Steel bashing is misleading. Large amounts of steel bashing can be subbied out for ships (eg MARS tankers) that are largely "empty".
I can tell you from personal experience that a conventionally sized DD/FF should take no more than 1.5-2m production manhours to build in total. Add some realistic labour rates to that and you get a feel for the proportion of cost that any "Shipco" might be able to influence. BTW - with steel at £600/te and say 2000 te of steel per DD/FF thats only £1.2M for material costs. Steel labour for an efficient yard should be around 150 manhours per te, so thats 300000 manhours by a reasonable rate (say £20 hr, plus overhead) say £12M labour total for the steel construction........
The real problem is described most elegantly here......
http://www.coltoncompany.com/newsand...ment2004q3.htm
and the cost impact here (for LPD17)
http://www.coltoncompany.com/newsand...htm#EIGHTH_LPD