Operation Laurasia (Classic)

Operation Laurasia is a proposed ice superhighway stretching over 11,000 blocks on solely the X axis from Porto to Boston. If completed, it will be the largest icerail in the history of EarthMC, estimated to need 7,500 blocks for the project if built in the Nether. The idea of such a highway was first proposed by Nip_Dip on May 17, 2020.

Design

Due to the sheer size of Operation Laurasia, the ice superhighway can't be built like a conventional icerail, as traffic might occur and boats might run into eachother while traversing such a large icerail. Therefore, Nip_Dip's plan is to have 2 parallel icerails for the project, one to go from Boston to Porto, and the other for the return trip. This way, traffic as a problem is eliminated.

Building the icerail out of packed ice instead of blue ice is also in the plan, as it willl make the icerail exponentially cheaper to produce, requiring only 25,000 regular ice to be farmed instead of almost 300,000 ice to make it out of blue ice.

Construction

As mentioned previously, the construction team would need to farm 25,000 regular ice to make the icerail out of packed ice in the Nether. This could be accomplished using multiple ice farms. An estimate by Nip_Dip states that if the construction team consisted of 5 players, and each player took 0.5 seconds to mine 1 regular ice, which is quite optimistic because of mending and the fact that ice farms aren't 100% efficient, and if each player mined for an hour per day, it would yield 36,000 ice per day, which is enough to gather all of the ice within 1 day, with around 10,000 ice to spare.

In order to keep the boats from falling off, the construction would also require 4500 blocks of any type to complete the rail. Wood is a good choice because you can craft 1 log into 4 planks. So if we had our same 5 players mine 1 log every 2 seconds for 1 hour each, we would be done with wood in a day with over 8 times the wood we would actually need, clocking in at 36,000 planks.

For building the actual icerail, that requires approximately 7,500 blocks. If 2 workers laid down 1 block per second, and started on opposite sides of the rail, we would finish building the rail in 53 minutes. This means that in total, with 10 crew members, Operation Laurasia will be built in no more than 2 days.

Impact

The icerail would take 45 seconds to travel from start to finish, assuming that you're traveling at full speed the whole time and don't slip up. This means that Spainards and Portugese could end up on the shores of Massachusetts in less than a minute, and vice versa. This would have a major impact on American and European politics, since if the other power can get from their side of the ocean to yours in less than 1 minute, they wouldn't want to anger each other.

Another impact this might have is it might start European colonialism. If settlers can get from point A to point B in a matter of seconds, they could easily start massive colonial empires.

Problems

First of all, it will be difficult to get the players needed to complete the project within the required timeframe. Many players might not want to risk traversing the Nether to connect two continents. Second, large lava streams will block the path and will have to be removed, which will extend the amount of time needed to construct significantly. We might have to mine stone since it is fireproof and will have to build a wall to protect the icerail from ghasts.