Canadian River Class Destroyer Megathread

[Furniture]

Two things true here. Yes they can and must be built in Canada (but just not at Irving), and yes it’s just like Canada to drag its feet until the last possible minute.Thus ensuring the 5-6 years it takes to build such a vessel any war will likely and thankfully be long over.

If we end up in another WWII style fight, just like in WWII, most ships will be emergency programme ships that are less complex than what we are building now. We will also surge defence R&D, as well as production so costs and build times will decrease.

We don't operate like that outside of war because its unsustainable. The only countries that can do it are dictatorships and America(for now).

I get that the current thing is too panic about ship numbers, but for longterm things like fleet sustainment and capability sustainment you can't bounce from panic programme to panic programme. When its time to actually panic, then we can do that. Until then, we need a sustainable plan to grow the CAF as a whole.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Colin, that has almost certainly already been examined within the RCD production plan. Nobody running a first of class build is sitting there waiting to discover that some modules can be started earlier than others. Sequencing around long lead items, labour loading, module readiness, yard space, subcontractor flow, and critical path work is basic program management 101, not some hidden trick. The problem is not that Irving has failed to notice you can throw more bodies at early modules. The problem is that shipbuilding does not scale cleanly just because Ottawa throws more money at it. You need trained trades, supervisors, planners, QA staff, outfit integration, steel flow, and physical yard capacity to support them. Stuffing extra workers into the system too early can just create congestion, rework, and bottlenecks downstream. And targeted money with strings attached sounds great in theory, but in practice the yard is already under contractual pressure to hit milestones, so if this was an easy acceleration lever it would likely already be in play. The first hull is not slow because nobody thought of prebuilding what they can. It is slow because first of class warships are integration nightmares, and the true choke points are usually design maturity, supply chain friction, skilled labour depth, and production learning curves, not simply a shortage of funded hands on a few steel modules. Other than building a separate yard, production facility or expanding the existing one which is happening there's not much you can do over the short term to get a ship in the water faster.

I don't doubt any of the above, but I also don't doubt that Irving is quite happy to have things go the way most profitable for them. I suspect there is likley more productivity to be squeezed out, if Ottawa leaned a bit harder on them.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

If we end up in another WWII style fight, just like in WWII, most ships will be emergency programme ships that are less complex than what we are building now. We will also surge defence R&D, as well as production so costs and build times will decrease.

We don't operate like that outside of war because its unsustainable. The only countries that can do it are dictatorships and America(for now).

I get that the current thing is too panic about ship numbers, but for longterm things like fleet sustainment and capability sustainment you can't bounce from panic programme to panic programme. When its time to actually panic, then we can do that. Until then, we need a sustainable plan to grow the CAF as a whole.

Even when we got the corvette plans, they required a lot of redrawing and fleshing out before we could build them, even then our corvettes had to sail to the UK to finish fitting out. If you need/want a emergency build that can be built in time for a conflict, then you need to build at least one hull and heavily document that build before the crisis.

 

[suffolkowner]

I think its way to early to worry about Irvings production schedule. They will still be working things out notwithstanding the 8 AOPS previous. They have the advantage of learning from the UK and starting undercover plus the yard improvements they are working on. There were impressive improvements on production efficiency with the AOPS and with Seaspan. Just got to fight through it

 

[Underway]

The RCN knows that the frigate to destroyer transition will be difficult. It's timing could barely be worse. It also comes at a time where we are facing large personnel challenges, both retention and training ones.

This is a wicked problem, and frankly similar ones are being felt by most 1st world navies, with Europe, Japan and Korea facing brutal demographic challenges even if their ships are generally newer.

The building of the ships honestly is a relatively easy fix overall. We can throw money at that problem and it mitigates it somewhat. The pers issues are much harder to deal with. It takes much longer to build an experienced Petty Officer and Lieutenant than it does to build a ship once that ships production line starts.