Operation Laurasia (Classic)

Operation Laurasia is a proposed ice superhighway stretching over 11000 blocks on solely the X axis from Coimbra to Boston. If completed, it will be the largest icerail in the history of EarthMC, estimated to need 55,000 blocks for the project. 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 Coimbra, 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 198,000 regular ice to be farmed instead of almost 2 million ice to make it out of blue ice.

Construction

As mentioned previously, the construction team would need to farm 198,000 regular ice to make the icerail out of packed ice. This could be accomplished using multiple ice farms. An estimate by Nip_Dip states that if the construction team consisted of 10 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 72,000 ice per day, which is enough to gather all of the ice within 3 days, with around 12,000 ice to spare.

In order to keep the boats from falling off, the construction would also require 33,000 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 10 players mine 1 log per 2 seconds for 1 hour each, we would be done with wood in a day with over double the wood we would actually need, clocking in at 72,000 planks.

For building the actual icerail, that requires approximately 55,000 blocks. If each of our 10 workers laid down 1 block per second, and had 1-hour shifts, we would finish building the rail in 7 hours. This means that in total, with 10 crew members, Operation Laurasia will be built in no more than 5 days.

Impact

The icerail would take 6 minutes 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 tenth of an hour, 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 10 minutes, 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 minutes, they could easily start massive colonial empires.