This definitely wins in “ignore politics” nomination.
Technical reasons why it is not feasible:
Ice ships need flat surface, and land is not flat at all. First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice. The cost would be astronomical.
There is no reason to assume ice ships that big are possible. Biggest ice yachts ever build could carry less than 1⁄100 of this cargo weight, and due to square-cube law, the basic three-skates design cannot be scaled up. “Lots of skates” design was never tried.
Even if the ice road was free, this would be economically unfeasible due to crew pay. Each ice ship that can carry 500 tonns of cargo would need about the same crew size as container ship that carries 100000 tonns.
Ice can be accumulated on rugged surfaces, without prior paving. That’s how it happens in nature, which is a proof by contradiction. I hope you can admit your claim that “First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice” is false.
The structural limits to supporting weight upon solid ice, and supporting weight upon skates, are not magic numbers that no-one could guess. We have charts of material strengths, so you are again wrong when you claim that “Biggest ice yachts ever build could carry less than 1⁄100 of this cargo weight”—further, “1/100th of this cargo weight” would be only 5 tons. You might want to check your facts on yachts’ cargo capacity.
Finally, crew pay is only a tiny fraction of a ship’s cost; it’s an immense piece of capital, has unfathomably difficult maintenance, and fuel, fuel, fuel. Increasing the crew costs is off-set by eliminating fuel costs, as well as reduced capital-cost per unit payload delivered due to higher velocities along a shorter route. If you actually want to criticize the cost-structure, you have to include the changes to ALL the costs, not just the cherry-pick that says you win. It’s embarrassing to have to point this out, when I made all these things explicit in the original.
So we usually don’t tone police on LessWrong, but this is such an extreme case that I’m going to break that norm.
Your tone is needlessly rude, and the emphasis here is on “needless”. Your rudeness doesn’t achieve anything useful.
I think the mistake (at least this is the one I used to make) is to think that being aggressive is bad if you’re wrong, but good if you’re right. That is not true. Being rude (at least in this context) is bad if you’re wrong and bad if you’re right. This isn’t some kind of washy feel-good message, it’s a factual claim about how the world works. Assuming you are 100% correct about every factual item, you will convince fewer people due to your tone.
The reason why rudeness is bad is that you’re increasing the social cost for the other person to admit they’re wrong. If you’re polite, they have to admit they’re wrong; if you’re rude, they have to admit they’re wrong and stupid; admitting wrongness and stupidity is harder than admitting wrongness, hence it’s less likely to happen. (Scott Alexander talks about this here.) Hence fewer people will believe your factual points. To the extent that your post would have increased the usage of Ice Ships, your tone will decrease the usage of Ice Ships.
This is even partially justified! Your being needlessly rude shows that you have not figured out truths about persuasion, which, because there is such a thing as general problem solving ability, is evidence about your ability to figure out other things, such as the usability of Ice Ships.
What’s beautiful about your comment is how clear-cut all this is. It’s like something you could have put into a text book about how not to argue. In your case, your comment can be made way better by only taking out parts of it—like, literally, you don’t need to add a single word. To demonstrate this, I’ve copied it into paint.net and struck through all the passages that you could have omitted without hurting the substance of your arguments. Here’s the result:
Some of these are obvious, others less so. There’s real art to not being needlessly offensive because some words like the “unfathomably” just sneak in. But this word is terrible there; it adds nothing and antagonizes the person you’re replying to. You really have to train looking over your writing and cutting them out. Or at least I really needed to train this, maybe other people do it naturally.
Don’t get me wrong, the comment you’re replying to isn’t great either; I’d maybe give it a 4⁄10 on the “avoid needless aggression” metric. But your comment is a 0. And if you want to convince anyone ever, that is a massive problem.
I’m surprised that rudeness is the issue, when fallacies are not; it displays your priorities. If I follow your line of thinking, then I should present myself in whatever way would best manipulate my audience for my own desires. It sounds really icky, and I don’t want to follow your norms. Other cultures have been more interested in the fallacies than the rude words, and they did a better job of keeping solid epistemology. When you walk-past fallacies without comment, you are accomplice to them, says Tom Moore. I agree, and I’ll point-out a fallacy the same way Voltaire approved: defending your right to say it, without a tone-police to silence you.
