Dear Madam President,
The following document has been written by a group of engineers, thinkers, and industrialists who wish to assist in the betterment of the Commonwealth. Over the past handful of years, we have gone over the current economic capability and characteristics of the Commonwealth. In this document, we have highlighted areas of the economy most suitable for development and attached proposals on how to best go about doing so.
Thank you for your consideration.
Unified Commonwealth Industrial 3 Year Plan
First-line production (Processing of ore to metal/feedstock)
Coal
Coal ore processing and production must be increased in order to supply the wider region with both heating fuel and power. We have the largest coal basin right under us, we may as well make it work for our good. Due to said large deposits of good quality coal, a lot of things are on the table, but firstly the most important of them is consistent power and heating infrastructure.
As for international aid that can assist in this priority should go to equipment that can increase the depth of coal mining, while tighter integration of transport and extraction can improve efficiency. Given a few years, we should be able to heat every home with electricity rather than coal and retire it to being a fuel for our power-plants rather than being used directly.
Another fortunate effect of our continuous coal mining is that we have a trained stock of personnel that is almost definitely willing to teach newcomers, and as long as the structuring of the teaching works well, we should have a good basis for expanding the industry while not facing an acute shortage of trained manpower.
As an aside for the economical cost, first-line increases in coal production would be one of the cheapest improvements in base supply that we could make and could make us one of the largest coal exporters. Due to China being offline, and with the European coal fields consisting of brown coal, we have the option of being a strong coal exporter.
Iron/Manganese ore
For iron mining, we have decent deposits under us, along with one of the world's largest deposits to our direct north near lake superior. Exploiting both or funding the exploitation of the Superior deposits would provide us a good industrial basis for steel production, providing the bulk of resources needed while at the same time having a nearly inexhaustible supply of ore.
Due to the format of both of these mines as pit-mines, heavy trucks along with other transport machinery would be the main import goals, as they boost the speed at which we can expand. Also, as these are simple open-pit mines they will only need their heavy equipment to be useful once more. Given the foreign import market and the number of old mining trucks we can buy, this is also a fairly cheap item to expand at little cost, and every bit of machinery we ship home increases the amount we can extract.
Cement
Another critical component that we have in spades across multiple quarries in the southern commonwealth (South Illinois). For this, some processing is required, but in general, the amount of industry and power involved is fairly minimal, allowing a considerable amount of buildup with minimal imports. Thus to increase the production of this, along with other pit-mined goods more heavy trucks are needed, but fortunately, they are fairly cheap to buy from supply companies as older ones are rapidly competed out of the market.
Sulfuric Acid/Sulfite Processing
The most critical product for the chemical industry, and one that we are fortunately surrounded by. This forms the basis of all chemical synthesis and production while also providing the driving form for many reactions. Our coal and oil deposits are heavy in it, allowing easy economic extraction. The main issue with its production is the relative energy intensity of the process and how much electric power is needed.
For this, our best bet is going to be importing some high chromium steel for the production vessels, along with the whole-sale purchase of old coal power plant turbines if we can get them. Any production of sulfuric acid forms the basis for all nitric acid production and most antibiotics. I cannot emphasize how critical this stuff is to produce in that it forms the entire backbone of any chemical industry we make, along with being needed to prepare semiconductor dopants.
Heavy Sour Crude
Our poor quality oil that we actually have a reasonably decent deposit of. It's sulfur heavy, it's full of heavier material, and is all-round sub-optimal for making lighter fuels, but, with the gifts of the international market. We can process it and set up mass production of its products for a reasonable cost. Due to the lack of extraction of our deposit due to the previous instability in the region, it should be able to be pumped at a reasonable cost, especially given that drilling technology has to have advanced considerably in the time passed.
