Reply to: Those Pesky Ships
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When is the last time a contractor delivered a ship to the navy
or a building to the county WITHOUT(!) cost overruns?! It's my
contention that your spreadsheet is probably more accurate than
you think it is. When you look in the books and see that a ship
of a given class cost X, X is probably an average. Every ship
is unique. As ships of even the same class age, they are refit,
equipment is added or replaced, etc... Our wet navy puts a great
of effort into standardizing equipment but things happen beyond
their control(eg sub assembly maker goes bankrupt, Murphy's Law,
etc). Prehaps after trials of the first few ships of a class,
some improvement is made, and changed in follow on orders.
Reality: there are over twenty Spruance class destroyers
in the US Navy. There at least 4 different variant sub-classes
which vary from the general design in some minor way.
They probably didn't square on the Navy's spreadsheets either.
(Rumor has it that the last ship in that class was supposed to
be a can of peaches but the order number had digits transposed...)
There are scads of factors to consider in building a ship(wet).
Starship construction is an infinitly more challenging project.
- - -James R. Ware
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