SpudFiles

I succesfully aluinched my cannon a few times today with candles the size of my barrel. I was wondering, would pycrete (sawdust+ice) work with wax instaed of ice, would that be more solid at all?
Thanks,

Mav

I think there is some "special" bond between the ice and wood slury. By the way your supposed to use wood slury not sawdust. It might work with wax and ice but Im not really sure like the rest of the post.

My self-forged understanding of pycreate is that the ice gives compressive strength, and the fibers provide tensile strength and impact resistance. This may be quite wrong, but if true, it means that wax will probobly be a poor choise to make pycreate with - it's malable.

Pycreate does have more tensile strength and impact resistance and it melts much slower than regular ice....just watched a show about it on the history channel

the history channles awesome what kind of show was it modern marvels or what

It was some show about WWII and weapons that where never used. They where going to build a whole ship out of Pycreate and it would last for years and years. At leaste i think that's what he's talking about

I saw that same show like a year ago. If I recall right a US sceintist proposed the idea to some Europeans. (Maybe the other way round'.) Anyways he took the peice of ice and shot it with a pistol and it did not break. I could of sworn it was wood slurry... SR do you recall?

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/7 ... island.php

"Pykrete is a super-ice, strengthened tremendously by mixing in wood pulp as it freezes. By freezing a slurry of 14 percent wood pulp, the mechanical strength of ice rockets up to a fairly consistent 70 kg/sq cm. A 7.69 mm rifle bullet, when fired into pure ice, will penetrate to a depth of about 36 cm. Fired into pykrete, it will penetrate less than half as far — about the same distance as a bullet fired into brickwork."

Pykrete is what was used in the construction of ice ships.

"The prototype Habbakuk was 60 feet long and 30 feet wide, weighing in at 1,000 tons, and was kept frozen by a one-horsepower motor. The boat would not move very quickly, and the enemy would hardly fail to see it coming, but this hardly mattered. "Surprise," Pyke theorized in his first Habbakuk memo, "can be obtained from permanence as well as suddenness." The immense hull was just as strong as Pyke had predicted, but Mountbatten eschewed the scientist's reports for a more direct testing method: hauling out a shotgun and trying to blow a hole into their precious prototype's side. He failed."

Done and Done

I thought this was a bit funny: "7.62 rifle bullet"
Yeah, that's informative.

But yeah, pycrete is good stuff. It's not hurt very much by even direct hits to trees even at fairly high velocities, although disintigrates rather compleatly appon collision with rocks (30psi*5' barrel).

It's a tad messy to make though, so it doesn't see as much use by me as normal ice does.