Originally Posted by
rjtjrt
Rat (I hope I can call you by your diminutive).
Of course you can believe that the subs will all be built in Adelaide. A press release form the Liberal or Labor government of the day undertaking to do something in 10+ years time is something you can take to the bank.
Lease of 1 or 2 older near decommission subs to get training started and some capability, and increase sub numbers to 8, is the most likely early move. Then off the shelf overseas build of 2 new boats, assuming we can get US or UK to free up build space, will most likely happen. Adelaide will get more non sub orders to appease them. By then Osborne will have not built a sub for 30+ years.
The previous imperative to have a sovereign sub build and maint capability was only there when we had to buy conventional subs i.e. Continental European designs. Now we are can source subs from more reliable, trustworthy countries home build is desirable but not essential, and impractical in terms of timeframe, recent experience and cost.
Adelaide will loose sub build, as it did car manufacture.
Still, none of us really know. All here is just speculative opinion from people who most likely have no real idea.
Where else can they be built ? The US has no spare capacity, niether does the UK. We maybe close friends but the US or the UK are not going to delay the production of their own subs to fit ours. I have said it before these will be manufactured in australia, they will be supervised / managed by probably general dynamics electric boat in the same way they did for the astutes. Once its complete there would be somewhere to service the subs a lot closer to china, osborne shipyards are building the new hunter frigates. I still think they will be majority built there with certain sections built overseas and shipped over. If for only reason being is that there is no where else to build them, there appears to be zero capacity worldwide