We forgot
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You do realize a market exists for battleship armor plate? We used to produce and do things with steel, we can't even touch today. During WW2, the U.S. cold-rolled and shaped eighteen-inch armor plate.
Maybe it's old fashioned, but a hallmark of a prosperous nation used to be a skilled manufacturing sector that employed middle-class blue collar workers. Machinists, millwrights, shipwrights, specialty welders and even guys who knew how to work an assembly line and keep it purring along.
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This reminds me about a Minnesooooooooota fun fact:
About 70% of all the iron used for WWII came from Minnesota’s Masabi Range, amounting to about 330 million tons of ore. The war effort almost completely depleted Minnesota of its iron reserves and led to the mining of taconite, a lower grade of iron ore.
Without Minnesota’s rich iron ore reserves, the U.S. could not have won.
https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-iron-range-mesabi-world-war-2-ore-steel-mining/600259684/
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Sad and pitiful...
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.
Just a few minutes drive from where I sit, they do it all day long
