https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Kanguroo
From reading the description of the ship, the SS Kanguroo (1912) was a dock type heavy lift ship, built initially to transport submarines, but with access to the dock being done by dismantling the bows and rebuilding them after loading. According to the article, loading a submarine, and presumably any other cargo, took weeks but how much of that is down to having to dismantle and rebuild the bows I don’t know.
Can anyone see why superstructure forward and stern loading via a gate design as in later dock ships couldn’t have been used?
