To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/to-build-ships-that-break-ice-u-s-must-relearn-to-cut-steel-da8c797f

by the_third_wave • 3 years ago

77 171 3 years ago

wsj.com

westurner6• 3 years ago

"This new idea could reduce steel’s carbon emissions by 90%" https://www.freethink.com/energy/decarbonizing-steel

Why is steel necessary for ships?

From "Plant-based epoxy enables recyclable carbon fiber" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30138954 :

And once it’s completed you have an insanely strong material that makes steel look weak and brittle. It’s reported to be as much as ten times stronger than steel, yet is lighter than fiberglass

Make it out of hemp aerogel and you could carry the boat.

thorncorona• 3 years ago

You need mass to break ice.

marginalia_nu• 3 years ago

Well there's always reinforced ice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk

;-)

fsckboy• 3 years ago

You need mass to break ice.

this is one of the narrow cases where pounds comes off the bench to say, "actually, you need weight"

(icebreakers slide/ride up on top of the ice and the weight of the ship breaks breaks it ice downward)

delfinom• 3 years ago

The problem with carbon fiber and epoxy composites. Once it cracks, you cannot repair it, easily. It relies on a continuous composite structure. You can't patch it because that patchwork joint will just be a weak spot.

So you are talking about writing off tens of millions of dollars of a boat just because someone lost control and hit something too hard.

Steel is infinitely repairable, cut out the damaged section and weld in new steel.

Damage will and does occur to boats.

andylynch2• 3 years ago

The other big drawback is that damaged composites attend to violently fall to pieces, where metal would bend.

bluGill6• 3 years ago

Steel - it doesn't lose strength when you bend it a little. Most other materials suffer fatigue and fail when you bend them repeatedly. This makes steel ideal for many things.

MattGaiser• 3 years ago

A boat you could carry couldn’t break ice.

pvg2• 3 years ago

depends how hard you throw it

westurner6• 3 years ago

+1. How do mass density of the craft and thrust limit the energy necessary to solve problem?

bell-cot• 3 years ago

Carbon fiber materials have excellent tensile strengths, especially under steady-ish loads.

The front of an icebreaker's hull mostly faces compressive loads, with lots of shocks from hitting ice.

Try searching for "OceanGate Titan" if you want to read more about the performance of carbon fiber composites under large compressive loads in a marine environment.

westurner6• 3 years ago

Reading further from that thread about hemp on an article about carbon fiber: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30147414

Have you here contested claims that hemp - biocomposite with resin - has greater Tensile Strength and Compressive Strength than steel and aluminum (and carbon fiber with sustainable binder)?

jjoonathan• 3 years ago

"Stronger than steel" is a common materials science catchphrase, but it usually carries more than enough asterisks, daggers, and double-daggers to skewer practical applications.

neonate• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/lSeY4

dingosity4• 3 years ago

Do we really need to OWN icebreakers? Maybe we could start a website where countries and companies who own icebreakers can operate them for the benefit of other countries and companies who want to use them. They just walk to the shore in the Canadian north, click the "Call Icebreaker" button on the app and wait for an icebreaker someone else owns to arrive.

omginternets3• 3 years ago

Generally speaking, states try to avoid having critical dependencies on other states, because they become points of leverage for adversarial foreign policy. For the purposes of keeping America running, yes, we really do need to own icebreakers in the same way that we need to own powerplants, steel mills, chip foundries and and refineries.

georgeg232• 3 years ago

But then market pressures for efficiency will lead to mergers and acquisitions...

munk-a2• 3 years ago

In this case though we're talking about Canada - the Canadian and US economies are incredibly linked. Personally, I'm a Canadian who makes money examining the US healthcare market and reselling that data to other Americans - there's lot of crossover here.

thedaly• 3 years ago

Do we really need to OWN icebreakers?

That would depend on one's strategic goals and priorities. Personally, I do not believe the US should be the world police so I don't think it is necessary.

toss13• 3 years ago

OK, the who would you suggest should be the world's police?

The post-WWII world order is predicated on the agreement that the age of imperialism is over and that invasion by force to annex another country is illegitimate.

It is obvious that all nations do not agree to this. E.g.: China on Tibet, Taiwan, 9-dashed line, etc., Russia in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine. Those authoritarian states think it is perfectly fine to use force or threats of force to occupy & annex other territories and peoples.

