Comment by hermitShell
3 days ago
Another instance of 'Super Ice' or as named in the article 'Pykrete' in science fiction is in Neal Stephenson's Novel from 2015: Seveneves.
The substance is used in space for the construction of temporary habitats. I suppose this is plausible if you manage to find a large source of ice and bring it into a stable orbit. It won't melt into liquid, and perhaps the reinforcing fibers could help prevent sublimation.
A lot of the novel strained my ability to suspend disbelief, but the overall scope and ambition is so awesome I was able to forgive the poor editing. It's attempting to be hard sci-fi, much of the novel is taken up by technical descriptions that could only appeal to an engineer-minded person.
> A lot of the novel strained my ability to suspend disbelief, but the overall scope and ambition is so awesome
While the 2nd half of the book is definitely still sci-fi territory, the first part is slowly getting into the plausible tech realm, 12 years after the book was written. We now have a much stronger space industry, and probably could match or exceed the payload to orbit in 2 years from the book (if everyone would work towards the same goal, which is still a bit of fantasy but hey...)
> getting into the plausible tech realm
Except bringing an asteroid all the way down to the ISS. That part was uncharacteristically thoughtless, I think.
It basically enabled the plot and mostly happened 'off camera'. The parts about the management of radiation was pretty cool though. Because if it I earmarked "Ichi-F: A Worker's Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant" to read later on.
Side note, but I have a hard time thinking of Seveneves in halves; isn't it 3 distinct parts?
Mainly I remember skimming the middle third because it felt like such a drag.
You could cleanly think about it in three parts, but the time jump in the middle which involves a whole new set of characters is another way to split it.
Yes the book itself is broken into 3 parts but if you're looking at it from a scientific plausibility scale parts 1 & 2 are in the same vicinity of that scale where part 3 jumps a good ways into more traditional scifi levels of plausibility.
Heh, true. My brain went into "pre space" and "post space" as halves :)
pykrete isnt a scifi material. its a ww2 idea the brits had for making an ice based aircraft carrier
I saw the title and thought "pykrete". Here's the aircraft carrier in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk
I'm still salty over the Kickstarter he ran about a sword fighting video game that was, at the time, the highest valued project in Kickstarter history, and he just... gave up and released nothing.