Puts the costs per ton and "steel is cheap" argument into perspective. And if anyone asks what the aviation aspect is..... its from AW&ST......
Cost Overruns Lead To Slashed U.K. Frigate Order
Royal Navy’s Type 26 ‘affordable’ frigate is breaking the bank
Francis Tusa | Aviation Week & Space Technology - Defense Technology Edition
Implicit in the design of the British Royal Navy’s Type 26 frigate was that it should cost no more than two-thirds of a Type 45 destroyer.
The latter is a design where advanced technology ran away, leading to costs that resulted in six ships being built instead of 12, and with the nonrecurring costs of a full class amortized across those half-dozen ships. As a result, the Type 45s have a unit production cost (UPC) of £650 million ($975 million), excluding R&D. To avoid this, Type 26 was to be “cost capped” at a UPC of just over £400 million. But by the time of the November 2015 U.K. Strategic Defense and Security Review, the anticipated class of 13 Type 26 frigates was cut back to eight as a result of UPCs escalating to well above £600 million—about the same as a Type 45.
How did this happen? Put simply, the Type 26 got too big. And size drives cost, even if other factors are at play. A dominant concept in Royal Navy ship design was expressed by the First Sea Lord at the start of the 2000s, Adm. Mike Boyce: “Steel is cheap, and air is free.” He advised that in designing the Type 45, the naval service should not replicate errors of the previous Type 42 destroyer class. These were a bad compromise in size and capability. Because the treasury reduced the ship’s size to save money, when it came to updates, trying to shoehorn equipment into too-small spaces cost inordinately more. So, with steel 5-7% of a ship’s cost, Boyce was arguing that you should build ships with, in effect, empty spaces to accommodate updates.
However, as the Type 26 design developed, size ballooned.
Here are some reasons for the escalation in size and cost:
Land-attack missile tubes. Vertical launch silos for these missiles are 2-2.5 meters (6.5-8.2 ft.) longer than for standard surface-to-air missiles, equating to a draft up to 2-2.5 meters deeper.
Chinook-capable deck. The Type 23 deploys the Merlin medium-lift helicopter, but the target for the Type 26 is a Chinook. Even if the hangar is not Chinook-capable, the deck will need to be 6-10 meters longer. That means a plug of steel weighing 400-600 tons.
Mission bay. It is fashionable to have a bay for extra payloads, to make a ship adaptable and even future-proof. But adding the capability to carry a dozen 20-ft. ISO containers securely means a big box (with handling cranes and rails), which adds a several-hundred-ton section in the middle of the ship.
Modernizing crew quarters. This is an issue with real size/cost implications. Ships are no longer built with 30-60-sailor mess decks—most recruits would balk. Instead, there have to be 2-4-person spaces, a far larger provision of showers and separate facilities for women. All of which adds size, weight and cost. As a point of comparison, if the Type 23 frigate were built to current crew standards, it would displace 1,200-1,500 tons more than it does. At full displacement of around 4,500 tons, that brings the ship close to 6,000 tons, not far from what a Type 26 displaces.
Design creep means larger ships and correspondingly higher unit production costs.
Even if the U.K.’s appetite for the Type 26 does not meet its financial resources, comparisons should be made to put matters into perspective. In studying the costs of European frigates/destroyers for the past 20 years (including inflation), a range of costs for frigates/destroyers emerges: European general-purpose frigate cost per ton: $100,000; European antisubmarine-optimized frigate cost per ton: $125,000. Multiply the latter figure by 7,000, and it comes to the cost of a Type 26. The Type 26 is not “expensive”—it costs exactly what a 7,000-ton+ antisubmarine-warfare-optimized escort should cost. However, if it didn’t have a Chinook-capable flight deck, vertical-launch silos and large mission bay, it could be 1,500-2,000 tons lighter and so cost £425 million compared with more than £600 million.
And it isn’t just the U.K. that has been hit by this trend. France planned to buy a class of 17 Fremm multimission frigates but because of cost, reduced the program to eight ships. So, size matters. Even if the price of steel is at historic lows, an antisubmarine-warfare frigate will not be cheap since steel is not driving the price.
The U.K. now plans to launch a “truly affordable frigate” program—notionally called the Type 31—to enter service in the late 2020s.