In terms of what to get internationally, just some derricks and ability to hydro-frack would let us get good quantities of the oil out of the ground, but processing and re-building the refinery infrastructure is going to be a challenging endeavor. Assuming we cannot do oil cracking, and go for the cheaper options, this would mean that we would at best produce workable quantities of Diesel and fuel oil, with masses of bitumen. If we can crack, the world opens up to us and allows us to produce masses upon masses of diesel fuel for all uses. While it would mean that gasoline isn't going to be economical for us to make for a few years, we can have a reliable domestic fuel industry for use in the military and civilian market.
Crops/Food
We are the breadbasket region, and this is very apparent in the amount of food we can produce, along with the degree we can ramp up food production across the commonwealth. The biggest factor in all of this is going to be the persistent mechanization to reduce manpower in the sector, along with centralization and scientific work on new seed crops to increase yields further. Along with may be offering farmers classes so that they can become up to date on the latest agricultural information, to further increase yields.
Another thing to import would be chemical pesticides, and synthetic fertilizer, as both were heavily responsible for the increase of per-acre yields, and both should be fairly cheap to buy in bulk. From there, these imports should last us long enough to get our own local production up to a reasonable extent, allowing us to shift into modern agriculture and make a region that can feed thousands.
Supporting Industry (Stuff that we need to make more)
Electricity
The most critical thing that we need for building up our state and allowing us to get more industrial production. Electricity would also form the basis of a lot of industry and would allow the centralization of coal-burning into a much more efficient configuration, allowing us to use less coal, and to concentrate the smog into regions that are not absolutely critical, rather than burning it in homes for heating. Plus, electrification would allow us to start distributing out, along with providing a significant market for any consumer goods that we can produce, further allowing an increase in production and quality of life across the commonwealth.
In terms of accomplishing this, we have one very easy local means and foreign dependant means. The first of these would involve the construction of coal power plants using our prodigious coal deposits, allowing cheap and easy power that we can build more and more of using locally available materials. At most this would require the import of the turbines and catalytic converters to remove the risk of acid rain. Allowing us to save imported foreign currency for other projects.
The other option would be importing solar panels and reflective mirrors allowing us to rapidly set up cheap clean power. This, however, would be fully foreign tech dependant, outside of us making concentrated solar power, and with our tech level/currency exchanges, would be a massive expensive option that may not even fit our goals or economic capability for a few years. Thus, this commission would recommend the construction of additional coal power, as it's cheaper, easier, and would give us a good basis for later industrialization.
Whatever option we take, however, we are going to need international experts and instructors to teach our people how to make infrastructure in the most efficient manner. Along with the general updates to our power transmission infrastructure and turbine designs that would greatly increase the power we can get out. Along with reducing the losses during transport that will become more and more of an issue as our state grows.
Rail/Rail transport
A big nice to have for us, and what would tie all of our industrial options together most optimally would be a rail system. Going for a pie in the sky idea that we could maybe implement if we time it well with the implementation of electric power, would be an all-electric rail system, in that rather than relying on considerably less efficient locomotives and engines. We can use much more efficiently produced grid power to power our trains. This would coincide well with us building up electrical infrastructure and would give a good basis for further train movement.
To accomplish this, any buildup in rail infrastructure would be accompanied by power lines along with link-ups for electric trains. The large advantage for doing it from the start, however, comes in the fact that we can pre-plan and standardize a lot of concerns when it comes to the general electrification of our rail lines, and ensure that efficiency standards are similar across the board due to us needing to build all of the novel capacity either way. And as long as we can combine the actions of constructing power plants with expanding railways, we can manage this as a combined effort.
In terms of international aid, the most prominent factor here would be the same as the question of power plants, as those require components that are challenging for us to build at best, and massively benefit from the import of components such as turbines, along with industrial engineers.
Information Distribution or Workforce Education
A key part of our efforts to improve our nation is to improve access to information. Factory workers, engineers, planners, and scientists must be educated as well as exposed to ideas to encourage development.
Libraries should be made one of the centers of this effort, with career and trade fairs held to disseminate methods and techniques to help new industries grow. They will also act as a way to motivate the youths into identifying a career or field that most interests them so they can begin pursuing it.
On the front of education itself, we need to build a strong system to provide as best an education as we are able to. Local education systems should be networked together so prospective students across the nation can consider the best school for their needs.
