Why did the companies that built Austro-Hungarian dreadnoughts not cooperate after the empire collapsed?
Short answerTheir industrial network was split among successor states and there was no solvent dreadnought customer able to recreate the empire's coordinated program.
NotesNo affordable customer outside the treaty powers was waiting to buy a dreadnought fleet. The yards passed into new national jurisdictions, Škoda shifted toward land artillery, and some smaller-ship capability survived in Yugoslavia. What vanished was the imperial coordination that had tied armor, guns, machinery, yards, and naval administration into a capital-ship program.