Would make sense because when you look at bulk carriers they were almost always rather round with small, undefined bulbs, while container ships have much more prominent bulbs. In bad weather my experience with bulkers, bring the bow down . I recon the whole bow acts then as a bulbous bow because of its overall round shape and therefore goes smoother into the waves

Come up here for your first load, Reggeborg.
Tomas

The brilliant concept behind the invention of the bulbous bow was to let the bulb create a wave that cancels out the wave created by the hull itself, if you can accept this over-simplification. Now - looking at a few other pics of this ship (on dry land) one can see a pretty unusual shape of the bow section. It looks a bit like chipmunk cheeks, and my guess is that the effect is pretty similar, and yes, maybe even slightly superior in certain aspects.
cheers
Uwe

@ B. Clark I know of the Maersk B class that had their bulbous bow design changed..But I thought that was as a result of slow steaming..i.e the design speeds that were set for those ships were no longer economic..Therefore as the speed changed the profile of the bow was changed to suit.
It's certainly an interesting point that Pica makes about the bulbous bow.
This type of bow reminds me of early 20th century warships.

Some ships fitted with bulbous bows are now having them retrospectively removed............

@ Pica
The more cargo matter aside, this design and the inventers "claim" that it is better. However, to my knowledge not much other building yards following this trend.
If it is really better needs to be seen over the next years to come. There were a lot inventions in the ship design, like for example the a-symmetric stern and a few other stern designs, they all were the new "wonders" and never heard again off

Hello Peter,

in all my life as a seaman I was told, and I believed, the bulbous bow was the state of the art piece to increase speed, or reduce fuel consumption, of a ship. The more complicated and strangely shaped the bulb was - the better. Now we are coming back to WWI bows and that makes a ship "green" ( more efficient...?) they say. Have all naval architects and designers of the last 50 or 60 years been wrong?
Am I to old to understand these things?
Reg Jürgen

Does it make her more efficient ?