Ok, so the long end of your estimate means it takes double the time for Chinese shipbuilding to turn out a ship of 7,000-7,500t compared to 1 year for US shipbuilding to turn out a ship of 9,800t. That's fine, since we're both just speculating at this point.
Who's "we"? Clearly this does not include Wikipedia or Austal or NAVSEA. If you want to use "steel cutting" that's fine and actually makes sense as a stand-in for tech freezing, but in the case of the 052D you then have to totally speculate when that actually was.
The naval watching community at large, including this forum, going back years now.
If you don't want to abide by it, that's fine.
When you attribute "keel laying" to me I assume you mean module connection since I already made it clear modern day modular construction makes keel laying meaningless. If this standard is applied is applied to the 052D then February 2012 for module connection seems reasonable to me, and something less than a year prior to that date for "steel cutting".
Overall duration of construction might depend on the shipyard, but if we're talking Chinese shipyards specifically, then no. I'm certainly not going to default assume it takes twice as long for Chinese shipbuilding to produce a 7kt hullform than it does for US shipbuilding to produce a 9.8kt hullform.
Your faith in Chinese shipyards is surprising.
The time it takes for a new ship to have its construction done is very much dependent on the concurrent work going on.
JNCX is plagued by the inability to consistently track hull modules with completed hulls, but for DL it is fortunately a bit easier. For example, tracking these two 052Ds (circled green), their modules were first visible by satellite in the final assembly area (drydock) in December 2017, and they would be simultaneously launched on 10th May 2019, 1.5 years after their modules/keels were first "laid down" in the drydock, and thus at least multiple months and potentially up to a year after their steel was first cut.
The longer duration they spent in the drydock for assembly (not inclusive of steel cutting!) compared to the year it took for some Tico class cruisers to be built by the relevant US shipyard, is a result of the other activities going on in the shipyard at large -- namely the other ships that were being simultaneously built at the same time.
At DL this can be easiest seen due to them utilizing this large exposed drydock to track various hulls, but at JNCX this is more complex because various hulls are constructed variously under covered halls, or semi exposed areas in the yard, not to mention the vast array of other commercial ships that are built in the same yard.
So no, directly comparing the "overall time of construction" in a like for like manner is illogical, because the "overall time of construction" will vary depending on the other concurrent activity occurring in a given shipyard.
A more like for like comparison would be the launch rate of new ships constructed in a given portion of a yard for a certain period of time.
(One can look at say, how many ships Bath or Ingalls produced respectively during their production run periods in the 1980s to very early 1990s, compared to say JNCX in the early to mid 2010s with the consideration that the bulk of JNCX is dedicated to producing ships other than 052Ds and 055s)
You are not the "forum", and I am not a "skeptic" just because you hold a differing opinion from me.
That's fine, but just tone down your aggressiveness a little bit please. It really makes these discussions more unnecessarily hostile than they need to be.
That was a sentiment shared by people to you when you were active in the late 2010s to 2020.
