A battleship can be built in 240 days with very basic technology.

[panzerzombie]

I would have been very satisfied with a different approach to Navalyards ( although a distinction with regular factories was really necessary ). What if you can use a single Dockyard/Slip/Drydock/whatever only on a single ship sitting there ( single ship means a serial build as well....ship after ship etc. ).

This single ships Hull requires the historical time of the technological state of the art its been laid FOR THE HULL. The outfitting (as a separate strengthbar or something) however would be filled out steady but slowly as a kind of "side-effect" of this single drydock or after the hull is completed. A single unaided drydock would produce a single ship in the historical timeframe of a "lazy" build (please insert approbiate example) ....however when I want to accelerate the build I need to attach MF to the OUTFITTING of the ship to fill that bar. So a drydock with 15 attached MF would then build the whole package ( Hull + Outfitting ) in a record time of e.g. ( please insert approbiate example ) a ship of that class which was achieved in RL. So the minimum time achievable build time would be locked by the hull and the fitting could be accelerated to zero time.

So a massive BB uses a lot of massive and cumbersome pieces to outfit which either have to be produced and installed after a certain build phase is achieved or the parts would be - in a hurry - be pre-produced and stored nearby. A Liberty Class Freighter on the other hand may be mainly characterized by its outfitting (not realistic - I´m no naval engineer - I know but you need to fit it in a system). A lazy Liberty^^ thus takes the a.m. 240 days without any "help", a drydock producing a Liberty aided by 15 MF at maximum efficiency churns out a new Lib in 40 days...

I don´t know how an AI would do that - perhaps via national ideas or a script - but it would add (pseudo)realism to the game, which the current system can not.

And yes ofc it would need a new balancing of the numbers of shipyards each country had and its MF.

edit: awful wording...

 

[Axe99]

I'm kind of astonished that people are extrapolating (and panicking) so much from a back-of-the-envelope calculation by Denkt (which is what the OP was)

Most of us aren't extrapolating and panicking, I fully agree with what you're saying and it'll either be fixed in the main game, or I'll mod sensible ship built times in mine if it's not - but most of the discussions are in response to the argument made by some that quicker build times wouldn't affect the strategic gameplay. It's a hypothetical argument (we're on a forum for a game that hasn't been released, after all ), but some people made the claim (rather strongly) that quicker ship build times wouldn't hurt (or would be a good thing for) the game, while others were countering this with examples of how it would make certain aspects of a WW2 game unbalanced. I'd be very surprised if we don't see longer ship times in the base game m'self.

 

[Amur_Tiger]

I'm kind of astonished that people are extrapolating (and panicking) so much from a back-of-the-envelope calculation by Denkt (which is what the OP was)

Part of this is due to a lack of concrete information, where information is poor speculation ( and extrapolation on what hard data there is ) runs rampant. As to how much worry there is, speaking for myself the only real 'make of break' aspects to the game are going to be around how the planning and battle AI perform as this is both a key feature to the game as a whole and an area where modders can't tweak and adjust things easily to suit the varied preferences out there. As much as I've said about naval construction here and how I'd prefer it to turn out I'd definitely still buy the game if it's not well-suited to my preferences, in part why the suggestion of DLC to flesh some of these aspects out has come up.