:: If LessWrong members walk-past fallacies and errors, unmentioned
:: And LessWrong members enfore tone-police to coerce greater agreement and satisfaction
:: Then—enforcing tone-police is evidenced to NOT bring LessWrong closer to the truth, by the fact that fallacies and errors go unmentioned.
So, you do not become less wrong by enforcing tone; you are not describing an epistemological method for truth. You are asking me to follow a recent, regional culture of extra-polite, as a strategy, by saying “we all ignore whoever isn’t polite, so it’s in your best interests to obey and sugar-coat.” That’s a threat of dismissing the speaker regardless of their arguments, which is an ad hominem attack (attacking the speaker, instead of the argument). To insist that I follow your standard of politeness, or else I am ignored, is a hostage scenario. I wasn’t running around shouting obscenities; and I won’t cow to sugar-coat my words, just to coerce more listeners. The listeners who are swayed by sugar-coating, instead of being swayed by the arguments themselves, are a dubious audience.
No it doesn’t. I know nothing about the factual question (and I don’t intend to change this because I don’t care). So I have opinion about the subject matter that could interfere one way or another.
When you walk-past fallacies without comment, you are accomplice to them, says Tom Moore. I agree, and I’ll point-out a fallacy the same way Voltaire approved: defending your right to say it, without a tone-police to silence you.
This is a nonsequitor; nothing I said entails changing your factual comments.
If I follow your line of thinking, then I should present myself in whatever way would best manipulate my audience for my own desires. It sounds really icky, and I don’t want to follow your norms.
That’s very noble. It’s also a legitimately interesting dilemma, sort of. Specifically for rationalists, trying to be actively persuasive is considered taboo. Scott Alexander even says this in the post I linked; he draws a distinction between [being manipulative] and [not actively squashing any chance to convince the other person]. Sort of optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there.
I don’t really have a reason to try to convince you either way though, so … (shrugs).
“optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there.”
That’s a strategy, not an epistemology. That is the priority which you did, in fact, display. You focus on tone, which shows you value that issue more. I’m not sure how you side-stepped that, by turning what I said into a claim of “nothing I said entails changing your factual comments.” I was actually pointing-out that you were trying to coerce a bargain: “We’ll ignore you unless you follow our edits, such as calling crew-costs ‘tiny’ when they are only 5% of expenses.” That’s not a “dilemma”—it’s just unethical. And, you keep pointing to Scott Alexander as an appeal to authority? Or, do you think I’m just unaware of the reasons for extra-polite wording?
I was actually pointing-out that you were trying to coerce a bargain: We’ll ignore you unless you follow our edits
… What do you think this site is? There is no “we” or “our”. Not a single person on this site will particularly care about what I think on this. And it goes against my honor to downvote you out of spite, which means I have zero leverage over you.
I was giving you advice because I saw you doing something that I know is self-desctructive. But you’ve exhausted my good will with this comment so I’m no longer going to do this conversation.
I don’t appreciate unsolitced advice on how you’d prefer I communicate; as I mentioned, your norms of politeness are a recent, regional change, where you consider it “self-destructive” that I referred to the 5% spending on ship’s crew as “tiny”. That’s bizarre.
You then conveniently ignore the core of my point, again: you hoped to coerce the bargain, by saying I should be ignored if I don’t meet your standards of communications, regardless of the merits of my arguments. You specifically said “Hence fewer people will believe your factual points.” Yet, if there is some person Bob, who ignores the factual points, then I know I don’t need to convince him; he is fooled by appearances, and fails to appreciate the facts. Bob won’t be able to provide any valuable insight or substantive critique of the concept itself. I notice you won’t be able to provide any valuable insight into the factual points and concept, either. I hope to avoid such people, so I am glad that you take your unsolicited advice away! :)
“A British person would see hedging around a difficult issue as politeness and civility, whereas a Dutch person might see the same thing as actually dishonest.”—BBC’s recent explainer clip “Why the Dutch Always Say What They Mean”
What Rafael referred to as “self-destructive” is considered appropriate in other cultures, and has absolutely nothing to do with epistemology. It belongs on LessRude, not LessWrong.