The fact that we also have global shipping and travel at a relatively low cost (cheap enough to make & ship goods petty much anywhere-to-anywhere, and international travel is available to non-elites), is a direct result of US Navy keeping a lid on piracy.

Anarchy, or unpoliced random aggression would be a very bad option.

So, if the US does not do it, who do you think would do a better job, Putin, Xi, Kim, someone else?

edrxty• 3 years ago

I think in this case the US is mostly concerned with securing the increasingly lucrative exclusive economic zone north of Alaska. Anything beyond that we can use air power over sea power, now that we've given up on desert power.

munk-a2• 3 years ago

As a Canadian I fully support this approach - it's not like the US and Canada could ever effectively have highly contentious relations due to our economic interdependence... and we make good stuff up here, know how to build things that deal with ice and train our crews to deal with ice - ice breakers need special knowledge to operate safely and well.

yardie• 3 years ago

Fun times when our Space Shuttle program shutdown we had to rely on Russian Soyuz to get astronauts to and from ISS. Well, whenever Russia didn't like something the US was doing, guess what the bargaining chip was?

dghlsakjg• 3 years ago

We still are sending Astronauts on the Soyuz, even though we are also sending them up in the dragon capsule. (https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/russia-us-agree-add....)

Tangurena24• 3 years ago

I was interested in Arctic tourism. Some of it happens on Russian nuclear powered icebreakers. For giggles, I thought I'd buy one if I won the powerball. No powerball is sufficient, I was looking at about $2.5 billion. And I'm pretty sure that it would be a violation of the NPT for Russia to sell me one. Although the white Persian cat with a diamond collar would merely be a violation of good taste.

ClumsyPilot4• 3 years ago

Do we really need to OWN icebreakers? Maybe we could start a website

i can't tell what is parody and whats real life

fragmede2• 3 years ago

Anyone interested in angel investing for my startup? It's like Uber, but for $50-100 million specialty ships of which there are only a handful in the world, owned and operated by only a few nations, one of which is currently sanctioned by the US government.

Move fast and break ice!

dingosity4• 3 years ago

Oh yeah. This was a snarky comment. Serves me right for trying to be clever over a text channel. It is very easy to misinterpret this as a legit comment.

dingosity4• 3 years ago

Just sort of realized I know a guy in San Francisco who owns an Icebreaker. So... I guess the answer is... yes, SOMEONE needs to own an Icebreaker.

tristanb• 3 years ago

Just wait a few years, there won't be any ice.

notamy3• 3 years ago

Meta: What is it about this post that attracted so many flippant comments?

Non-meta: Why does the US have so few of these ships? Were more just not produced? I didn’t see an answer in the article but it’s possible I missed it.

hef198982• 3 years ago

Icebreakers? No need, as simple as that.

FourHand451• 3 years ago

Non-meta Answer from user @bruce511: "Russia doesn't have much in the way of non-polar coast (well, not today European end) so they've been breaking ice since forever. The US by comparison has very little polar coast and so less need for icebreakers."

phkahler• 3 years ago

> Why does the US have so few of these ships? Were more just not produced? I didn’t see an answer in the article but it’s possible I missed it.

Article mentions that as the polar ice melts there is MORE activity up there which increases the need for these ships. And the US is about to have just one left, which for some reason in down for maintenance in... the winter?

ahi• 3 years ago

Not a huge need, really just Alaska and the Great Lakes. For geostrategic purposes, our friends to the north have something like 20 including a couple heavies.

notamy3• 3 years ago

Interesting. I would have thought that the Great Lakes would be important to keep cleared and necessitate more than 1-2.

justsomehnguy• 3 years ago

Why does the US have so few of these ships

No need to ship goods from China to the West Coast through the Arctic.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

Surprise, this is what happens when you shift everything in heavy industry or production in general off to India and China without keeping at least some production domestic or at least have everything documented and regularly (i.e. once every ten years) check if the documentation is accurate and workers can understand it to build a product that meets specifications.

appleiigs3• 3 years ago

The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy. Each business is free to do as it wishes... and if they wished to survive competitively, they moved their production offshore (helps avoid UAW strikes).

