So as said a had some new ideas- and I've been mulling them over since the first post. One "new idea" was using a detachable crane. I was thinking of having this crane on sort of a mini pipelaucher which would attach itself to the pipelauncher, then it could be used to move a rocket from a ship to the pipelauncher. This would be better than having a crane on a boat- because a pipelauncher would be a much more stable platform than any ship & because when actually mating rocket to pipelauncher it would be completely stable. Then once rocket was mated, then this mini crane would detach from pipelauncher. I've since this time come across two problems. First a pipelauncher moves hortizonally "badly", so having two pipelaunchers trying to dock with each other then detaching and moving away would be at best, time consuming. And other problem is how this crane actually attaches to the pipelauncher- for instance it might be a good idea to have crane attach near the top of pipelauncher in a kind of a horse shoe attachment & using the pipelauncher structure for leverage- plus having open end where rocket is brought in and other side as counter weight and all the cables [winch & etc]. Another aspect of this is crane is could incorporated as kind of dock for vessel bringing the rocket. Or, something like "foot" could be on the ship with other end attached to pipelauncher- this way the motion from boat would be mostly cancelled at the end where you are picking up the rocket from boat deck and after rocket is slided across to the pipelauncher the motion from boat would be quite small [or none if "foot" is pick up from the boat deck].
Anyways I guess I need to know more about cranes- especial those that lift hundreds of tons- and I'm still mulling this over. Maybe a crane would be better if on a ship and instead the "foot" attached the to pipelauncher.