SCADS carrier

[Hobbes]

Yup. Navies need a different hull and propulsion for most of their ships. Escorts are much narrower than commercial ships, even an aircraft carrier has a reasonably narrow hull with great big sections of flight deck sticking out on the sides.

The hull generally isn't very expensive to build, so you might as well spend a bit extra and get one that matches your requirements.

[rickshaw]

Ship steel has been, for about the last 40 years, one of the cheaper components that have gone into warship construction.   The most expensive is electronics, followed by labour, then machinery and finally the steel used to construct hull and superstructure.

[pyro-manic]

Also worth mentioning that hullform and installed power become critical for higher (ie "fleet") speeds. There's no realistic way to get a hull the shape of the Columbo's up to 30kts.

[Weaver]

Yes and the power follows the square/cube law (or something like that), i.e. going up 50% from 20 kts to 30kts requires 100% more power....

[Hobbes]

Also worth mentioning that hullform and installed power become critical for higher (ie "fleet") speeds. There's no realistic way to get a hull the shape of the Columbo's up to 30kts.

You can get pretty close though, the Maersk B-class carries about half the load of the CE at a service speed of 29 knots, the SL7 ships get to 33 kts at the same weight of the B-class.

[Thorvic]

The sheer size is why i sent extra sprues as its going to take some detailing 

[pyro-manic]

You can get pretty close though, the Maersk B-class carries about half the load of the CE at a service speed of 29 knots, the SL7 ships get to 33 kts at the same weight of the B-class.

But the B-class has a different hullform, being specifically designed for speed (at the expense of capacity). Running at that speed is also extremely expensive, using an enormous amount of fuel (hence the Bs were laid up for a number of years as uneconomical). Ditto for the SL7s.

[scooter]

And just for gee-whiz, our very own Almava did up the Maersk variant Afloat Forward Staging Base on Shipbucket:


Which begs the question, why use it as a fleet ship?  Why not deploy it forward for staging?

[rickshaw]

Fleet ships are designed to operate with, well, the fleet.   They have to be able to maintain and preferably exceed the cruising speed of all the other ships in the fleet.   Fleets usually don't cruise at 30 kts but if you want to manoeuvre around the fleet you need that sort of speed.   Above 20 kts for all ships starts to become rather expensive in fuel, even for naval ships, even if optimised in hull form for it.   

Higher speeds usually come at an expense and that is range.   So, if you're doing oceanic voyaging the speed tends to be in the 20 kts area (which actually eats up the distance quite quickly.  When I was doing my Falkland Islands scenario I worked out the distances between various ports/places and how long it would take a ship cruising at 10,20 or 30 kts.  It was surprising how quickly you could reach the Falklands from the UK at 20 kts).

So, unless an alternative propulsion system like Nuclear, where there is power to burn (literally! ), cruising speeds start becoming prohibitive unless some exotic hull form is adopted (preferrably as long and as thin as possible) to decrease drag.  Such hull forms tend to have stability or structure problems associated with them.  Perhaps the best compromise is a multi-hull form such as a trimaran.   It has a slim hull and allows higher speeds and provides adequate deck space for weapon.

Merchant ships OTOH are optimised for capacity and so rarely get above 20 kts with a full load.  The few times operators have made high-speed merchant ships, they've proved uneconomical to run, which has already been mentioned.

[kerick]

The thing about the forward staging ships is that they are sent out well before a crisis so they can be as slow as a cargo ship. In effect they are a cargo ship with special features like a flight deck and maybe a well deck. If I'm not mistaken the US. does or has used this before in the Indian Ocean.
A container ship modified with a flight deck and well deck and other material handling features could be very usefull.