The spiral’s spokes represent the set of all major areas that must be addressed throughout the design process to completely define the ship. The spiral itself depicts the current practice of independently developing each required parameter in a sequential manner, evaluating the relationship between design attributes, iterating to resolve conflicts, and repeating the evaluation/iteration process until all conflicts are resolved. Thus, following each successive iteration, the design progresses closer and closer to the spiral's center until convergence is attained at a constant radius from the center.