Victory ship performance versus Liberty ship volume

Victory ships could make roughly 15 to 17 knots and cost only about half a million dollars more per hull, but multiplying that premium across thousands of ships sharply reduced attainable numbers. Only 534 Victory ships were completed, compared with 2,710 Liberties, and a full substitution also demanded turbines already claimed by destroyers, cruisers, and other warships. One estimate is that those constraints could reduce an imagined replacement fleet from more than two thousand hulls to nearer one thousand. Much of the remaining speed advantage disappeared in mixed convoys constrained by older ten- or twelve-knot freighters. A smaller fleet of superior ships would therefore fail the program's chosen measure: aggregate cargo delivered.