Reddit reviews A Shipyard at War: Unseen Photographs from John Brown's, Clydebank 1914–1918

> First, graph of Town and derivative cruisers during the war.

Nice one. I quite like your methodology of counting partials. The effects of Crete and Pedestal and how they line up with other things are also quite apparent.

There's always an issue aside from that of going just 'commissioned, fine' to 'at what point was the ship worked-up and capable?'. There's frequently not much delineation in RN ships (e.g. PoW sailing to Denmark Strait with contractors aboard), especially compared to the German working-up periods. It was something I started thinking about with my RN BB assessment - for instance when Warspite comes back into commission in early 1942 she theoretically partially offsets the Valiant/QE being damaged in Alexandria, but she's not worked up and of lower fighting efficiency (aside from being a bit uselessly on the US West Coast).

There are a few fringes where I'd look at your <3 month refits not counting. I did in my BB analysis take the line that 'if you were in for a 24hr boiler clean you could be out pretty sharply' but 3 month refits are probably hard to rapidly deploy from.

However there are some ships like Mauritius which are a bit tricky. I pick on her because I read 'The Sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse' recently where PoW/Repulse come into Singapore and Mauritius is sitting there like a lemon, a ship less than a year old basically knackered from boiler issues. When Force Z arrived she was ordered to hurry her refit as much as possible, but wasn't able to complete quickly, didn't sail with the Force (even though she'd already been alongside a month and would have been a decent addition) and then ended up sailing to England, finally completing by April '42, six months of near uselessness even if she'd been able to divert and intercept say a merchant raider on transit.

The minimum 'requirement' for cruiser numbers is also of note. There were several key utilization areas:

• Home Fleet
  
  
• Med Fleet, inc. surges for 'Operation' Convoys - e.g. 3x Town/Colony for Pedestal
  
  
• Arctic Convoys - up to 3 ships simultaneously for say Battle of the North Cape, otherwise 1-2 per convoy where available (also interesting to know if the deployment of Belfast, Sheffield and County Norfolk was by necessity or design
  
  
• Northern Patrol - ships including Newcastle were used, though I'm not sure how suitable they were.
  
  I do wonder what a minimum requirement would look like.
  
  I'm also interested to know what the logic for the Operation Neptune deployments was. Ideally the RN should have been able to supply the entire covering force (it being within their sphere) but 4 USN cruisers and 2 USN battleships were required.
  
  The RN bombardment force included a bit of a rag-bag of cruisers, 4x twin-6in, 3x triple-6in, 6x old single-6in, 4x Dido and 2x 7.5in CA. When Glasgow, Belfast and Mauritius were deployed on 6 June 1944 they were only 3 of 13 operational Town-types from your chart, suggesting they weren't heavily prioritized for the role.
  
  > That would include a drydock breakdown, length, width, depth, when it was in use, etc. Do you have any references I can use to shorten the research time? I’ve found researching the building slips in the US to be hit or miss
  
  Only this which included a good sketch of that yard layout and some interesting facts. My Dad back in the UK has a copy so I might ask him to scan over some sections, it's pricey as a single, niche source after all - after all 'only' 12 British yards built Dreadnought-type battleships/battlecruisers.