While ship propeller design becomes ever more minute due to advances in CFD (computational fluid dynamics), there has been little growth in performance and other added values due to the fixed nature of the basic principles involved and the fluid nature of design practices. In the search for a way to overcome this, and while keeping in mind Japan's maritime industry as a whole, we have followed two avenues of investigation: expanding the design focus to include hull dynamics and making radical changes in the materials used in propeller construction.