Rainbow1910
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Yes Asterix has done a lot of good work however, my point of calling it "nothing special" was regarding another commentator above waxing poetic about how Davie "did something that no others did, thought to do, or were able to do". The reality of the situation is that Davie took a commercial hull and converted it to act as an interim gas carrier for the RCN. There is no special sauce here, Seaspan, Irving or any other vaguely competent shipyard with the space available could have pulled off the same project with the same or better results. I am fairly sure Irving actually considered doing the same thing with a converted tanker in their proposal however, they pivoted towards they strange hybrid RO-RO tanker concept that eventually fell through. I think part of this whole thing was giving Davie some table scraps of work, considering where they are located and how they had just managed to claw themselves out of the pit of debt and insolvency made for themselves previously.They produced a good product. It's actually put on some serious miles doing the business of an AOR all over the globe, and kept up our RAS skills for years now.
Sure it's expensive, but you can't deny it's been a busy a hull. I would say the juice is worth the squeeze. And that's more than I can say for another company that produces us ships.
If I ran the company that made her I would pump those tires as well.
My only gripe is we should have bought her and the second. And the reason we didn't do either is because the LPC would have none of it, it was purely political. Just ask Norm.
I personally don't think the juice is worth the squeeze, especially considering this juice comes with a premium annual subscription model to keep it fresh. People love to throw shade at Irving and Seaspan (to a lesser degree) but Davie gets to slide along largely on goodwill from Asterix. Irving and Seaspan definitely deserve their fair share of criticism however, both of those yards are building entire ships from the ground up while Davie has built its reputation as the Canadian Shipbuilding darling off converting a single civilian tanker and some Coast Guard icebreakers purchased from abroad. I will be far more supportive of Davie if they can show that all of this talk translates to action once they actually start building vessels instead of just converting them.
If the RCN had purchased Asterix outright and not bought into the FFS contract system, I think the financial situation surrounding the vessel would be easier to swallow. This is especially true if we would have got a competitive price for it, as unlikely as that would have been. It is a bit of a kludge vessel that is ill suited to being deployed anywhere near a combat zone and lacks many of the features that JSS will have however, I think the baseline capability would have been valuable. Davie wanted $724M to sell Asterix to the RCN upon entry into service in 2018 when they apparently purchased the original vessel for $20M. Considering it took them from 2015-Fall 2018 to bring the ship from start of conversion to service acceptance, I think the option for purchasing a proper "long term" interim design from abroad would have been better considering the pressing requirements at hand.
The RCN would have been left with a purpose built design that they owned from the start instead of the option to purchase a converted civilian vessel for a substantial markup, after it had been rode hard across the world for a decade or more while we payed for it. Considering the costs at hand to do another one of these situations without serious restructuring of contract prices and agreements, the proposed "Obelix" really doesn't sound like a great strategy to me.