WesWorld

Random thought on floating docks.

The USN War Plan Orange held to an 18month delay before starting a trans Pacific drive because it would take this long to build floating docks for the advance bases. Assuming 1000 tons a month this comes out at 18000tons (cost) for a floating dock to take a battleship. Assume also that a dock can lift double its 'cost' so an 18000ton dock can lift 36000tons while a 12000ton dock (1 year to produce) can lift 24000tons. I'd expect that you can't build in a floating drydock but you can use it for repair. Does this sound fair?

Cheers,

For ships over 400 tons Light displacement, you add another 9 months building time, above the 1 month per 1000 tons of Light displacement. With this addition, your thoughts seem reasonable. We might want to limit floating dcks to doing repairs and refits only, not rebuilds or reconstruction.

Great idea too. Expect to see some French and Russian docks soon!

Sounds good to me.

The question remains, do we drop the shakedown cruise part of the building process?

I'm intrigued, but see a game-balance issue here. The cost of a floating dock capable of fixing a coastal submarine would be about ~250 t as proposed here. Yet a class 0 drydock requires 1.0 infrastructure points, the equivalent of 10,000 t of warship material. That's a real disparity.

If we were to go ahead with this idea, I'd rather consider the floating dock to be a less capable version of a drydock, built with infrastructure materials rather than warship materials.

As for cost, half that of drydock of the same size? And I'd say it was repairs only, no refits or other changes to the ship. Thing is, I can't think of why this would be the case in real life...

Really a floating dock should cost more than the fixed equivalent due to its ability to move giving more flexibility.

Cost isn't the only issue. Availability plays a big part in the equation. If you are advancing across the Pacific and need to move your fleet support activities forward you need resources that are mobile.

Also a fixed installation may cost less in the beginning, but it is FIXED. If you need the same capability elsewhere you have to start over. The more portability in the fleet train the greating the flexibility available to the commander.