Energy As A Weapon - Architecture Reloaded

There has been a recent shift on ships power systems away from power management to energy management, due to the increasing use of Energy Storage fast acting power electronics convertors. This paper discusses the general shift in architecture to accommodate this, primarily to gain efficiency and resilience, covering items such as advanced AC and affordable DC networks, Shared, Centralised or Localised Energy Stores, Variable Speed generation, Energy Management vs Power Management. It also considers how to accommodate directed energy weapons on future and existing power systems in the Naval Arena. It outlines the broad options for efficiency and the supporting architectures without delving too much into the detail. Architecture reloaded, as we take a step back to evaluate the system solutions, to accommodate Energy, rather than Power as a weapon.