Easy to know U.S. lost expertise, but tough question how do you get it back? Tariffs? A larger military-industrial complex? Even larger government?

mschuster913• 3 years ago

The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy.

You don't need a centrally planned economy. Subsidies are enough incentive to at least keep a bit of production around.

Easy to know U.S. lost expertise, but tough question how do you get it back?

Invest money into subsidies / R&D like in the icebreaker case, or raise tariffs against Chinese and Indian price dumping.

User232• 3 years ago

The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy. Each business is free to do as it wishes...

Currently US federal government spending is around 36% of GDP, which means 36% of the US economy is in fact centrally planned, albeit with some devolution in some cases.

Tangurena24• 3 years ago

Every large company is itself a "centrally planned economy". I worked for General Motors - it was much more like the Soviet Union than people want to admit. Every conglomerate I have worked for that had more than 10,000 workers was run like dictatorships.

0xDEF4• 3 years ago

to India and China

You probably mean just China. India's manufacturing output is less than 1/10th of China's manufacturing output.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

India does a lot of steel, but especially medicine, which suffers from the same problem.

Here in Germany, we're lacking cough syrup and antibiotics for children and so fucking much more drugs it's not even suitable for making jokes about the situation, it's so dire. Decades of "cutting costs" by always going for the cheapest manufacturer - i.e. China and India - has led to serious issues now.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/health-ministry-confronts-germanys-dir...

[2] https://www.deutsche-apotheker-zeitung.de/daz-az/2021/daz-30...

hwillis3• 3 years ago

this is what happens when you shift everything in heavy industry or production in general off to India and China without keeping at least some production domestic

I disagree, or at least think it's a lot harder than that.

1. It's not like we closed down Metal Cutting Inc. and just bought everything from China. There's no single company to have saved; there was Icebreakers and co. and Reactor Vessels Ltd. and ValvegearForgingCo. Any one of them might have been able to adapt but none of them were save-able and a lot of them were obviously obsolete.

2. Even when there is a Metal Cutting Inc., that's almost as bad. The supply chain was more efficient when it was integrated, not when its contracted out to a third party... or we would just buy from the places that still make things.

3. In this specific instance, but also in many others, market forces are not really the real problem. Look at Alcoa- hugely successful because small mills were cheaper to operate than large mills, but now we don't have huge mills everywhere. Can't fix that- even we had seen it coming and kept large mills alive, what would they make? What about harder problems,where you need a varied set of things to make to keep knowledge from dying out?

4. How do you do this without picking specific winners, and lobbying for who will live and who will die? If industries can survive the decline without losing their experts, how do you decide how much money to give them? How do you incentivize them to actually keep that knowledge, instead of getting into a more profitable industry?

5. In the end, the problem isn't about the companies or documentation or people. If you continued to employ all the people who operated the great presses, they'd just be mostly dead by now. It's not like people need much more than a wage, but I do think that an industry that depends on government subsidies, cannot possibly grow, does not build truly useful things, and could disappear because a new appointee dislikes it is not a line of work most people would be drawn towards.

My take is: Academia is the right place for some fraction of the people who are made redundant by outsourcing or technological change. They don't have to be lecturers, but they are already teachers. They pass on their knowledge to new employees. Document, research, experiment, and prove manufacturing and industrial techniques. Preserve that knowledge for when it is needed. Humanity doesn't invest nearly enough into education, much less the preservation of knowledge.

cm21872• 3 years ago

designers, engineers and welders grapple with something the U.S. hasn’t done in decades: reliably shape hardened steel that is more than an inch thick into a curved, reinforced ship’s hull

I don't understand. Aren't modern military ships armoured anymore?

andylynch2• 3 years ago

No, they aren’t armoured nearly as much as WWII era ships; it shorten range, slows them down, and doesn’t really work against guided weapons

hef198982• 3 years ago

Or torpedoes.

tomatotomato37• 3 years ago

Yeah, the dreadnaught arms race of the first part of the 20th century was kinda an anomaly in ship design, especially considering how little big-gun naval battles happened despite two world wars. Turns out up-armoring ships hard enough that they end up legitimately surviving a close range nuclear shockwave (look up Operation Crossroads) is actually a massive waste of resources.

ars• 3 years ago

The thick steel (like the landing deck of an aircraft carrier) is flat not curved. The curved stuff is actually Kevlar, not steel.

kevin_thibedeau2• 3 years ago

Didn't know they had kevlar hulls in WW2.

dmitrygr• 3 years ago

I don't understand. Aren't modern military ships armoured anymore?