A great explainer on this concept of “unsolicited advice on a tangent I don’t value, which is then a reason to throw-up-hands in disgust” is Theramintrees’ video on the Martyr, “When Saviors Go Bad”
The concept Theramintrees discusses which is relevant is this:
The Savior-Complex rushes-in, offering help which that recipient did NOT ask for (in this case, I did not ask for “advice on the tone and presentation”—Rafael decided on his own that my tone “needs saving!”). Then, when the recipient is not gracious and fawning for the Savior’s help, that Savior declares their target ‘the problem’ and the Savior rushes-off in anger, to target another person with their unsolicited and irrelevant ‘help’.
[[Personal Examples of The Strategy of Politeness being Counter-Productive to Valuable Critique of a Concept: When I would dress-up, and say only polite things, going to the Innovation Oakland meet-ups to hob-nob with the Mayor and all the local techies, I quickly learned something—dress down. When you dress-up, every money-hunting idiot flocks to you, and believes any crazy idea you make-up on the spot, because they are gullible and uninformed. They will never provide you with valuable insight into your work. They suck-up your time and attention, and you end-up NOT talking to the scruffy engineer who would tell you why, specifically, your design sucks. You need to hear that engineer’s critique—and the only way to get it is by dressing down . Now, you scare-away all the folks who can only read a book by its cover! ONLY the scruffy engineer will talk to you, because she doesn’t care about appearances—she wants to hear your details, and tear you apart. :)
Similarly, if there are two people in an audience, Alice and Bob, and Alice will focus on the reasoning and evidence, while Bob focuses on tone. In 25 years of experience, I have never heard valuable critique of the concept from any of the Bobs—tell me if you’ve heard one! They complain about tone and presentation, without insights into the design; I have to meet their standards, or I should be ignored, regardless of the merits of my arguments. Alice is actually the only person I WANT to talk to. So, when you claim that “Being extra polite will win Bob to your side...” well, I don’t want Bob on my side; those guys clutter things up and get in the way, without providing valuable insight into the problem itself. I ONLY want to appeal to Alice, who as stated originally is not focused on tone.]]
First, ice accumulated over terrain would not be flat. You can search how Alaskan glaciers look like, no way an ice ship can move on that. It is not necessary to pave the road—the problem is that to make an even surface, huge amount of ground has to be moved.
Second, yes, no recorded iceboat carried more than few tons of cargo, including crew.
Third, crew pay is around 5% of operating cost of a container ship. Even if it takes 50 iceships to replace it (due to higher speed and shorter way), then crew pay alone would more than double total operating cost.
As for capital cost, lots of small ships are more expensive than one big ship.
You originally claimed that “First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice.” Then, you switch to saying “It is not necessary to pave the road—the problem is that to make an even surface, huge amount of ground has to be moved.” Both are still strange claims; when ice is accumulated hundreds of feet thick, the surface texture beneath it is irrelevant.
You also insisted, strangely, that “ice accumulated over terrain would not be flat. You can search how Alaskan glaciers look like, no way an ice ship can move on that.” Why would an ice highway accumulated in the way I described necessarily have a surface identical to natural, untended glaciers? You never explained what would prevent flattening the ice as I had originally described. Your claim lacks any support… at all.
And, you said originally that “There is no reason to assume ice ships that big are possible.” You seem to be confusing the limitations of a ship on lake ice, which can crack under heavy loads, compared to what I described—ice on land, a hundred feet thick. There is, in fact, no metric of materials strength which implies failure at 500 tons; it is wrong to assume that the skates, or the frame, or the ice, would magically fail at hundreds of times less than their ultimate compressive strength. It is, by metrics of material strength, entirely reasonable to assume ships that large are possible. Check the numbers; your claim of “no reason” has no merit.
