>>13041177Well like I said it would only really be used on those icy moons/other icy objects, specifically because they exist beyond the snow line and thus don't need to deal with sublimation from exposure to sunlight. Anything made of frozen water on Mars is not going to last long, even if it's at the poles. Exposure to the warmth of the sun will make it sublimate into water vapor and go away bit by bit, think dry ice on Earth but a lot slower.
Oh and fiberous material isn't that hard to come by, I'm talking about basalt fibers (melt basalt and extrude it, done, significantly less energy per kilogram product than making chemical propellants btw) but you could also use plastic fibers or biological fibers or carbon fiber or even metallic fibers (though I guess that'd be more like wire). I'm not talking about mining huge amounts of asbestos lol. The concept of using fiber reinforced ice as a building material on distant cold objects comes from the fact that those objects have surfaces ranging from dirty ice to almost pure ice, meaning literally anything you use to build will be kinda hard to come by if you aren't involving ice somehow. If you're on Callisto for example and the crust on the surface is 80% water ice 20% rock, you can either mine 1000 cubic meters of crust to get 200 cubic meters of rock, then refine that rock into metals to build stuff out of (maybe end up with 100 cubic meters of metal in total? And pay a massive energy fee) OR you can take that 200 cubic meters of rock, melt it, extrude it into fibers, and soak the fibers with the 800 cubic meters of water you separated earlier, let it freeze, and end up with 1000 cubic meters of building material, which happens to be very light, very tough, and very strong.
As for building on Mars uh idk use rocks only. Don't try to use water as a binder because water ice is not stable enough physically (it will sublimate on you). If anything, use sulfur compounds as binders, because they will be stable.
