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Alabama's 60,000 wartime shipbuilders
A new submarine factory
Hadrian is building a 2.25 million square foot factory there to help with Virginia-class and Columbia-class submarine construction, and it will be online in about a year. Those two classes sit at the top of the most complicated products America manufactures, ahead of Starship and Falcon 9.
The old spirit
The hope was to find that the old shipbuilding spirit still lived in the area. It does. People there are fired up and understand why the work is important, and they know it will bring generational changes in economic impact.
Work that means something
What excites them most is a job on something meaningful, like submarines, munitions, and space flight hardware, even more than a pretty good job.
How did wartime shipyards build ships so quickly?
Standardized designs let yards build ships in volume: the Liberty ship, a cargo vessel based on a British design, was produced in 18 American yards. Welded hulls replaced riveted ones, which cut construction time. At a California yard in 1942, a Liberty ship was assembled in just over four days as a publicity record. About 2,700 Liberty ships were built in all.
Why are submarines so hard to build?
A submarine's pressure hull must hold back the crushing pressure of deep water, so its welds are inspected far more heavily than those on surface ships. A nuclear-powered boat also packs a reactor plant and dense systems into a tight space. Virginia-class construction is split between General Dynamics Electric Boat in Connecticut and HII's Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia. The first Virginia-class boat entered service in 2004.