Let’s also assess crew pay, because you multiply the entire crew, which includes engineers, etc. A TEU costs $500 to send between Germany and South Korea, and weighs 25 tons; $20 per ton. So, a five-day haul across the Arctic, with 500 tons aboard, would be priced competitively with a revenue of 500*20 = $10,000. In five days. For shifts of pilots, each paid $60K annually, or $30/hr (which is good pay in Russia! Multiple times average...) in 120 hours cost $3,600, which is only 36% of the revenue. Consider, also, that folks pay a premium for higher velocities—not just for perishables; being able to get-ahead-of their competitors, especially. Further, refrigerated cargo pays a premium, too! So, the rates that an Arctic line could charge would naturally be a higher average, even if a portion of their cargo didn’t need speed or freeze (because you still want to operate at maximum capacity). That’d push the crew-members’ cost percentage down further.
You’ve made repeatedly false claims, unsupported, and you ignore the numbers. I’d hoped for intelligent critique on a forum calling itself ‘Less’ wrong; I’ll have to go back to talking to real engineers.
I assumed that ice layer is supposed to be a few feet thick, and given figures are just for illustration that that amount of ice is trivial to make. If the plan really is to build an artificial glacier hundreds of feet thick, that creates a different set of problems, the first being that described structure wouldn’t do it. Depending on temperature and wind speed, ice will either be carried away by wind, form an ice hill that would grow until it blocks nozzles, or accumulate on scaffolding until it collapses under its weight.
The problem with heavy iceboat is that its weight has to be distributed evenly on numerous skates, because otherwise skates that are more heavily loaded dig deeper and friction increases drastically. Such design was never built.
Your calculation of expenses relies on three assumptions: that this is an end-to-end route, that it takes 120 hours, and that it takes one pilot to drive an iceship (of this size and in these conditions). All of these are wrong.
As for refrigeration—a much larger fraction of cargo types doesn’t tolerate freezing.
“I assumed that ice layer is supposed to be a few feet thick, and given figures are just for illustration that that amount of ice is trivial to make.”
Um, if I have illustrated that “the amount of ice is trivial to make,” then you are agreeing that it would be trivial to add more, which negates the original argument you made. So, it seems like you’ve just picked-up your goal posts and started walking away with them.
“Depending on temperature and wind speed, ice will either be carried away by wind, form an ice hill that would grow until it blocks nozzles, or accumulate on scaffolding until it collapses under its weight.”
You may not have noticed, in my original post, that I pointed to exactly why the Polar Vortex, blowing continual sub-zero winds off the Arctic waters, onto the land, would be exactly what is needed to “be carried away be the wind” and “form an ice hill”. Yes! That is exactly the natural process which constructs the necessary mound, and as the mound grows in size, there is what is called a “Cliff-Effect” that accelerates that wind (it’s really just Venturi Effect and a change in orientation), causing the ice to be carried to the far side, widening AWAY from you—THAT is what prevents the scaffold from being covered, and prevents the ice from blocking the nozzles. The wind carries the ice away from nozzles, NOT toward the nozzles. I hope you can visualize that process: there is no physical way for ‘straight-line winds’ to blow the newly-formed ice onto the scaffold or nozzles. And, as the ice downwind accrues, then velocities over the top will increase, carrying the new ice to the FAR side, such that it does not obstruct your spray. This is actual engineering; I hope you can see how it works.
“heavily loaded dig deeper and friction increases drastically.”
That is incorrect. When ice is pressed-upon by skates “digging deeper”, their pressure causes momentary melting, and that melt-water is precisely what LOWERS friction. If you fail to press-down upon the ice firmly enough, you cannot form a hydroplane.
Further, you can observe the depth dug in passage of a ship, with a given load per cm2 footprint. For the “500t vessel” I described, as I mentioned in other areas of the comments, you could fit all that on a 10m x 25m vessel at only 2 tons per m2. That is not such an immense increase in weight that it would somehow get the vessels “stuck”, and yes, many skates can be placed along the bottom in parallel. And, because no one has built an ice boat so large (which is due to lake ice constraints, NOT material-strength constraints) no one needed to try extra skates. You have yet to present a plausible situation where ‘more skates’ leads to impossible-to-surmount design-failure. You only claim that more skates is a failure, without saying what would make it fail; a claim without support or explanation. “All of these are wrong” you say, without a word to what makes me wrong. You are not providing insight or valuable critique; you are making unsupported claims.
