You’re welcome to check the numbers, again—I mentioned “5km wide should be plenty” as an illustration. If tacking led to disruptions, you could easily multiply the width of the ice-lane manifold; as mentioned, a spray-wall 10m tall with a 10m/sec arctic wind (the Polar Vortex there) would produce enough ice to cover a mile wide, 400 feet deep, when compacted… each year. You want it ten miles wide, 100m deep? That’ll only take 2.5 years. And, again, the amount of capital required is minimal—a hundred kilos per meter of shoreline, while the amount of ice produced is immense—hundreds of thousands of tons per winter. Similarly, for every 1 joule of energy that you spend spraying water, you are transferring 3,200 joules of heat to the air, as that water freezes. 3,200x inputs is not magically ‘too expensive, too hard’ just because ships zig-zag as they tack. You could claim that I would need 10x more ice, and that still wouldn’t make the design ‘impossible’ let alone unprofitable.
You’re welcome to check the numbers, again—I mentioned “5km wide should be plenty” as an illustration. If tacking led to disruptions, you could easily multiply the width of the ice-lane manifold; as mentioned, a spray-wall 10m tall with a 10m/sec arctic wind (the Polar Vortex there) would produce enough ice to cover a mile wide, 400 feet deep, when compacted… each year. You want it ten miles wide, 100m deep? That’ll only take 2.5 years. And, again, the amount of capital required is minimal—a hundred kilos per meter of shoreline, while the amount of ice produced is immense—hundreds of thousands of tons per winter. Similarly, for every 1 joule of energy that you spend spraying water, you are transferring 3,200 joules of heat to the air, as that water freezes. 3,200x inputs is not magically ‘too expensive, too hard’ just because ships zig-zag as they tack. You could claim that I would need 10x more ice, and that still wouldn’t make the design ‘impossible’ let alone unprofitable.