The Aussie facility is a fair bit simpler than the proposed Clyde Frigate Factory. Effectively they're assembling the ship blocks into one piece whilst Govan is building them in two mega-blocks and then joining them together:SD67 wrote:I like your approach
The FF shouldn’t even be that expensive. I believe the Frigate factory in Adelaide is costing around 300 million, were that to be replicated onto the Clyde it would surely pay for itself pretty quickly.
Definitely an improvement on how we're building the Batch 1 frigates but still not as impressive as the 300m+ covered dry dock they hoped to build (said to cost only £200m). A downside was that a single site couldn't justify keeping the full workforce of Govan and Scotstoun.
There was a great video which BAE seem to have taken down, showing how they could could work simultaneously on two Type 26s, clearly at a far faster rate than either Australia or Canada will put them together, whilst fitting them out in one of the many neighbouring drydocks. Simply put, it would have been a world-class facility and potentially could have driven unit cost down hugely:
To this day I struggle to understand why BAE knocked down the old Scotstoun shipbuilding hall, before they had any guarantees that the Frigate Factory would be funded but I presume they had their reasons....
Jensy