Testing the WWI concrete ships and WWII concrete barges | Hacker News Reader

Testing the WWI concrete ships and WWII concrete barges

thecretefleet.com

41 pointssurprisetalk15 comments

Interestingly concrete yachts are a thing. Ferro-cement is the term, but it is just reinforced concrete. You can buy very large yachts for small amounts of money with yachts made this way in the 70s.

Insurance can be tricky for no really good reason

>Insurance can be tricky for no really good reason

It is very expensive to prove a ferro hull to be sound, which is a requirement for getting insurance.

Except the steel armature inside can turn to hidden rust and if you do something and crack the ferro hull they can be a total loss. A lot were home built so finding a quality build is another issue.

There’s a reason insurance won’t touch them.

One of these capsized off the beach at Capitola and now serves as a de facto bird sanctuary.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/05/29/ss-palo-alto-reaches-...

Before it capsized and sank, it served as a dance hall at the end of a pier.

ASCE (American Society opf Civil Engineering) has an annual Concrete Canoe Competition. (https://www.asce.org/communities/student-members/conferences...)

Was this created by AI and not proofread or created by a human and not proofread? The paragraph relating to the Musgraves taking over a factory is repeated and it reads rather oddly.

Anyway, regardless of that nitpick, it was an interesting read.

Probably a copy-paste mistake while quoting the source. If anything, it makes me less inclined to believe it's AI generated.

You could do that today for cargodrone boats sintering or epoxy glueing beachsand?

Or melt the sand and form it into long strips, fibers, then glue the fibers together in some sort of glass-fiber-epoxy type material. Get the patent done quick because that sounds viable imho.

Glass fiber? Ridiculous, that'll never work.

Imagine if someone tried making a sub from that, and then it delaminated lol

Carbon fiber

Reminds me of "pykrete" which was also a potential construction material for ships (notably aircraft carriers) proposed during WWII:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete

Notably Project Habakkuk, which if built would have been the largest ship ever created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk

back then it were large ships. Today the issue is building large Starships. How many would we need to move several millions people and various equipment to Mars. May be not ice - though ice should work if building in space (or on the Moon). And ice can be oxidizer if aluminum is used as fuel, so you just burn large part of your ship too. For building on Earth - something cheap and easy to shape. Say 3D sinter-printering from sand.

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