This reminds me of my favorite part of this story. In 1943, the first Quebec Conference between the US and UK military brass was a very contentious and heated affair, with the top generals and admirals on either side almost coming to blows. At one point they all dismiss their aides and go into a closed session, and Lord Mountbatten takes this opportunity to brief everyone on Project Habbakuk, using some samples of pykrete to demonstrate its resilience compared to ordinary sea ice. At one point in the demonstration, he draws his service revolver and fires at the pykrete.
Now, both the US and UK aides and staff officers are outside the room where this is happening, and they don’t know what’s going on, but they all remember how heated the earlier discussions were, so naturally, when they start to hear gunshots from inside the room, they all panic and assume the worst and burst through the door. Fortunately, everyone was unharmed—the bullet ricocheted off the pykrete and embedded itself into the wall, only grazing the trouser leg of Ernest King.
Pykrete is one of those things that makes sense in theory, but in practice and from a practical perspective just isn't great.
There aren't a lot of places in nature where you have tons of trees and easy to get ice. So a society would never default to pykrete because those two things tend to be the opposite of each other. Its a somewhat unnatural thing to do.
Industrialized societies just can make steel and steel doesnt start to soften until 500-600 degrees F. There's no need for a 24/7 refrigerator power plant to keep steel from melting. Steel also is strong and rigid. Steel is of course still used today for both war and civil ships, and has been since the day it became technically and economically feasible to do. Its really hard to beat steel. This project has some nice technical merits and pykrete itself is interesting, but it just doesnt seem to ever have a practical use.
> There aren't a lot of places in nature where you have tons of trees and easy to get ice.
I take issue with this - there are vast swathes of canada, sibera, and northern europe where this is the case. I would say however finding all three year-round near liquid water may be harder, although not exactly an insurmountable challenge compared to say, moving quarried rock 5 miles to build a house
Take a chain saw to it. Take a sledgehammer to it.