To support both efforts, foreign databases should be obtained via any means necessary. These will help round out large gaps in our information base. We also should make an effort to attract foreign professors and instructors.
Road Infrastructure
Our road infrastructure is roughly non-existent and will likely still be lacking even with any reasonable industrial effort due to the low relative priority of the systems. Their primary use would be moving vehicles and machinery between cities, along with some limited civilian traffic due to small amounts of fuel that is available. Thus, any road expansion that we do should be small and reasonable but left with the opportunity for expansion, such as for now using the extra space to the side of roads as greenery, and expanding them later on if the demand is there.
In terms of approach to making the roads, we can broadly split the construction into two categories, large roads, and smaller sub-roads. For the larger ones, concrete pre-fabs offer both cost and maintenance benefits and would co-encode will with expansion later on, while also consuming the same resources that heavy industrial production of concrete and housing pre-fabs, allowing the industry to pull double duty. For smaller roads, we can use our prodigious amounts of bitumen to simply and cheaply make sub roads by just casting them out and rolling them down.
Recycling/Resource Efficiency
In terms of our current resource scarcity of certain rare materials, policies such as chromium rationing and recycling should play a massive role in our developing industrial priorities. As there are no real substitutes for it in the realm of acid-resistant steel production. Thus, a reasonable reclamation and recycling department would help massively. As it would allow us to collect pre-collapse or old material and fashion it into new much more useful goods.
As a baseline suggestion, making a dedicated organization for this purpose would be a nice thing to have, along with making a media push to encourage people to recycle/donate/look for goods and items with industry critical materials for significant monetary compensation. We will not always have the international pipe-line of resources, and any program we can implement to reduce our usage of them will go a long way.
Safety and Quality Control
While production is important there should also be some thought to the safety of the workers as properly trained workers are difficult to replace en mass. Thus, we do need some form of OSHA to be made in order to ensure that safety standards are followed and that there are reasonable penalties for not following them and squandering our limited pool of trained manpower. Asbestos is prohibited from industrial or any other use. Human life will not be willfully sacrificed for industrial or economic gain.
As to quality control, creating a centralized industrial regulatory agency for the quality of produced goods, along with standards in testing would go a long way towards ensuring that there are no inconsistencies in our production. This would assist with our export of goods to the international market, along with ensuring that whatever we use domestically keeps to reasonably and minimal quality standards.
Workforce Management
One of the most important aspects of our industrial expansion is to ensure that we correctly manage all of our resources, human included. Those out of work and actively looking for work should be assisted in looking for work as best as possible. Those with disabilities or other conditions that inhibit their work in certain industries should be provided with jobs that they are still able to do with a reasonable degree of efficiency.
The workforce as a greater body is predominantly unionized at this point and should remain so. The government should coordinate with unions and workers communes to ensure that manpower is not spent unduly on industries that do not need too.
Child labor laws will be implemented, with the earliest age someone can work is 16 years, and only with parental permission. They must also prioritize academic development. At the age of 17, anyone may work without parental permission but still must focus on academics. At 18, these limitations are no longer in effect.
Light industrial production (Consumer goods and small manufacturing).
Government Actions
Our baseline for Light Industry is quite strong at the moment as it is the cornerstone of our economy. We have a good deal of people experienced with local production of a variety of goods both military and civilian to draw from for practical expertise. Their distributed nature also helps ensure that no one community is a major strategic target at this time.
The immediate goal for our light industry coming out of the peace talks should be to expand it to supply civilian consumer goods to raise the standard of living as well as the size of the economy, use what we have to begin laying the groundwork for heavy industrial expansion.
To go about expanding our light industry, there will need to be a mix of government and private effort. Existing manufacturers should be incentivized into producing tools and equipment for the starting up of additional workshops, manufacturing communes, and maker spaces.
Beyond incentives, the federal and local governments should also go about obtaining tools and machinery to provide to the above entities in less wealthy areas with at least some tooling to both expand industry and create wealth.