No, no amount of armoring is useful against modern weaponry, but it does increase the "m", thus lowering the "a" you get from your engine's "F".

robotnikman• 3 years ago

Only the most vital parts receive some armor iirc. But not as thick as the armor found on the old battleships, and probably not curved.

echelon• 3 years ago

I'm curious as to whether manned ships will continue to prevail in the age of drones.

Wire up a cheap boat with explosives and it can sink an expensive naval vessel. The Ukrainians are using this to massively great effect right now against the Russians.

What if instead of building one new aircraft carrier, you build an autonomous submersible capable of launching drones with variable payloads?

Or instead of a destroyer, build a drone ship that can launch missiles?

Or an entirely new class of ship that simply swarms enemy defenses and is laden with explosives? Mass-produced autonomous jet skis with explosive payloads. But faster.

hwillis3• 3 years ago

Wire up a cheap boat with explosives and it can sink an expensive naval vessel.

This has been pretty obvious since the Millennium Challenge 21 years ago, when they just called them suicide attacks. Nobody seems to have cared then and not much has changed.

I think the issue is pretty tightly limited to boats/sea drones, though. If you're even a few feet under the surface then sonar can see you. If you're a few feet above the surface then radar gets you. Both options die a mile away.

I also think Russia is probably not very representative of the overall threat, too. I don't think their navy is running particularly better than their army. I don't know that other navies can do much besides trying to spot ships and blow them up with guns (do top-attack missiles work?) but whether or not they're good at it they'll definitely be much better than Russia. Until there's some sign that countries are actually investing in sea drones I don't think anything will be done, and I wouldn't be surprised if some kind of small top-attack rocket makes it a non-issue.

autonomous submersible

autonomous and submersible don't go very well together. Radio contact underwater is terrible. It's not like drones fly themselves; we haven't figure out the whole autonomous thing.

capable of launching drones with variable payloads?

Landing a plane on a ship is actually really hard and requires constant maintenance, even for VTOL. Even for helicopters. Smaller the ship, harder it is to land.

build a drone ship that can launch missiles?

But like, why? Why not have people on it? Ships are not big because of the people on it. People can treat casualties, repel boarding, land on the ground etc. Ships are also constantly being maintained and repaired. Waves and salt are a real bitch.

If you make a ship without people it'll cost almost the same, be almost the same size, be very hard to repair and be much less capable.

mikewarot• 3 years ago

At the end of WW2, the Japanese had developed, but not yet deployed, suicide airplanes with 2,900 Kg shaped charges built into them. If they were deployed, and managed to get close enough, it's possible it would have blown right through the 12" armor of an Iowa class battleship.

It was Mitsubishi Ki0167[2], according to Ryan Szimanski the curator of the Battleship New Jersey, in this video[1].

This marked the effective end of the concept of armor thick enough that it couldn't be breached, and the Battleship.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KlFxbF8hrs

[2] https://www.daveswarbirds.com/Nippon/aircraft/Ki-167.htm

cm21872• 3 years ago

ok but that's 12" armour. But doesn't necessarily mean we went to the other extreme, i.e. that a modern military ship has the same hull than a trawler. A quick google search suggests the thickness of an ice breaker hull seems to be about 2 inches.

horeszko• 3 years ago

Makes me wonder how much manufacturing knowledge has been lost in the west, and how long it might take to rediscover it all.

Does anyone know of any good sources on this?

deaddodo• 3 years ago

Strictly speaking, none.

The knowledge is all there, the problem is lack of experience/training.

kevin_thibedeau2• 3 years ago

Training is a cost center. Just put out a job req demanding 20 years experience in forging curved steel. Problem solves itself. Now just let me collect my plum consulting fee for this bit of genius business management advice.

1970-01-013• 3 years ago

It's the skills that are lost. The knowledge is safe in print.

moonchrome3• 3 years ago

There's a lot of practical/contextual knowledge that isn't documented, and what's documented isn't guaranteed to be correct or can be misleading (terminology changes, standards change, some things are implied because they are obvious at the time, etc.)

