Slow warship construction preserved yards at a high price

Nelson and Rodney each took about five years from laying down to commissioning during a deliberate peacetime go-slow. The Navy spread work across longer periods to preserve yards, skilled labour, and future construction capacity when orders were scarce. That policy kept industrial capability alive but made each delivered ship absorb years of overhead and reduced the apparent efficiency of the programme. The same structural incentive appears in later British warship procurement, where paying for continuity can mean funding substantially more capacity than the number of ships delivered suggests.