Can a concrete ship be used as a mine sweeper or for some other strategic use case?
The SS Palo Alto and the Surprising History of Concrete Ships
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Re: The SS Palo Alto and the Surprising History of Concrete Ships
#12The Seasteading Institute had some pages about concrete oceanic structures that captured my imagination a while back
https://www.seasteading.org/2010/11/green-float-the-botanica...
https://www.seasteading.org/2010/05/cocrete-structures/
They are not "boats" exactly!
Re: The SS Palo Alto and the Surprising History of Concrete Ships
#13Nice article, but note that the site's operator is "on pause in 2017",
and the video appears to pre-date the damage sustained
by the SS Palo Alto during winter storms of January, 2017.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/01/2...
For more concrete fun, and interesting material sciences challenges, see what floats civil engineering students' boats: http://www.asce.org/event/2017/concrete-canoe/
Re: The SS Palo Alto and the Surprising History of Concrete Ships
#14Slightly tangentially, there's a great short documentary on the building of Chevron's Ninian Central Platform at Loch Kishorn in 1978 [0]. At the time of construction it was the largest "man-made movable object". The base and supporting column for the drilling platform itself was constructed entirely out of concrete and floated to ~100 miles north east of the Shetlands.
Really is quite amazing that you can float a 600,000 tonne object several hundred miles out to sea.
[0]: http://movingimage.nls.uk/film/5973
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Kishorn#Kishorn_Yard