Quote:
Originally Posted by swaghauler
In a V2.2 timeline, you wouldn't even see that number. By 1995, most medium to small shipyards in the US had closed as the Pacific Rim took over building the majority of merchant vessels. This left only the primary Navy shipyards capable of building warships.
It takes 18 months to build a Burke, and even the new LCS classes are taking about 15 months to build. I do not think you would see more than 2 Burkes (one from Bath and one from Ingalls/Huntington), 2 Independence Class LCS sized vessels (Austel), and 4 Freedom Class LCS sized vessels (Marten/Marietta) being produced per year. This will be especially true if damaged ships are being repaired at the same time. The US was not in a position to mass produce ships after the "Clinton Peace Dividend" took effect.
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I used to work with several Navy pukes and the question of wartime production would always lead to lots of arguments. It was the general opinion that the real bottleneck would not be the hulls but the electronics, weapons and munitions. Many of the defense contractors have only a couple of production facilities and you can see the logjam that a war will cause.
As for the hulls, you would often hear that the shipyards will simply to go 24/7 production, what was left unanswered was where the trained personnel were going to come from.
IMHO, one of the unanswered questions of any timeline is when the U.S. started to ramp up production of its armament industry to support its needs.