Accompanying asset assistance, government funds should be allocated to new manufacturing entities to service the massive civilian goods demand. Military manufacturing should not be cast aside, but as it stands we need to increase the prosperity of the common commonwealth citizen. This not only raises the standard of living but also increases the size of our economy and how much resources we can dedicate to efforts besides survival.
Heavy industrial production (Industrial goods for the construction of more industry/infrastructure)
Steel
THE most important industrial resources that we can produce en mass and the critical component to so many other sectors of our society and construction. Unfortunately for us, there are considerable limitations on the quality of steel we can make, and this report will subdivide the different categories of steel, along with separating out the foreign relations measures that we can take in order to further optimize production.
To begin one of our first priorities should be structural steel in that it is the most widely used and cheapest steel that we will employ for most applications. For this category, cheap low-mid carbon steel would be ideal. In terms of application, A36 is a good candidate [
see attached data sheet(1)], it has decent mechanical properties, uses only local resources, and is decent all-round steel. It can be made cheaply with no import-dependent parts, and massive centralized mega-foundries for it should be set up to ensure a rapid upgrade of infrastructure. This stuff can be used everywhere from rails to buildings and would form the basis of most construction efforts due to its acceptable mechanical properties for almost all non-specialty applications. For anti-corrosion efforts, we can always galvanize the steel using zinc to ensure that corrosion is kept to acceptable levels.
As to tool steels and hardened steels, our best choice is 38MnB5 Boron Steel (2), as it does not use any imported materials to make it while providing good levels of durability and hardenability while being a reasonable intermediary for other applications. In terms of military use, it does not spall as prodigiously as other tool steels and can form an acceptable form of armored plating, while at the same time being hardenable enough for both applications. This would be our general steel for constructing most military equipment and industrial machinery, but, due to its lacking resistance to corrosion, it needs to be galvanized with zinc as well to ensure that it does not rust.
In terms of stainless steel, there are two approaches available to the Commonwealth due to our great limitations in the realm of chromium production. This leaves us with two options, one possibility is the use of novel aluminum manganese composites in the greater steel (3). As long as hard acids are not being worked with, this would work well to create near-total corrosion-resistant materials. When it comes to acid-resistant steel grades though, there are no alternatives to chromium and will require imports and rationing of it to ensure that we will have enough to last, but fortunately, highly acidic environments are only going to be present in industrial and chemical machinery, thus allowing us to get buy with imports and rationing, as long as we are careful with our stocks.
Aluminum
Another critical but very energy-intensive material that is needed as a light composite for many industrial and civilian applications. The main issue with its production is the electrolysis process needed being extremely energy-intensive along with alumina being hard to separate out, necessitating a great increase in power production to ensure that we can make enough for our needs, especially if an aerospace industry develops.
The alloying materials though are a branch of good news, as almost all aluminum alloys use materials that we have locally, and do not need to import, with the exception of ultra-high temperature ones used in some aerospace applications. This allows us to build almost anything out of aluminum, and as long as we can supply the power production to make enough of it.
As to international imports that would help the most with this, corrosion-resistant electrodes would optimally reduce machinery wear while at the same time ensuring that we can keep up production of Aluminum. While these would be a major one time cost due to the material rarity involved in the electrons.
Concrete Prefabs
Another critical infrastructure resource that is needed to build up our cities and roads while at the same time massively benefiting from economies of scale that are involved in its production. Using central factories for processing aggregate and cement into them, we can massively ramp up production, and use them as an almost standard construction material in almost any new structure we put up. At the same time, this produces a material with acceptable properties that we can standardize on to further simplify the production of houses and other domiciles, while also using it for roads. As long as we can make pre-fabs and cement bricks, we can make almost any modern building to reasonable standards for low costs.
