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.
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.