Weapons, engines and mods, Oh my!

[PvK]

I tried looking for cost figures today, but haven't found a great source yet. My impression mainly comes from various books and discussions of naval design, which have often mentioned the great expense and difficulty of producing capital ships, which could only be justified by their ability to deliver ship superiority (usually, for semi-modern navies, by virtue of superior range).

I am entirely certain of it being true for the example of WW2 tank design. Both the Germans and the Americans considered different designs which were either relatively small weak and cheap, or large and powerful but much more difficult to produce and maintain.

Coke bottles and Coke cans are both common and cheap. The six-pack is a little more like the battleship anyway, because it's got slightly more complex and expensive ingredients and manufacturing process.

Knowledge is only part of the challenge of producing something.

Here is a good example of the sorts of problems that appear when building building massive ships, from an excellent web site describing the Japanese Yamato class battleship:

"When the construction of the Yamato class was planned, there was no shipyard in Japan capable of building such ships without expanding it's building facilities.
Since the Japanese Navy intended to build four Yamato class ships in succession, special preparations for their construction had to be made in selected shipyards.
Some of these arrangements consisted of expanding dock capacities, building a special transport ship capable of carrying an 18 inch gun turret and hiding such a vessel behind sisal rope curtains for security reasons.
The depth of the building dock at the Kure naval yard, in which the Yamato was built, was deepened about 3 feet so that the hull could be floated in the dock.
The capacity of the gantry crane straddling the dock was increased to 100 tons in order to lift heavy armor plates. Furthermore, about a quarter of the dock at the landward end was covered with a roof to prevent it from being seen from a prominent hill nearby.
In the Yokosuka district a large dry dock was specially built and the third ship of the Yamato class, later named Shinano and converted into a carrier was built there.
The Nagasaki Yard of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. was the only other shipyard capable of building a Yamato class battleship. even with some expansion of it's facilities.
Unlike Kure's building dock a slipway was to be used for the construction there. Needless to say, the launching of a vessel weighing 30,000 tons raised various problems technically. Not only was the slipway strengthened but workshops and piers were also expanded or strengthened. The overall area of the expansion of the workshops reached a total of almost 787,401 square feet. Floating cranes of 350 tons and 150 tons were built and installed to lift heavy armor plates and gun fittings.
At Sasebo, one of the three major naval bases in Japan, a dry dock capable of accommodating a Yamato class battleship was also built.
Some measures taken to safeguard the security of the Musashi were interesting.
The slipway on which she was built was covered by a sisal rope curtain.
The total length of rope used reached 1,683 miles and it's weight totaled 408 tons. This great consumption of sisal rope caused a temporary shortage of this item on the market, and caused complaints among fishermen.
One more thing to be mentioned was the construction of a transport vessel to carry the 18 inch guns and turrets from Kure to either Nagasaki, where the Musashi was being built, or to Yokosuka, where the Shinano was to be built.
These 18 inch guns and turrets were manufactured at the Kure naval yard and they could be transported only by this specially-built vesse
Even in accommodation the Yamato had remarkable features.
She was the first Japanese warship to be equipped with an air conditioning system.
Although this comfort was not afforded to all the living quarters, the Yamato and her sister Musashi had a favorable reputation among sailors as the most comfortable ships in the Japanese Navy."

These are just some of the sorts of issues that come up when undergoing massive engineering projects, which don't tend to have to be considered at all for building smaller craft. However, except for WW2 tanks, I'm not entirely sure how well the numbers back up these ideas. I'd like to know, so I'm going to try to dig up some good figures.

PvK