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:

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.