Manufacturing creep, was RE: Mission Creep - Was Re: The new US Army APC the Stinger

At 3:47 PM -0600 7/1/02, B Lin wrote:
>
>This is where the politics come in, the politician, having an 
>interest in the shipyard will try to pad the numbers for either more 
>ships or longer commitments to benefit the shipyard.  Single or 
>limited run production would be limited to experimental prototypes 
>or specially modified units that cost much more than the standard 
>item.

In the Real world there is a benefit to keeping a production line 
running for 10 years on 10 ships vs just building one in one year. 
You maintain the knowledge base of the folks that are able to perform 
the highly technical labor and you can have it passed from one work 
force generation to another in 10 years.

The same applies to the slips and the manufacturing capability. If 
the US tried to build large armored vessels on the scale of the 
Iowas, we'd have to rebuild the armor industry from scratch as well 
as a number of other segments of the major industries. Britian is 
currently lacking for a slip capable of building a full sized carrier 
as they've sold off those facilities for conversion to ocean front 
property (or something else). They're going to have to try building a 
Carrier from modular components. So far that works with DDs. Perhaps 
it will work with a CV.
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