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Pykrete
- akkartik 11y agoIt plays a major role in Neal Stephenson's latest novel, SeveneveS.
- jnsaff2 11y agoYes it does. And the book is mighty good as well.
- igravious 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete#In_the_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete#In_the_media
- JoachimS 11y agoThe opinion about Seveneves varies quite a lot. I found it to be really bad and a great disappointment, and I am a huge Stephenson fan. Anathem being one of the best reads of my life. Seveneves is far from being a new Anathem.
- cicero 11y agoI like Anathem better, but Seveneves is interesting and worth my while.
- akkartik 11y agoEspecially compared to Reamde. Now there was a turd.
- hypersoar 11y agoI definitely liked it the least of all the Stephenson I've read. He spends lots of time talking about pykrete and bolides and orbital mechanics and robot swarms and space habitats, and in the end it doesn't feel like he spends very much time talking about people.
- rorygreig 11y agoThere's a Mythbusters episode where they make a boat out of Pykrete, it's pretty awesome.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoThey used layered newspaper, right?
- scott_s 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete#In_the_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete#In_the_media
- tedunangst 11y agoThis would be a great link to submit to HN!
- suprjami 11y agoBecause building concrete ships has worked out so well in the past. The Selma developed a crack, nobody knew how to repair it, so she was scuttled. However she was too big to scuttle with other ships, so a specific spot had to be made. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Selma_(1919) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Selma_(1919)
- pavel_lishin 11y agoA ship made of pykrete is probably a lot easier to scuttle than one made out of concrete. You just let it melt.
- ucaetano 11y agoThat can take forever in the arctic, as mentioned in the article...
- elektromekatron 11y agoThe concrete canoe community is doing rather well though. http://concretecanoe.org/ http://concretecanoe.org/
- escherplex 11y agoAnother one from WWI was the SS Atlantus. Although scrapped after 2 years service it was used successfully to transport troops back from the Euro theatre after the war. I remember seeing its 3-piece remains sitting in the waters off Cape May, NJ during a visit there as a little kid. With concrete canoes, wonder if they ever experimented with Roman seawater concrete, which generates heat when it reacts with water. Heated hulls supposedly exhibit less friction which may give a slight edge in a race.
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoRegular Portland cement goes off under water too - it is exothermic as it reacts but it doesn't continue to generate heat. The "heated hull" would only be during the initial setting when the cement was weak and prone to cracking. A heated hull riding on a bed of steam sounds like an interesting [and very high energy cost] engineering challenge though! Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement
- soperj 11y agoSo this would be a good way to prevent sea ice from melting? Just drop wood fiber into the artic ocean(near gjoa haven) sometime in late september, and then continue dropping wood fiber until february moving out in the direction of the aleutian islands.
- maratd 11y agoThere are far simpler things you can do to affect the global climate. See the "Risks and criticisms" for some reasons on why we may not want to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering
- spiritplumber 11y agoWe tried to make it with simulated Martian regolith at MDRS, but no go.
- themodelplumber 11y agoThat's awesome, is there a list somewhere of the different experiments that have been done at MDRS?
- spiritplumber 11y agohttp://mdrs.marssociety.org/crew-reports http://mdrs.marssociety.org/crew-reports Sadly there's no list per se, this is the closest.
- civilian 11y agoI was really hoping this was going to be a python package for manipulating the symbols in the Linear A and Linear B scripts. :-/
- erbo 11y agoSomething like this shows up in Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth. In that book, the interstellar starship Magellan can reach a large fraction of lightspeed, thanks to its "quantum drive," but, at those speeds, interstellar gas and dust becomes a real problem that could damage the ship. The ship, therefore, has an ablative shield on its nose, made of ice. (This shield has to be replaced, which is why the Magellan stops off at the mostly-water world Thalassa en route to its final destination.) The shield is built of giant hexagonal tiles of ice, which contain seaweed as a strengthener; the resulting mixture is dubbed "icecrete" by some of the engineers. Clarke may have been alluding to pykrete here; I assume he'd have known about it.
- ptaipale 11y agoI have always particularly liked this scene, even if it is completely apocryphal: "Next, he fired at the pykrete to give an idea of the resistance of that kind of ice to projectiles. The bullet ricocheted off the block, grazing the trouser leg of Admiral Ernest King and ending up in the wall."
- trhway 11y agodream of a DOD contractor. Short term of service (thus launching a ship a replacement for it has to be started to be built immediately) with constant maintenance during it. Looking at the flight test results, i suspect that pykrete has made its way as a super secret core material inside composite pieces of F-35.
- koenigdavidmj 11y agoProbably posted based on the earlier post today about Boston's snow problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9842887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9842887 Basically, their snow is dirty enough that there's still a 12 foot pile of the stuff.
- stephengillie 11y agoI think you're right. Sorry for the tangent, but posting to HN seems a rather passive-aggressive way to show someone something. The submitter could have just linked it to the discussion they were having. Instead it's like OP is desperate for attention. Or at least that's how it works on Imgur.
- gitpusher 11y agoHaving not seen the "original" post, this didn't bother me at all :) I had no idea something like pykrete exists, or that it'd be used to build ships (of all things)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- darkmighty 11y agoYou're concluding too much, it could be just someone found it interesting and decided to share.
- albedoa 11y ago
- uptownfunk 11y agoI thought this was some new python package.
- vilhelm_s 11y agoGrab the name before someone else takes it!