Kerkship St. Jozef, Antwerp – Wwii German Concrete Tanker
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The Kerkship St. Jozef, a WWII German concrete tanker in Antwerp, is featured on a blog, sparking interest in its history and preservation, with commenters discussing its significance and the challenges of preserving such vessels.
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9d
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Day 9
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Oct 23, 2025 at 9:23 AM EDT
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Oct 31, 2025 at 9:46 PM EDT
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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/
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.
Improvisation is one thing. But tons of cheaply massproduced T34 (or Sherman) another one. The german warmachine was actually not so good at mass producing and had a faible for overengeneering and Hitler well, "was thinking big" (but with no connection to reality)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte
Full invasion of UK would have been very expensive and Hitlers main ideological goal from the start was gaining new land in the east. ("Blood and earth")
And they came very close to Moscow. If they would have succeded, they would have settled with the west for sure somehow.
I'm no expert, but I thought the "Blood and Soil" mantra was referencing how the "real Germans" was of "German blood" and "German soil". It was a calling for nationalism, for kinship based on blood connections.
The expansionism used the "lebensraum" mantra. That the "real German people", as identified by their clean pure blood and soil heritage, needed more space to live.
Im general, yes you are right, but it wasn't so much about the "germans", but the aryan white master race. That must take its natural ruling position over europe. And conquer the lowly slavic lands, not to exterminate them, but to use them as slaves for the pure blood aryans who then would own large lands with workers there.
(It always screamed inferiority complex to me, that the dark haired Hitler installed the blond aryan as the great pure blood example)
Anyone who will tell the folks what they want to hear (and isn’t impossible to be delusional about!), can lead.
I really don't know, but the russian red army (and with it the sovjet regime im general) was close to collapse at some points.
Absolutely, and UK shines at that too - they produced 130K aircrafts (US - 350K, USSR - 150K) and 47K tanks (US - 110K, USSR - 120)
>The german warmachine was actually not so good at mass producing
and the US and UK bombers were a major reason
Building anything these days is like responding to a government contract RFP, it's an exercise in cost cutting to get around whatever industries, companies, etc. got the crap that makes them money written into the rules.
Don't look into it. You'll want to armor a bulldozer. Igornance is bliss
A fun challenge for engineering departments at technical universities.
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.