This definitely wins in “ignore politics” nomination.
Technical reasons why it is not feasible:
Ice ships need flat surface, and land is not flat at all. First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice. The cost would be astronomical.
There is no reason to assume ice ships that big are possible. Biggest ice yachts ever build could carry less than 1⁄100 of this cargo weight, and due to square-cube law, the basic three-skates design cannot be scaled up. “Lots of skates” design was never tried.
Even if the ice road was free, this would be economically unfeasible due to crew pay. Each ice ship that can carry 500 tonns of cargo would need about the same crew size as container ship that carries 100000 tonns.
Your reasoning is erroneous:
Ice can be accumulated on rugged surfaces, without prior paving. That’s how it happens in nature, which is a proof by contradiction. I hope you can admit your claim that “First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice” is false.
The structural limits to supporting weight upon solid ice, and supporting weight upon skates, are not magic numbers that no-one could guess. We have charts of material strengths, so you are again wrong when you claim that “Biggest ice yachts ever build could carry less than 1⁄100 of this cargo weight”—further, “1/100th of this cargo weight” would be only 5 tons. You might want to check your facts on yachts’ cargo capacity.
Finally, crew pay is only a tiny fraction of a ship’s cost; it’s an immense piece of capital, has unfathomably difficult maintenance, and fuel, fuel, fuel. Increasing the crew costs is off-set by eliminating fuel costs, as well as reduced capital-cost per unit payload delivered due to higher velocities along a shorter route. If you actually want to criticize the cost-structure, you have to include the changes to ALL the costs, not just the cherry-pick that says you win. It’s embarrassing to have to point this out, when I made all these things explicit in the original.
So we usually don’t tone police on LessWrong, but this is such an extreme case that I’m going to break that norm.
Your tone is needlessly rude, and the emphasis here is on “needless”. Your rudeness doesn’t achieve anything useful.
I think the mistake (at least this is the one I used to make) is to think that being aggressive is bad if you’re wrong, but good if you’re right. That is not true. Being rude (at least in this context) is bad if you’re wrong and bad if you’re right. This isn’t some kind of washy feel-good message, it’s a factual claim about how the world works. Assuming you are 100% correct about every factual item, you will convince fewer people due to your tone.
The reason why rudeness is bad is that you’re increasing the social cost for the other person to admit they’re wrong. If you’re polite, they have to admit they’re wrong; if you’re rude, they have to admit they’re wrong and stupid; admitting wrongness and stupidity is harder than admitting wrongness, hence it’s less likely to happen. (Scott Alexander talks about this here.) Hence fewer people will believe your factual points. To the extent that your post would have increased the usage of Ice Ships, your tone will decrease the usage of Ice Ships.
This is even partially justified! Your being needlessly rude shows that you have not figured out truths about persuasion, which, because there is such a thing as general problem solving ability, is evidence about your ability to figure out other things, such as the usability of Ice Ships.
What’s beautiful about your comment is how clear-cut all this is. It’s like something you could have put into a text book about how not to argue. In your case, your comment can be made way better by only taking out parts of it—like, literally, you don’t need to add a single word. To demonstrate this, I’ve copied it into paint.net and struck through all the passages that you could have omitted without hurting the substance of your arguments. Here’s the result:
Some of these are obvious, others less so. There’s real art to not being needlessly offensive because some words like the “unfathomably” just sneak in. But this word is terrible there; it adds nothing and antagonizes the person you’re replying to. You really have to train looking over your writing and cutting them out. Or at least I really needed to train this, maybe other people do it naturally.
Don’t get me wrong, the comment you’re replying to isn’t great either; I’d maybe give it a 4⁄10 on the “avoid needless aggression” metric. But your comment is a 0. And if you want to convince anyone ever, that is a massive problem.
