ORIGINAL: Historiker
Is it really a problem building a slipway?
I mean, what is a slipway? Just a flat area in the right angle that the ship slips to the water with a massive fundament to allow thousands of tons on it. It can't be THAT problem building slips within a year or even faster. I think the biggest problem is (beside the money) to get enough skilled worker, no?
I don't see any great technical knowledge that's needed to build a slipway, especially as the Dutch really should have enough experience with weak ground and such things as they are the masters of building dikes.
I guess you've read what I've written in the other thread that I think it should be possible concerning all data, that even (or at least?) two BCs are completed or at least able to flee to England in 1940, so that they are ready for service in 12/41.
Peter the Great learnd shipbuilding in Holland - so knowledge per se is an old thing there. But the Dutch did not prefer slipways - and in their low country dry docks are not particularly hard to build either. Either way - for a captial ship - it is a big deal. More so in a place where land is very rare and expensive. I am not saying it is a technical challenge though - but rather an indication of intent and also time. Since no such dry dock existed, there was no fast option to use it. You had to build it first. And no one expected war before 1940. But we know they only had until 1938. I suspect they would want to do what they really did try to do - the 3 battlecruisers - and since that COULD be done fast once the drydock was available - they just might have got the first one far enough along to mattter for WWII. I was sharing my reasoning - which was not based so much on technical challenge as what would have been an option in the available time.
