I've been trying to get a hold of an ex marine engineer turned surveyor who has surveyed sisterships of the one above, but he hasn't checked in, last I checked.

I'm still perplexed, because even if they stich welded parts of them, the ships in question were nowhere near a priority for scrapping, based on MARAD's own ranking. This would seem to suggest that if it could have been a problem, it hadn't become one yet. The following report is an older one, which includes these ships, it has the ships arranged first by fleet, and then by ship from worst condition (lowest priority #) to best condition (highest #) under the heading of "priority"

At issue are the now gone (all but one in each case) Lykes Lines gulf pride C3-S-37c's and Moore-McCormack C3-S-33a's: https://voa.marad.dot.gov/programs/ship_disposal/standing_quot/docs/Obsolete%20Non-Ret%20Vessels%20for%20SQ%2002-8-2005.pdf

They were evidently some of the best ships in the fleet.

And to my knowledge, the Navy / MSC wants and has new ships because they don't want breakbulk cargo ships anymore, hence all those huge ro-ro things they've built in recent years.

I'm guessing that these ships were built under ABS rules, but does anyone know if the same rules that apply to semi-submersibles also apply to ships?