Royal ownership let naval leaders mandate new techniques while retaining older skills needed to maintain the existing fleet. Workers trained in the dockyards could later move to higher-paid private employment and carry scarce expertise with them. This capacity-building role differed from a single-customer, single-supplier market, where nominal corporate independence may offer little genuine competition. The public yards functioned as training institutions and technology-diffusion centers as well as places where ships were built and maintained.
Notable Point · 39:49-43:04
Royal dockyards trained the wider shipbuilding workforce
State yards could adopt new methods directly, train workers, and diffuse those skills into private shipbuilding through labor mobility.