[HN Gopher] Project Habbakuk: Britain's ice "bergship" aircraft ...
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Project Habbakuk: Britain's ice "bergship" aircraft carrier project
(2017)
Author : not_a_boat
Score : 102 points
Date : 2024-04-29 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (99percentinvisible.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (99percentinvisible.org)
| akarve wrote:
| This is one of those "so cool yet so silly" brainstorms that I'm
| grateful someone was audacious enough to entertain. I'm both
| relieved and saddened that it never came to fruition.
|
| There's a word, chindogu, to describe things that are less than
| useless. In some sense this project engendered more problems than
| it solved. Like so many other attractive brainstorms.
| euroderf wrote:
| It's probably worth the trouble to try making some DIY pykrete.
|
| Take a chain saw to it. Take a sledgehammer to it.
| dmurray wrote:
| Unsurprisingly, Mythbusters have tried it - not at the scale of
| an aircraft carrier, but a boat displacing a few tons:
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a4101/4313387/
| euroderf wrote:
| "Some leaks sprang here and there, but a few sprays from
| carbon-dioxide fire extinguishers sealed them pretty well, at
| least for a little while."
|
| Excellent!
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| Pykrete is one of those things that makes sense in theory, but
| in practice and from a practical perspective just isn't great.
|
| There aren't a lot of places in nature where you have tons of
| trees and easy to get ice. So a society would never default to
| pykrete because those two things tend to be the opposite of
| each other. Its a somewhat unnatural thing to do.
|
| Industrialized societies just can make steel and steel doesnt
| start to soften until 500-600 degrees F. There's no need for a
| 24/7 refrigerator power plant to keep steel from melting. Steel
| also is strong and rigid. Steel is of course still used today
| for both war and civil ships, and has been since the day it
| became technically and economically feasible to do. Its really
| hard to beat steel. This project has some nice technical merits
| and pykrete itself is interesting, but it just doesnt seem to
| ever have a practical use.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I believe they didn't actually use pykrete in the Canadian test
| model. It was just ice.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The outcome of this project is an illustration of a rule of thumb
| from materials science: many solid materials begin to lose their
| mechanical properties at about half their absolute melting point.
| This is why (for example) ordinary steel should not be used above
| about 550 C; there's too much creep.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Can you expand on this comment in the context of ice/water? It
| implies ice changes behavior at about 140K, but that isnt close
| to a phase change boundary, so what would you expect to be
| seeing here?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| At a guess, movement like that seen in glaciers and ice
| sheets?
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's right -- plastic deformation under stress.
| denotational wrote:
| The glass transition temperature of amorphous ice is
| approximately 140 K.
| 0x457 wrote:
| This is that how jet fuel melted steel beams?
| afterburner wrote:
| Not melt, soften slightly
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Here's a blacksmith demonstrating this exactly:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA
| kimixa wrote:
| I thought the "failed" result of the project was more due to
| economic factors, and the reduced need due to other actions in
| the war meaning a waterborne carrier was less useful. Not some
| issue with the mechanical properties of pykrete. If the tested
| properties were already past that 1/2 absolute temperature
| point and considered acceptable, it doesn't really matter what
| the behavior would have been at less than that.
|
| Did I read it wrong?
| alexwasserman wrote:
| Also what looks like insane scope creep.
|
| "The full-sized ship would also need to have a range of 7,000
| miles, support heavy bombers and be torpedo-proof. It was to
| be over a mile in length, weigh as much as 2.2 million tons
| and require as many as 26 electric motors to move and steer
| across the ocean."
|
| That's a crazy target growing out of "cheap to produce
| aircraft carrier"
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Yeah it's like a mobile midway pacific war at that point!
|
| Sailing midway all the way!
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Check out Hobart's Funnies [0] and the great Panjandrum [1] for
| some other awesome WW2 British out-of-the-box thinking.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart%27s_Funnies
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panjandrum
| Theodores wrote:
| This concept could be done today with newer materials such as
| mylar film and polystyrene to keep the sun at bay.
|
| Although a YouTuber would be able to do it for internet likes, in
| reality, when the horse manure gets real, every aircraft carrier
| is a dead duck when the enemy has hypersonic missiles.
| office_drone wrote:
| > they called it Project Habbakuk, in reference to ... "I am
| working a work in your days, which ye will not believe though it
| be told you."
|
| This is a slightly more subtle way of calling it Project You
| Ain't Gonna Believe This
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Think most peoples gut reaction would be that it would melt.
|
| But
|
| "it took three hot Canadian summers for the test vessel to
| completely melt."
|
| Seems like in north sea, it would have worked and probably would
| have happened if it wasn't for un-related changes like airfields
| and re-fulling planes.
| msarrel wrote:
| It was either going to be ice or concrete
| https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-concrete-fleet...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The material they used (water mixed with wood, frozen) is
| called pykrete.
|
| > Blocks of ice containing as little as four percent wood pulp
| were weight for weight as strong as concrete; in honor of the
| originator of the project, we called this reinforced ice
| "pykrete". When we fired a rifle bullet into an upright block
| of pure ice two feet square and one foot thick, the block
| shattered; in pykrete the bullet made a little crater and was
| embedded without doing any damage. My stock rose, but no one
| would tell me what pykrete was needed for, except that it was
| for Project Habakkuk.
|
| (from _I Wish I 'd Made You Angry Earlier_ by Max Perutz, via
| Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete)
| TylerE wrote:
| Unfortunately it turned out to be basically impossible to
| keep a ship-sized block of it frozen, and modern attempts at
| replicating it have found the strength claims to be a bit
| "optimistic".
| FrojoS wrote:
| This could be straight out of the Command and Conquer: Red Alert
| series. [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert
| elwell wrote:
| Can't get sunk by an iceberg if you are an iceberg. _taps side of
| head_
| meeks wrote:
| What if, instead of building a full carrier out of pykrete, you
| instead build very simple pykrete ships that follow around the
| outside of a carrier group to add a layer of protection from
| torpedoes and sea drones?
| Yeul wrote:
| If memory serves there was a plan to invade the Azores in WW2
| which would have been immensely ironic.
|
| After WW2 the US was gracefully handed over a few islands to
| serve as aircraft bases. The Chinese still lack such soft power
| so they have to make their own islands.
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