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  • One small thing: it's kerkschip, not kerkship. The article wavers between these spellings, but schip is the Dutch word for ship.
    by tgv
  • Church ship or kerkschip, but kerkship is an incorrect combination indeed.
  • <<POINTLESS TANGENT ALERT>>

    Het schip vaart naar Engeland (the ship sails to england)

    which for the non dutch speakers sounds like skip fart, which brings joy everytime I hear it.

  • There's a long-lived niche interest in making yachts out of concrete and rebar.

    It's not quite as stupid as it sounds. While it's not ideal for speedy sailing, it's cheap, exceptionally strong - which matters for adventures around ice - and low-maintenance.

    But if it fails, it really fails, and the boat suddenly sinks like a rock.

    Not everyone thinks it's a bad idea, but it's not exactly a mainstream hobby.

    https://www.ferrocement.org/facts-and-falacies/

  • How is it low maintenance? Concrete piers get concrete cancer from the rebar and spall like crazy pretty quickly. Seawater is generally unfriendly to concrete.
  • >it's cheap

    even here it seems that the labor is expensive. It may be considered cheap only if one does it themselves and discounts the one's own labor. One though can imagine a 3d printing of something like this like those houses printed out of sand - that way it may be cheap.

    And sidenote. From the link :

    >The country to have built the most vessels in ferro-cement is the UK >An estimated 9 million tons were built in the period Sept 1943 to May 1944 alone.

    UK innovation during the war is really something - from low tech like ferro-cement boats and gravel-between-wooden-panels armored vehicles to the spinning to skip on water bombs to using BBC broadcasting equipment to jam/mislead German bombers to computer/codebreaking and radar and that automated anti-aircraft targeting. ( Spent a lot of hours reading Wikipedia :) As far as i see Hitler lost the war the moment he decided to stop his attempts to take over UK.

  • Also for canoes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_canoe).

    A fun challenge for engineering departments at technical universities.