JWE
Posts: 6580
Joined: 7/19/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Gary Childress I was operating on the assumption that the ships could be reconstructed using other facilities than the construction slips. Ok, don’t want to get too deep into this, but here’s a quickie on ship construction/conversion. Ships can be built in a dry slipway or a wet slip or a wet dock. In a dry slip, can be oriented two ways, lateral launch or longitudinal launch, depends on shipyard terrain. If a dry slip (pics 1, 2, and 5), it is built, primarily to main deck level (see Missouri, pic 5), with darn little superstructure, no guns, no fittings, i.e., as little weight as possible to avoid damage during launch (or to avoid it being so heavy it doesn’t move at all). Pic 3 is Mount Vernon in what I call a graving dock (shallow with little in the way of heavy equipment – good for hull work). Ships can be constructed in wet slips like this. One may complete more of a ship constructed in this manner, prior to launch, but as one can see, they might be draft limited so, again, launch weight becomes a factor, depending on the depth of the slip. Pic 4 is Texas in a full-boogie drydock (deep, wide, stuff for heavy lifting). A modern one, yes, but one gets the idea. Ships can be constructed in wet slips like this (a construction drydock) in which case they can complete through topsides prior to launch. The Yamato-type construction ways looked like a cross between pics 3 and 4, with construction girders like pic 5 (good also for hanging tarps to hide the things). If built in a dry slip, a ship “may” be moved to a graving-type fitting dock, and/or a fitting drydock (maybe one, maybe the other, maybe both, maybe neither – depends). Then ship goes to a fitting pier like in pic 6. Fitting pier (or fitting dock) has heavy lifting gear alongside, and might be one sided (port side to, in pic 6) or two sided. So one must have a sufficient sized (and facilitated) construction slip, and a sufficient sized (and facilitated) graving and/or drydock, and a sufficient sized (and facilitated) fitting dock/pier/slip/whatever. Conversions don’t require construction dry slips, but do require some time in a graving/dry dock. If the drydock is also a construction dock one is borked. If the drydock is also a fitting drydock (almost always the case), one is equally borked. Conversions next require substantial time at the fitting dock/pier/slip. Depending on how many (or few) of these there are, and of what size and facility scale, one may well be equally borked. As one may imagine, full-boogie capital-ship construction drydocks were a horridly inefficient use of resources in the ‘30s and ‘40s. They were populated for years by each ship, during which time they were unavailable for fitting or hull upgrades (bulges, armor/girder mod, reboilering/reproping) and wartime damage repair, to other ships of consequent size. One must have yet another large drydock with yet more duplicate facilities, and yet another fitting pier with yet more duplicate facilities. It’s not rocket science, but ship construction planning is a professional endeavor because of things like this. Every ship class is different, every yard is different, every constructor (the one who makes it happen) is different. But that’s construction/conversion in a nutshell; the actuality (in the 30s and 40s) was much more complex, particularly for Japan.
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< Message edited by JWE -- 10/18/2010 3:42:09 PM >
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