Shortround6
Major General
Full conversion requires a lot of shipyard time. You need to spend many months tearing the ship down to level you need to redo a lot of the lower spaces. They you need the same amount of time as a new hull needs to build back up from that low level. Is it quicker to just build a new hull or tear down the old one and modify the lower spaces (magazines, fuel storage, etc)?
Perhaps I am biased. Back in the 1970s and 80s there was a real 'craze' for refurbishing fire trucks to 'save money'. My chief not only bought into it, he wrote at least one magazine article for "Fire Engineering magazine". For a small dept we wound up with more than our fair share of white elephants.
One of his 'refurbs' consisted of not repowering an existing fire truck but taking the existing engine and transmission out the old truck along with the 100 ft areal ladder system (turntable, hydraulics and stabilizer jacks) from one company and dropping those parts into a new chassis and body from another company. The engine was in good shape but the arial was old, out dated design (from the 1950s?) that was soon not even rated by insurance companies. The truck was overweight for the axles and tires when it showed up, let alone after we filled the compartments with tools. The Company that had built the ladder system didn't want to know about it after the new company mounted it on their chassis. The new chassis company didn't didn't want to know about the ladder as they hadn't built it. We had an orphan as far as repairs, warranty work. We were stuck with this thing for many years after that chief retired.
I could suck up another page (or 2) with some of the other refurb projects we were stuck with. The whole refurb craze died out when they figured out that they weren't getting the value for the money. If a fire truck was supposed to last 25 years and you refurbed it after 15 years you didn't get another 25 years after that. You were lucky you got a few more years. They should have been putting money aside to just pay for new trucks on a regular basis.
Perhaps I am biased. Back in the 1970s and 80s there was a real 'craze' for refurbishing fire trucks to 'save money'. My chief not only bought into it, he wrote at least one magazine article for "Fire Engineering magazine". For a small dept we wound up with more than our fair share of white elephants.
One of his 'refurbs' consisted of not repowering an existing fire truck but taking the existing engine and transmission out the old truck along with the 100 ft areal ladder system (turntable, hydraulics and stabilizer jacks) from one company and dropping those parts into a new chassis and body from another company. The engine was in good shape but the arial was old, out dated design (from the 1950s?) that was soon not even rated by insurance companies. The truck was overweight for the axles and tires when it showed up, let alone after we filled the compartments with tools. The Company that had built the ladder system didn't want to know about it after the new company mounted it on their chassis. The new chassis company didn't didn't want to know about the ladder as they hadn't built it. We had an orphan as far as repairs, warranty work. We were stuck with this thing for many years after that chief retired.
I could suck up another page (or 2) with some of the other refurb projects we were stuck with. The whole refurb craze died out when they figured out that they weren't getting the value for the money. If a fire truck was supposed to last 25 years and you refurbed it after 15 years you didn't get another 25 years after that. You were lucky you got a few more years. They should have been putting money aside to just pay for new trucks on a regular basis.