International Nickel A710 / HSLA-80 predecessor development

The type of steel they were looking at was A710, which is the same thing that was the predecessor to HSLA-80 that the Navy uses now. That was a steel developed by International Nickel. It had like one or two percent nickel. As a young mid-20s engineer I said well why don't they just build the whole thing out of A710. He says, well first of all you couldn't afford it, with all the alloy content to get that high toughness. But the other thing, there wasn't enough nickel in the world to build a whole pipeline out of something with that high nickel content. Well there probably was enough nickel, but it was really the cost issue. Nonetheless, you do run into problems of whether you have enough material. So they actually sometimes design crack stoppers, crack arresters — just thicker, higher toughness, and if a crack starts running, you can stop it.