designing and predicting the hydrodynamic performance of ships. His methods were applied to many of the naval and merchant ships designed by Gibbs and Cox, including its multiple shipbuilding programs; most destroyer types in the U.S. Navy; several advanced experimental marine power plants; the SS United States, which held the Atlantic speed record; and various other projects, including floating oil drilling platforms, the platform for the MOHOLE Project, and unusual ship types.

Bachman played a leading part in the design, engineering, and preparation of working plans for such various U.S. Naval ships as destroyers and guided missile destroyers, destroyer escorts, frigates and guided missile frigates, cruisers, aircraft carriers, landing craft, icebreakers, minesweepers, and numerous auxiliary ships such as destroyer tenders and submarine tenders. For commercial shippers, he did similar kinds of work on the SS America, SS United States, SS Santa Rosa and Santa Paula, British cargo ships, Liberty ships, and numerous other cargo ships.

In certain areas of his work on ship propulsion characteristics and machinery plants Bachman was particularly active. He developed an improved analytical method for ship propeller shaft alignment, applied the results of his extensive study of the various forms of ship vibration to many successful ship designs in both the machinery plants and the hull forms, and supervised correction of "singing" propeller vibration for a fleet of British cargo vessels in World War II. He developed a procedure for predicting the reversing characteristics required for the design of experimental diesel electric destroyer machinery for the USS Watson and made numerous studies leading to the design of an experimental reheat steam power plant that was tested full scale at the Naval Boiler and Turbine Laboratory for the USS Percival. He also took a leading part in guiding the many studies required for the development of advanced high-pressure, high-temperature steam machinery for the USS Timmerman, a design that extensively influenced all surface ship steam machinery in the U.S. Navy after World War II. In addition, he developed methods for predicting the hydrodynamic performance of ships and improved designs of