ClumsyPilot4• 3 years ago

You can't even document computer code accurately. And neither can I.

Gordon Ramsey can't document how to cook a steak and how to tell thats its done. 3 different cooks will read his instructions and will end up with 3 different steaks.

The idea that a lifetime of steelworking experience can be foind in books, especially by people who aren't known for love of books, is pure folly.

Skills are living. They live in flesh and bone.

smoyer• 3 years ago

We can't build the engines for the Saturn five rocket anymore though the engineering documents still exist. You need the documentation and skilled craftsman.

testfoobar• 3 years ago

Not the same industry, but here is an article in the WSJ about declining numbers of petroleum engineers: https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-oils-talent-crisis-high-sal...

"Big Oil’s Talent Crisis: High Salaries Are No Longer Enough

Energy companies scramble to attract engineers as young workers fret over climate and job security

Good news from the oil patch: Jobs are plentiful and salaries are soaring.

The bad news is that young people still aren’t interested.

Even as oil-and-gas companies post record profits, the industry is facing a worsening talent drought.

At U.S. colleges, the pool of new entrants for petroleum-engineering programs has shrunk to its smallest size since before the fracking boom began more than a decade ago. European universities, which have historically provided many of the engineers for companies with operations across the Middle East and Asia, are seeing similar trends.

...."

throwbadubadu2• 3 years ago

The bad news is that young people still aren’t interested

And maybe that is also good news, because the youth realizes what we won't and what is at stake? Wouldn't have thought that not everything can be bought.. a little hope for them's still there, as we will ignore it til our deaths ;)

Tangurena24• 3 years ago

I remember a very old WSJ article about "swiss style machinists" and how there are no young American ones any more. This style of machinist makes tiny objects (think of how small things inside a mechanical watch are), where a day's production fits into a coffee cup. It takes a 10 year long apprenticeship to become productive enough that a company is willing to one of these machinists. All of the "younger" ones came from Germany or Austria because their governments subsidize the long training & apprenticeship programs. In the US, virtually all of them were laid off at the end of the Cold War.

Like most trade workers, the worker owns the tools that they use on the job. When they sell their tools, they leave the trade.

I don't think there have been any good studies or histories written about the decline in tradeskilled labor.

NegativeK• 3 years ago

There's a lot of discussion about how tradespeople are retiring and leaving big gaps in the workforce, and there's a strong element of truth to it, but America is still producing large and small machined parts.

There's still large machine tools being refurbished in Rockford, Illinois, Haas is building a large new facility in Nevada (delayed; thanks covid) for making CNC machine tools, medical and aerospace parts are still earning machinists a crapton of money, and people are still hobbing enormous gears that are very, very expensive.

It's pretty clear that American machining has lost its production bandwidth due to offshoring, but it's not accurate to say that the field is dead.

mortureb• 3 years ago

I think for anything we don’t actively make anymore, we can assume the skill has been lost.

0xDEF4• 3 years ago

I think we in the West need to get better at creating excitement about manufacturing.

The two biggest wind turbine manufacturers in the world, Vestas Wind Systems and Siemens Gamesa, are located here in Denmark. It is definitely possible to do manufacturing in high income developed countries.

dxbydt• 3 years ago

https://www.businessinsider.com/basic-products-america-doesn...

Dated article, says USA doesn't make these anymore -

Baseball Babyfood Etch a Sketch Converse Shoes Stainless Steel Rebar Dress Shirt Mattel Toys Minivan Vending Machine Levi Jeans Red Wagon TV Cellphone Railroad Turnouts Sardines Dell Computer Cutlery Bulb

bhelkey• 3 years ago

I can't speak to many of these. However, some baby food is made in the US.

https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety...

HankB992• 3 years ago

Two articles now I try to access the content at archive.ph and cannot make it past the Captcha. I've disabled uBlock Origin and that seems to make no difference. Is anyone else seeing this and if so, have a solution? (Firefox 117.0.1 (64-bit) on Debian Linux.)

notamy3• 3 years ago

1.1.1.1 does not work with archive.ph and the related family of archive sites, due to choices on the archive.* end of things. See ex. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36970702

HankB992• 3 years ago

I don't understand the details of the problem but that is surely it.

