How did sailing-ship infrastructure adapt to steam and steel construction?
Short answerGradually, through decades of adding metalwork and machinery to wooden construction until some yards modernized and others became unusable.
NotesThe industrial transition happened in layers. Wooden ships first incorporated copper bottoms, larger cooking furnaces, heavier guns, and then steam engines supplied by boilermakers. Ironclads combined wooden structure with increasing quantities of iron before fully metal hull construction became normal. The process took at least fifty or sixty years, and yards such as Woolwich disappeared when geography and facilities could no longer accommodate the changing ships.