BBC News By Michael Sheils McNamee image captionPrince William cut the steel on the new HMS Belfast on Tuesday On Tuesday, Prince William cut the steel on HMS Belfast, a ship which will form part of a modern fleet serving the UK for decades to come. Pushing down on a button in BAE Systems' Govan shipyard on Glasgow's River Clyde, he set to work lasers which moved across the first steel plate on the £1.2bn Type 26 warship. The high-tech process is a long way from how its predecessor came into the world. The keel laying - the starting point for construction at the time - for the first HMS Belfast, which has been moored on the River Thames for the past 50 years, took place in the Belfast shipyard Harland and Wolff in 1936.