Thanks!

fragmede2• 3 years ago

It's Cloudflare's fault.

rkagerer• 3 years ago

Are you with Starlink by any chance? Had similar trouble from one of their IP's, but a different ISP's (same device) is working fine.

Tangurena24• 3 years ago

Archive.ph has trouble from time-to-time. Give it a couple hours and someone will "reboot the hamster".

throe37848• 3 years ago

Does USA even have civilian dry docks to build ships? I thought everything was outsourced to Korea.

I know it can build military vessels, but at horribly slow pace. Australia will get their nuclear submarines some time in 2040. I can not imagine building civilian nuclear ice breakers in US.

Ekaros2• 3 years ago

And building ships isn't even that hard... Like a really nice passenger ships takes what 2 or 3 years?

Gud2• 3 years ago

Major difference between building a cruise ship and a polar ice breaker.

Baeocystin• 3 years ago

Yes. The NASSCO shipyard in San Diego. I worked there as a ship welder for a while after the first .com crash, and two of the three ships I worked on were civilian.

randomname11• 3 years ago

Also Aker in Philadelphia. US law requires ships in domestic trade to be built in the US so there is a market for new builds.

JacobThreeThree• 3 years ago

Does USA even have civilian dry docks to build ships?

The article was about getting new ice breakers for the Coast Guard, a branch of the US military.

Arrath• 3 years ago

There's Gunderson Marine in Portland, OR.

red-iron-pine3• 3 years ago

Plenty. Newport News, Puget Sound, Portland, San Diego.

But Korea is operating at a much, much grander scale and scope. Like having a chain of 7 respectable burger shops vs. McDonalds.

HDThoreaun• 3 years ago

US shipbuilding is uncompetitive because of the Jones act. They literally don't have to compete because ships that travel between American ports have to by law be built in the US.

willmadden• 3 years ago

We should buy the icebreakers and retrofit them minimally and inexpensively, not rebuild a niche industry just because we are running out of 50+ year old icebreakers in the Coast Guard.

cpursley6• 3 years ago

Everybody likes to dump on Russia here but their nuclear icebreakers are something to behold:

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/may/worlds-m...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKaVhXn49xY

xvedejas• 3 years ago

People don't dump on Russia for their nuclear icebreakers ;)

Maybe in an alternate, more peaceful world, Russia would be happily selling icebreakers to the US for profit?

0xDEF4• 3 years ago

It is actually a surprising that Russia is not the manufacturing capital of the world. They have super-cheap energy, Soviet-era high-quality STEM education, and 50 million cheap workers from Caucasus, Siberia, Far East Russia, and the Central Asian countries.

EliRivers2• 3 years ago

Soviet-era high-quality STEM education

The last batch of such manufacturing apprentices went through in the mid-eighties. They're just about all gone from the workplace.

JumpCrisscross4• 3 years ago

Russia is still structured as an empire, though the fraction of ethnic Russians is relatively high, historically speaking. That, together with its large size, requires a large section of the economy be slaved to the security sector.

Frankly, Russia as a Chinese suzerainty might be one of the more productive alignments for the global economy, even if it isn’t great for America.

freefaler3• 3 years ago

And a very corrupted government and no rule of law. China is also corrupted, but the level of corruption in Russia is on a different level.

Also declining population and worsening education.

There is a statistically significant correlation between the level of corruption and economic growth:

https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-rep...

Putin has dismantled most of the check and balances in the system. Nobody would invest in that country. Check Bill Browder's story on how they raided the Hermitage fund.

And with this useless war going on they're forced to buy arms from DPRK.

cpursley6• 3 years ago

They don't really have the population for it. In fact, they've got an acute skilled labor shortage (and had one even before the war).

wrp• 3 years ago

It is actually a surprising that Russia is not the manufacturing capital of the world.

Why the USSR did not become a major industrial exporter has been the subject of some good historical studies. It's been a while, so I don't have any good references at hand, but I recall that the main problem was Soviet management policies. Companies had a very hard time implementing quality control, and the government was also reluctant to close obsolete plants, because their primary goal was to maintain full employment.

moffkalast• 3 years ago

Fun fact, the USCGC Healy is the ship that the Half Life 2 Borealis model is based on.

impish9208• 3 years ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37548091

To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

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