Coast Guard / Navy material-test best-region circumvention pattern

One-line analogy: "This is just like the Coast Guard case — pick the best place to get the best properties, test it, pass your test, say we've got good material." ## Figures referenced

They had taken their prolongation and measured the fracture toughness as a Charpy — it's not exactly Charpy for fracture toughness, but close enough. You're allowed an extra heat treatment — you can put it back in and reheat-treat it — except they had no prolongation left to cut off for testing. So they just put a chunk of steel in with the furnace, a smaller piece — maybe something this size rather than 200 tons. And believe it or not, the smaller pieces cool at a faster rate than the rest of the 200-ton piece. They passed on that external test, whereas the original one, cooling at the slower rate, didn't pass. So they passed their surrogates and said, okay, it passes. This is just like the Coast Guard case — pick the best place to get the best properties, test it, pass your test, say we've got good material in our product, okay.