Electric Boat Quonset Point pressure-hull welding facility

Brief reference. Electric Boat's $200M indoor building at Quonset Point exists to maintain the circularity needed for steel pressure hulls. Used to set the scale of the manufacturing problem, but the Soviets and Tom were doing it with electroslag rather than the gas metal arc Electric Boat used. Not a developed case in this excerpt; flagged as a proposal because it doesn't match an existing cluster. ## Figures referenced

Electric Boat has a whole facility down at Quonset Point to get the extreme circularity you need for a good pressure hull in steel. They have an indoor building that cost $200 million down at Quonset Point so they can weld these things. They weren't using electroslag, they were using gas metal arc on the steel. But you could do that with electroslag, and the Soviets, the Paton Institute, were the leader in electroslag technology in the whole world. Gurevich had quit publishing on any of the titanium work, and so on my titanium project, when I came back, we took some of our one-inch plate and we made the first electroslag weld outside of one research project in France and the Soviet Union — at least the first one I know of. We made it just in the room next door. It was a terrible weld, no fusion, but we found that titanium is easier to electroslag weld than steel.