MARCOM C-series hulls and the Liberty ship comparison

The Bogue and Ruler story depended on the US Maritime Commission's pre-war effort to standardize merchant-ship construction. Type C3 hulls belonged to a wider C-series family intended to expand merchant capacity rapidly in useful forms. Their repeatability gave naval planners a known hull instead of a different conversion problem for every ship acquired. Those peacetime standards differed from the Liberty ship, a more austere answer optimized for wartime mass production. An analogy with Yorktown and Essex shows how a design suitable for peacetime construction can differ from the version chosen when maximum output becomes urgent. The modern challenge is to identify a comparable merchant standard, explain its conversion, and decide whether the resulting escort carrier would justify its cost.