Maybe we should get that added to the Friendly Reminder. This has been a fairly consistent issue.
Lemme rephrase and/or
drop the coup bits.
Detroit/Chicago is widely known public knowledge. Just watching the evening news occasionally, let alone a few PBS documentaries, would give you a general overview. Chicago's problems are literally that notorious. Quite literally the top 5 things I know about Chicago is: 1. Its windy. 2. Capone was an asshole & the Untouchables were badasses. 3. The Projects are hellholes. 4. Best damn pizza ever. 5. They dye the river green every year for St. Patrick's Day. I have to occasionally be reminded the Bears play there.
The 'rust belt' is taught about in middle school level US History classes covering the 1950-1980s. If you don't know about it, even vaguely, and were taught in the USA, I worry about your teachers. And again, I'm from WA state, yet know it from when I was a kid. Closer to the mid-West & East Coast, those lessons probably got hammered on even harder as moving industries 'cheaply' overseas infuriated a LOT of people there, from the '70s-'80s, who saw whole blocks upon blocks of factories be locked up and then abandoned wholesale. I might only know the barebones facts, but just commenting that 'its coming' will get gears turning if someone pays attention. And,
historically, FDR wants the
internal US economy going like a rocket to Mars.
-
As for the Great Lakes shipyards, yes, they do still exist.
Just vastly downsized, and at only a fraction of the industrial support infrastructure they had in the 1940s. That would be
common knowledge to Thompson due to his OTL!Kancolle military position.
Most of the 'big' yards left in modern times are either on the Mississippi (
very easy to sail right up to the yards), in Virginia (Newport News & Norfolk are both within shelling range of the coast, less than 6 miles iirc), Maine (Bath Iron Works, also within easy shelling distance of the coast), and so on. The only two yards left that would be surrounded by land for a couple hundred miles that could have shore batteries blasting Abyssals, is those up in the Great Lakes, and Bremerton (Puget Sound is a gauntlet, second only to the suicide run a fool would have to try that is the St. Lawerence River). Of those two, Bremerton is the only one big enough to construct carriers - no way in hell can you run a carrier the size of a Lexington, or bigger, up/down the St. Lawerence. Thompson, being a member of the modern Navy would know these facts.
Intimately.
Its his job.
Especially post-Abyssals, who slaughtered the coastlines.
So its pretty much those two pre-existing yards, that the USA would be forced to rely on at first. Anything on the Mississippi COULD get moved much further inland, but that still means moving the yards. Something for a later date however.
Bremerton is pretty much maxed for the size it can get due to terrain. No big issues there. Forts Casey, Flagler, and Worden were already built by 1880s to cover the Admiralty Inlet entrance to Puget Sound from three sides, and were heavily updated in 1940-1941. Just
mentioning the Abyssals to FDR would have him make sure the USN & Army keep those three gun batteries in operation for decades, rather then turning them into the state/national parks they are today. Thompson, prior to getting yanked back in time, likely saw them directly, or heard about them, getting reactivated - the three locations really are perfect for setting up a killbox that would have decimated entire fleets trying to force their way in. And that was merely with 1940s disappearing carriage shore guns. Post-Abyssals? In modern times? *shudders*
But the Great Lakes? Nobody, but nobody, that isn't
Canada, has a prayer in the world of getting a hostile force into those lakes, without 95% of their forces dying to a man. Unless they nuke the USA first. Its the one location in the continental USA where, barring CVs & BBs, you can build
anything the USA needs, and unless they have ICBMs, they can't stop you.
That, is how protected their locations are naturally due to being so far inland, and how easily the USA could build added artificial defenses for said river & lakes.
Yet those shipyards were practically thrown away post-war, and whittled down even further over the decades. IIRC, at least 2/3rds the construction slips were backfilled in by 1970 and are now either housing or commercial districts.
All the above is middle school level knowledge. Not 'sum total of human knowledge', nor 'sum of college doctorate courses'. nor even 'sum of high school elective classes'.
Middle school.
I did that from memory, and a trip out to my garage to find a faded old report I did in 1991 in 7th grade, my parents had kept. It was in the pile of old homework they handed over, in binders no less (heh, parents), a few years ago. I didn't even bother to look at Google or Wikipedia.
However, as I will
attempt to limit this to just this page, I will end this topic here.