I’m surprised that rudeness is the issue, when fallacies are not; it displays your priorities. If I follow your line of thinking, then I should present myself in whatever way would best manipulate my audience for my own desires. It sounds really icky, and I don’t want to follow your norms. Other cultures have been more interested in the fallacies than the rude words, and they did a better job of keeping solid epistemology. When you walk-past fallacies without comment, you are accomplice to them, says Tom Moore. I agree, and I’ll point-out a fallacy the same way Voltaire approved: defending your right to say it, without a tone-police to silence you.
Key Concept Note: Strategy vs. Epistemology
:: If LessWrong members walk-past fallacies and errors, unmentioned
:: And LessWrong members enfore tone-police to coerce greater agreement and satisfaction
:: Then—enforcing tone-police is evidenced to NOT bring LessWrong closer to the truth, by the fact that fallacies and errors go unmentioned.
So, you do not become less wrong by enforcing tone; you are not describing an epistemological method for truth. You are asking me to follow a recent, regional culture of extra-polite, as a strategy, by saying “we all ignore whoever isn’t polite, so it’s in your best interests to obey and sugar-coat.” That’s a threat of dismissing the speaker regardless of their arguments, which is an ad hominem attack (attacking the speaker, instead of the argument). To insist that I follow your standard of politeness, or else I am ignored, is a hostage scenario. I wasn’t running around shouting obscenities; and I won’t cow to sugar-coat my words, just to coerce more listeners. The listeners who are swayed by sugar-coating, instead of being swayed by the arguments themselves, are a dubious audience.
No it doesn’t. I know nothing about the factual question (and I don’t intend to change this because I don’t care). So I have opinion about the subject matter that could interfere one way or another.
This is a nonsequitor; nothing I said entails changing your factual comments.
That’s very noble. It’s also a legitimately interesting dilemma, sort of. Specifically for rationalists, trying to be actively persuasive is considered taboo. Scott Alexander even says this in the post I linked; he draws a distinction between [being manipulative] and [not actively squashing any chance to convince the other person]. Sort of optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there.
I don’t really have a reason to try to convince you either way though, so … (shrugs).
“optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there.”
That’s a strategy, not an epistemology. That is the priority which you did, in fact, display. You focus on tone, which shows you value that issue more. I’m not sure how you side-stepped that, by turning what I said into a claim of “nothing I said entails changing your factual comments.” I was actually pointing-out that you were trying to coerce a bargain: “We’ll ignore you unless you follow our edits, such as calling crew-costs ‘tiny’ when they are only 5% of expenses.” That’s not a “dilemma”—it’s just unethical. And, you keep pointing to Scott Alexander as an appeal to authority? Or, do you think I’m just unaware of the reasons for extra-polite wording?
… What do you think this site is? There is no “we” or “our”. Not a single person on this site will particularly care about what I think on this. And it goes against my honor to downvote you out of spite, which means I have zero leverage over you.
I was giving you advice because I saw you doing something that I know is self-desctructive. But you’ve exhausted my good will with this comment so I’m no longer going to do this conversation.
I don’t appreciate unsolitced advice on how you’d prefer I communicate; as I mentioned, your norms of politeness are a recent, regional change, where you consider it “self-destructive” that I referred to the 5% spending on ship’s crew as “tiny”. That’s bizarre.
You then conveniently ignore the core of my point, again: you hoped to coerce the bargain, by saying I should be ignored if I don’t meet your standards of communications, regardless of the merits of my arguments. You specifically said “Hence fewer people will believe your factual points.” Yet, if there is some person Bob, who ignores the factual points, then I know I don’t need to convince him; he is fooled by appearances, and fails to appreciate the facts. Bob won’t be able to provide any valuable insight or substantive critique of the concept itself. I notice you won’t be able to provide any valuable insight into the factual points and concept, either. I hope to avoid such people, so I am glad that you take your unsolicited advice away! :)
“A British person would see hedging around a difficult issue as politeness and civility, whereas a Dutch person might see the same thing as actually dishonest.”—BBC’s recent explainer clip “Why the Dutch Always Say What They Mean”
What Rafael referred to as “self-destructive” is considered appropriate in other cultures, and has absolutely nothing to do with epistemology. It belongs on LessRude, not LessWrong.
