Design is still not the bulk of the cost of a CVF. It isn't like building two or three jet fighters, where design & development would be over 90% of the cost. Even for a single ship of that size & complexity, construction is the majority of the cost: it's a complicated & expensive ship. An additional vessel, following on from the two building, wouldn't cost much less than the original (pre building delays) price of each one.
What do the Bays & Points have to do with an Enforcer LHD as an Ocean replacement? The Points are miltarised freighters, & the Bays are for logistics, carrying reinforcements & supplies to follow up an amphibious landing. What we're talking about is something for amphibious assault, with a through deck so that it can launch a lot of helicopters. Enforcer is a family of designs with common elements, not just the Bay class - and the family includes LHDs.
Nor is an Enforcer LHD the only option. There are completely OTS options, e.g. Juan Carlos I & its modified version the Canberra class, the Mistral & Dokdo classes, the new Japanese 22DDH 'destroyer', now that they're allowing exports, & by the time your hypothetical 3rd CVF would be building, probably an Italian LHD. There are also outline designs which would need detailed design work: the already mentioned Enforcer LHD, designs from TKMS & BAe (the latter based on the Ocean hull), & the not-yet-detailed Fincantieri design that the Italians want to build. Any of those could replace Ocean for a fraction of the price of a CVF, & some could also lily-pad F-35B.
Sorry for not coming back to you earlier, I have been away for a few weeks. The centre piece of my original post was for the RN to construct a very high profile ship that would: create significant employment for blue collar/manual/trades workers in very depressed areas, raise the profile of the RN by so doing and attract additional funding. The suggestions of foreign designed LHDs would not really achieve these objectives. It needs to be an HMS Ocean replacement as a token excuse for the industrial subsidy; in reality unless the other objectives mentioned can be achieved, there is little likelihood of additional funding, despite the merits or not of the various LHD designs mentioned.
My original post was more carefully worded than my follow ups, so I will re-quote it for clarity "Without design and infrastructure costs, a third CVF will be a fraction of what we have paid for the first 2". I should have added to these: set up costs and the costs of the delays.
But your response got me thinking about design costs and this does trouble me. A few commercial website quote ranges of 15-20% for design, these are likely to be modifications/configuration of existing commerial designs rather than designing from scratch. The CVF was a completely new design, the RN has not built anything on this scale for 60 years. Then I noticed a figure for the design assessment (I am not sure what this covers, probably not the final design) for the Type 26 a figure of £127m. This number just completely passed me by, until your post. How could this be so high for a ship costing c 300-400m? This is just the cost of the hull design, one assumes not any systems/weapons or engines? Partularly when one thinks this is a pretty standard type of hull and we have been building similar, an improvement/modification on the Type 23 and T45?
These got me thinking about wider costs, I'm fairly familier with buying professional services/system intergration/consultancy costs on a T&M basis, now I don't now how much time it would take to design a CVF or a Type 26, but a recent high profile quote that has puzzled me has been the cost of the CATOBAR assessment of the CVF at c£45m. At a blended day rate of say £1500/day thats 30,000 days, what could they have spent all that time on.
We don't know the full costs of the QE & POW but if we say £6bn, and a 1/3 wasted by delays, bad planning/budgeting (£2bn), say 1/3 of the rest: design, set up & infastruture (£1.3bn). So I thing a unit production cost would not be unreaonable at c£1.3bn.
As to whether we need a 3rd CVF, I would say we would get more use out of a CVF than 4 GP Type 26. They will do more and have more status/capability and much of what a navy does relies on status and the deterrent value that provides.
