Construction times

As we've been talking about steel wet-navy construction times as
a way to get a handle on FT build times, I looked up Napoleonic wooden ship
construction in "Nelson's Navy" by Brian Lavery. He says that a sloop (~20
guns) could be built in 6 months, a
74-gun
Ship of the Line (i.e. a standard Battleship) typically took 2 and a 1/2
years, and a First rate (i.e. a Superdreadnought) could easily take 10 years.
Costs per ton rose as ship size rose, as bigger ships needed bigger, better
more expensive timbers for critical components (She's a BIG ship, she has BIG
futtocks...!). In 1804, a private shipyard had 35 shipwrights while
building 2 ships of the line (presumably 74s) - that doesn't include
labourers.

It's intriguing that the times are quite similar to those for late steel
warships; The UK around 1800 was to the construction of wooden
warships what the US was to the construction of WW2 ships- ie with a
mature technology and a powerful industrial base to support it.

Two other points in passing; the Admiralty had ships designed according to a
fairly fixed protocol, with all the original plans done to
1/48th scale...  Also, there was a formula for calculating the "tonnage"
-
this took no account of hull form, and therefore had little or no bearing on
the true displacement, but it WAS useful as an indication of the time, expense
and materials needed for a particular ship, and was the registered tonnage on
the Navy List. The formula was:

        ("Length on the Gundeck" x "Breadth" x "Half the Breadth")/94

cheers,