A great explainer on this concept of “unsolicited advice on a tangent I don’t value, which is then a reason to throw-up-hands in disgust” is Theramintrees’ video on the Martyr, “When Saviors Go Bad”
The concept Theramintrees discusses which is relevant is this:
The Savior-Complex rushes-in, offering help which that recipient did NOT ask for (in this case, I did not ask for “advice on the tone and presentation”—Rafael decided on his own that my tone “needs saving!”). Then, when the recipient is not gracious and fawning for the Savior’s help, that Savior declares their target ‘the problem’ and the Savior rushes-off in anger, to target another person with their unsolicited and irrelevant ‘help’.
[[Personal Examples of The Strategy of Politeness being Counter-Productive to Valuable Critique of a Concept: When I would dress-up, and say only polite things, going to the Innovation Oakland meet-ups to hob-nob with the Mayor and all the local techies, I quickly learned something—dress down. When you dress-up, every money-hunting idiot flocks to you, and believes any crazy idea you make-up on the spot, because they are gullible and uninformed. They will never provide you with valuable insight into your work. They suck-up your time and attention, and you end-up NOT talking to the scruffy engineer who would tell you why, specifically, your design sucks. You need to hear that engineer’s critique—and the only way to get it is by dressing down . Now, you scare-away all the folks who can only read a book by its cover! ONLY the scruffy engineer will talk to you, because she doesn’t care about appearances—she wants to hear your details, and tear you apart. :)
Similarly, if there are two people in an audience, Alice and Bob, and Alice will focus on the reasoning and evidence, while Bob focuses on tone. In 25 years of experience, I have never heard valuable critique of the concept from any of the Bobs—tell me if you’ve heard one! They complain about tone and presentation, without insights into the design; I have to meet their standards, or I should be ignored, regardless of the merits of my arguments. Alice is actually the only person I WANT to talk to. So, when you claim that “Being extra polite will win Bob to your side...” well, I don’t want Bob on my side; those guys clutter things up and get in the way, without providing valuable insight into the problem itself. I ONLY want to appeal to Alice, who as stated originally is not focused on tone.]]
All of these are simply wrong.
First, ice accumulated over terrain would not be flat. You can search how Alaskan glaciers look like, no way an ice ship can move on that. It is not necessary to pave the road—the problem is that to make an even surface, huge amount of ground has to be moved.
Second, yes, no recorded iceboat carried more than few tons of cargo, including crew.
Third, crew pay is around 5% of operating cost of a container ship. Even if it takes 50 iceships to replace it (due to higher speed and shorter way), then crew pay alone would more than double total operating cost. As for capital cost, lots of small ships are more expensive than one big ship.
You originally claimed that “First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice.” Then, you switch to saying “It is not necessary to pave the road—the problem is that to make an even surface, huge amount of ground has to be moved.” Both are still strange claims; when ice is accumulated hundreds of feet thick, the surface texture beneath it is irrelevant.
You also insisted, strangely, that “ice accumulated over terrain would not be flat. You can search how Alaskan glaciers look like, no way an ice ship can move on that.” Why would an ice highway accumulated in the way I described necessarily have a surface identical to natural, untended glaciers? You never explained what would prevent flattening the ice as I had originally described. Your claim lacks any support… at all.
And, you said originally that “There is no reason to assume ice ships that big are possible.” You seem to be confusing the limitations of a ship on lake ice, which can crack under heavy loads, compared to what I described—ice on land, a hundred feet thick. There is, in fact, no metric of materials strength which implies failure at 500 tons; it is wrong to assume that the skates, or the frame, or the ice, would magically fail at hundreds of times less than their ultimate compressive strength. It is, by metrics of material strength, entirely reasonable to assume ships that large are possible. Check the numbers; your claim of “no reason” has no merit.
