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the UK is hoping to get construction down to 66 months eventually @Oldgateboatdriver guesstimate seems reasonable if not a little optimistic for first of class for us/Irving
Canadian River Class Destroyer Megathread
- Thread starter jmt18325
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To think they used to launch 25-35,000 DWT Battleships in 2 years and they were peak tech at the time.
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I admire your optimism lol.
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Yea... The 10 year time span from when they laid down steel in 2025 to fully mission capable in 2035, while depressing is, I fear, realistic.
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OldSolduer
Army.ca Relic
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Different time with different thinking people. They were willing to work their asses off because the dirty Jerries and filthy Japs attacked them.
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Considering the ship will be the most technologically advanced warship ever built by the RCN, 10 years for the first one to reach operational status is realistic. Comparing the RCD to a WW2 ship is like comparing apples and orange's.
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Not really, the tech to build a battleship back then was cutting edge stuff for them, with the same sort of challenges and no computers to help them. We would absolutely struggle to make armour plate that thick and guns that big nowadays. In fact we would have to build the machines to make them first.
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We really struggled in WW2 to produce the Tribal Class Destroyers. They were on the bleeding edge of what our shipyards could handle at that time and took a long time to build, compared to UK yards. Anything bigger than that was beyond Canada’a ability, then.
The RCD class is the most complex thing Canada has ever built.
The RCD class is the most complex thing Canada has ever built.
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I was looking at some old footage of a WWII drafting room and thinking: "How the hell did they keep track of each sheet and make sure the stuff on one sheet fitted with the stuff on another"? All while puffing on a pipe.
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Not really. The technology to build battleships isn’t lost, and modern industry could absolutely produce armour plate and large gun barrels again if anyone actually wanted them. The issue wouldn’t be rediscovering how to do it, it would simply be retooling industry and spending the money. Large naval guns, high-strength steels, and heavy forging still exist today and were maintained for ships like the Iowa-class battleship well into the Cold War. What’s actually changed is where the complexity sits. A WWII warship was mechanically impressive but electronically pretty simple. A modern ship like the River-class destroyer is basically a floating combat network packed with sensors, radars, missiles, software, and communications systems that all have to work together and integrate with NATO systems. That integration and testing is what takes time today. WWII ships were also built fast because it was wartime and governments cut through bureaucracy and testing requirements. Today everything goes through years of design work, system integration, certification, and trials before it’s declared operational. So it’s not that we’ve lost the ability to build big ships or guns, it’s that modern warships are far more complex in completely different ways.
