Following on from mattk's answer, you can inherit DetachedCriteria to access its constructors:
public class ConvertedDetachedCriteria : DetachedCriteria
{
public ConvertedDetachedCriteria(ICriteria criteria)
: base((CriteriaImpl) criteria, criteria)
{
var impl = (CriteriaImpl) criteria;
impl.Session = null;
}
}
Now you can write code like this:
var criteria = Session.CreateCriteria<Person>()
.Add(Restrictions.Eq("Name", "John"));
var clonedDetachedCriteria = new ConvertedDetachedCriteria(criteria);
var newCriteria = Session.CreateCriteria<Person>()
.SetProjection(Projections.SubQuery(clonedDetachedCriteria))
.List<string>();
Disclaimer: I've only subject this to minimal testing in NH 2... no guarantees it will work or be of any use.