An expansion of the navy was seen as necessary, but the design of the new ships was still a matter of debate in the late 1770s. The old school of shipwrights, most prominently supported by the Sheldon family and senior navy officers like Admiral Carl Tersmeden in Karlskrona, favored the old design with only minimal alterations based on the older methods of empirically-grounded ship design. The new school, based in Stockholm and Sveaborg had in Chapman its most capable representative and was supported by General Admiral Henrik af Trolle and the court, pushed for more radical changes and designs based on the theoretical designs and experimental physics and mathematics. Chapman's first proposal for a new standard for ships of the line was the "", completed in 1778. Its superstructures were lowered considerably by removing the poop deck almost entirely to add stiffness and the gun decks were placed higher than in older designs to allow them to be used even in rough weather, when the ship rolled.