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"Our
tests soon confirmed Mark and Hohenstein's results. Blocks of ice
containing as little as four percent wood pulp were weight for weight
as strong as concrete; in honor of the originator of the project, we
called this reinforced ice "pykrete". When we fired a rifle bullet into
an upright block of pure ice two feet square and one foot thick, the
block shattered; in pykrete the bullet made a little crater and was
embedded without doing any damage. My stock rose, but no one would tell
me what pykrete was needed for, except that it was for Project
Habakkuk." Wiki
Yet
another amazing thing that I have heretofore never heard of.
First
thing that pops in me brain is to build a huge Pycrete island
somewhere in the arctic (people do live in the arctic, right?).
The
advantage would be that this island would be an independent nation,
ruled by me. Which means there would by very few rules. One
would be that
anyone trying to tax anything, or ban musical chairs, would be thrown
off the island. Literally.
I will be making me some Pycrete, and will publish my experiments with
it. One will be to make a slab of it to keep in the freezer so
that
during power outages nothing thaws. Stay tuned.
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Pycrete; It's Scientific 
Something about this makes me think of Lillehammer...
ReplyDeleteIce per se is pretty strong...But we embedded steel cables in it(runway ten feet thick, of fresh water over sea ice)... and operated DC-8 freighters at minus forty for a canadian arctic mine...I forgot exactly where in eastern arctic...Pycrete was not used because we never ever heard of it...but that was in CANADIAN sheltered ice...out in the open, the ice move around and pile up to 400 feet high...your pycrete "island" would be crushed! When a thousand miles of ice is pushed by the wind...remember the Russian convoy of 300 ships that was sunk in the seventies. Right in the middle of the cold war, the 3000 or so russian sailors had to be rescued by Alaskans!
ReplyDeleteSorry to pop your bubble!
Igloo bomb shelters for Arctic troops!
ReplyDeleteYeah, just parachute-in some logs and a whole bunch'a whittlin' knives.
BIG problem, how would sailors and equipment function in what was basically a deep freeze?
ReplyDeleteThey did some full scale work on it but stopped the project when other anti-sub measures improved.
ReplyDeleteI've always wanted to mess with it. The Mythbusters did tests and their results confirmed everything said about the stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMKis4FPykw
There are a lot of videos of people experimenting with it.