Industrial Machinery
Another critical thing to build up for the point of increasing production across the Commonwealth and is needed to ensure that we can keep up the economic boom. Although, we should be careful not to repeat the soviet mistakes of making too much industrial machinery. Here, for the first phases, we are going to need to import the first bits of machinery from foreign markets to allow us to rapidly build up our own native capacity. Along with the experts needed to operate and run it in the short term as our own industrial ventures are built up. The opening of other imports for this branch is critical and cannot be stated enough that the obsolete runoff/hand me downs from international markets will save us masses of time and effort, along with boot-strapping the entire future industrial economy that we wish to make.
Chip foundries
Here the foreign market and the import of trained personnel really come into play, as the presence of these would allow us to make our own electronics en mass without needing to rely on imports and basic circuitry. We have no option but to try and buy obsolete equipment from the international market and then implement its production. This would give a limited degree of production for local electronics and allow us to start digitizing our economy fairly rapidly. While this would not let us make up to date devices, a generation behind the current European market is still going to be an amazing leap forward and would allow a whole new revelation in how we operate our systems and economy.
Polymer Industry
In terms of polymer and plastic production, we have heavy oil, easily opening the door for the production of any plastic item we would wish for. While this production would take skilled personnel and necessitate considerable investment of capital, we have a near-optimal resource base for the production of all common plastic types.
Given some foreign expertise, we can easily build up massive plastic production and even use it as an export market due to our considerable reserves of heavy oil. As another aside, polymer production from the plastics would allow a revelation in quality of life across the Commonwealth, as many heavier items can be neatly replaced by plastic. This would also allow us to make new higher quality urban infrastructure projects due to plastic decaying slower, and being cheaper to produce the most metal alternatives. And it would be a good export market and a good target for foreign investment.
Non-Supporting Chemical Industry (Chemicals that are valuable as chemicals)
Sulfa Antibiotics
Using the production of sulfuric acid and our petrochemical industry, it becomes fairly simple to make most Sulfa antibiotics, greatly improving population health and growth, along with providing a cheap antibiotic that can be mass-produced and mass issued. And, as long as reasonable and sane policies are adhered to in usage we can prevent a good amount of antibiotic resistance. These would, however, include the avoidance of usage of antibiotics on livestock until our arsenal of antibiotics expands considerably. Fortunately for us, the production of these is a very simple endeavor and can be done with the very minimal chemical industry, allowing us to mass issue them out in the short term to anyone that needs them.
Nitrogen Fixing/Ammonia
THE most critical component of the modern agricultural revolution, and the means that allows us to massively ramp up agricultural productivity through the usage of modern fertilizers. It is needed for almost all chemical industrial production from explosives to fertilizer, and machinery for it should be our number one priority with access to the international market over any other industrial machinery. This suddenly allows us to mass-produce any form of fertilizer that is needed for the minor cost of power and would let us have our own little green revolution. Again, it cannot be reiterated how important this process is to us, as it forms the basis of so much of the industrial production that is needed to keep up food yields and to fight a war.
Work Cited/Referenced
because the steel argument between engineers never ends
https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=6117
(1)Steel grade for A36 Structural steel
https://www.salzgitter-flachstahl.de/fileadmin/mediadb/szfg/informationsmaterial/produktinformationen/warmgewalzte_produkte/eng/37mnb5.pdf
(2) Boron steel performance/composition
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-16919-4_27
(3) Alternative oxidation protection in basic/barely acidic environments
Authors note: This is a bit of collaborative work by me and
@TheFantasticFox as we decided to go through all of our industrialization options/be bored engineers and made a large summary of stuff we can do TM.
web.archive.org
The effect this has in-universe is that the CFLP is explicitly a far-left coalition, drawing in communists who wanted an actual chance at the polls (note that there is no fully communist party with seats in your legislature) and socialists who wanted to establish an ideologically-secular socialist party separate from the CSP. Neither demographic being decisive on their own, and both being quite conscious of the solid grasp the political center had on things, they banded together, and formed the Commonwealth Farmer-Laborer Party. De Leonism is not, by magic, the thing they all independently decided that they wanted; it is the doctrine they elected to pursue as part of their electoral strategy.en.wikipedia.org
www.vox.com
www.reuters.com