Let’s also assess crew pay, because you multiply the entire crew, which includes engineers, etc. A TEU costs $500 to send between Germany and South Korea, and weighs 25 tons; $20 per ton. So, a five-day haul across the Arctic, with 500 tons aboard, would be priced competitively with a revenue of 500*20 = $10,000. In five days. For shifts of pilots, each paid $60K annually, or $30/hr (which is good pay in Russia! Multiple times average...) in 120 hours cost $3,600, which is only 36% of the revenue. Consider, also, that folks pay a premium for higher velocities—not just for perishables; being able to get-ahead-of their competitors, especially. Further, refrigerated cargo pays a premium, too! So, the rates that an Arctic line could charge would naturally be a higher average, even if a portion of their cargo didn’t need speed or freeze (because you still want to operate at maximum capacity). That’d push the crew-members’ cost percentage down further.
You’ve made repeatedly false claims, unsupported, and you ignore the numbers. I’d hoped for intelligent critique on a forum calling itself ‘Less’ wrong; I’ll have to go back to talking to real engineers.
I assumed that ice layer is supposed to be a few feet thick, and given figures are just for illustration that that amount of ice is trivial to make. If the plan really is to build an artificial glacier hundreds of feet thick, that creates a different set of problems, the first being that described structure wouldn’t do it. Depending on temperature and wind speed, ice will either be carried away by wind, form an ice hill that would grow until it blocks nozzles, or accumulate on scaffolding until it collapses under its weight.
The problem with heavy iceboat is that its weight has to be distributed evenly on numerous skates, because otherwise skates that are more heavily loaded dig deeper and friction increases drastically. Such design was never built.
Your calculation of expenses relies on three assumptions: that this is an end-to-end route, that it takes 120 hours, and that it takes one pilot to drive an iceship (of this size and in these conditions). All of these are wrong. As for refrigeration—a much larger fraction of cargo types doesn’t tolerate freezing.
“I assumed that ice layer is supposed to be a few feet thick, and given figures are just for illustration that that amount of ice is trivial to make.”
Um, if I have illustrated that “the amount of ice is trivial to make,” then you are agreeing that it would be trivial to add more, which negates the original argument you made. So, it seems like you’ve just picked-up your goal posts and started walking away with them.
“Depending on temperature and wind speed, ice will either be carried away by wind, form an ice hill that would grow until it blocks nozzles, or accumulate on scaffolding until it collapses under its weight.”
You may not have noticed, in my original post, that I pointed to exactly why the Polar Vortex, blowing continual sub-zero winds off the Arctic waters, onto the land, would be exactly what is needed to “be carried away be the wind” and “form an ice hill”. Yes! That is exactly the natural process which constructs the necessary mound, and as the mound grows in size, there is what is called a “Cliff-Effect” that accelerates that wind (it’s really just Venturi Effect and a change in orientation), causing the ice to be carried to the far side, widening AWAY from you—THAT is what prevents the scaffold from being covered, and prevents the ice from blocking the nozzles. The wind carries the ice away from nozzles, NOT toward the nozzles. I hope you can visualize that process: there is no physical way for ‘straight-line winds’ to blow the newly-formed ice onto the scaffold or nozzles. And, as the ice downwind accrues, then velocities over the top will increase, carrying the new ice to the FAR side, such that it does not obstruct your spray. This is actual engineering; I hope you can see how it works.
“heavily loaded dig deeper and friction increases drastically.”
That is incorrect. When ice is pressed-upon by skates “digging deeper”, their pressure causes momentary melting, and that melt-water is precisely what LOWERS friction. If you fail to press-down upon the ice firmly enough, you cannot form a hydroplane.
Further, you can observe the depth dug in passage of a ship, with a given load per cm2 footprint. For the “500t vessel” I described, as I mentioned in other areas of the comments, you could fit all that on a 10m x 25m vessel at only 2 tons per m2. That is not such an immense increase in weight that it would somehow get the vessels “stuck”, and yes, many skates can be placed along the bottom in parallel. And, because no one has built an ice boat so large (which is due to lake ice constraints, NOT material-strength constraints) no one needed to try extra skates. You have yet to present a plausible situation where ‘more skates’ leads to impossible-to-surmount design-failure. You only claim that more skates is a failure, without saying what would make it fail; a claim without support or explanation. “All of these are wrong” you say, without a word to what makes me wrong. You are not providing insight or valuable critique; you are making unsupported claims.