Hey, peoples!
This idea came from a side tangent I had in Cidercraft's Iron Scaffold Thread. During the course of the topic, someone suggested having the iron scaffolds being able to be covered in construction foam, and this gave me the title idea.
With suggestions from Snoochy and others, the idea came forward to allow IC2's Iron Fencing to act like rebar does for concrete in Real Life(tm) - it would help strengthen the material for structural purposes. Obviously, for balance (and to avoid obsolescence completely), it wouldn't be quite as strong as reinforced stone, but it would be a cheaper alternative (in addition to being quicker to place) than r-stone. I can't tell you how mind-numbingly tedious it was to make a 4-block thick "coffin" of r-stone for the first nuclear reactor I ever made (I must have gone through 100 stacks of the stuff, if not more). Now I usually just do 2 layers, but it still requires an incredible amount of material (and time, even with Buildcraft and logistics pipes helping) to make.
Reinforced CF would obviously have the drawback of needing direct exposure to sunlight before it could harden, but that has the obvious fix of simply cutting away a hole for the mold if the roof's just a few meters underground - it obviously wouldn't be very practical if you were at the bedrock layer, though, and it wouldn't work in the Nether, as there's no light to begin with!
So, with that said, what do you guys think?