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Britain's Plan To Build a 2,000 Foot Aircraft Carrier Almost Entirely From Ice (bbc.com)
dryriver writes from a report via the BBC: In World War 2, Britain was losing the Battle of the Atlantic, with German U-boats sinking ship after ship. Enter Project Habakkuk, the incredible plan to build an aircraft carrier from ice. The British government wanted a better way of battling German U-boats and needed an aircraft carrier invulnerable to torpedoes and bombs. Inventor Geoffrey Pyke came up with the idea of using solid blocks of ice, strengthened with sawdust, creating the material Pykrete, to build a ship big enough for bombers to land on. Winston Churchill became interested in the plan after Pyke pitched it to him. The proposed ship was to be 610 meters (2,013 feet) long and weigh 1.8 Million tons, considerably larger and heavier than today's biggest ships. It would have hull armor 12 meters (40 feet) thick. Work on building a proof-of-concept prototype started at Patricia Lake, Canada. But when it became clear that the finished aircraft carrier would take until 1945 to build, and cost 10 million pounds, the British government cancelled the project in 1943, and the prototype in Canada was scuppered.
Was created. :P
[($)]
Thought is said Britain Plans To Build, and I was wondering what they were thinking.
People need to watch the History channel more often.
http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...
Basically, they tried to build a boat with 'pykrete' in the arctic and found that it fell apart PDQ.
They had a little more success building a boat with a mix of ice and sheets of newspaper, but it still didn't last an hour before coming apart.
NFW an aircraft carrier would ever manage to finish construction, let alone... y'know... launch aircraft.
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I'm assuming they melted it down for scrap.
an ice boat? :-D
I wonder if this project was the inspiration for one of the silly ideas in Brewster's Millions (1985).
The prototype, although abandoned, took many years to melt. In 1975, a large chunk of the remaining ice drifted into the shipping lanes of Lake Superior and was struck by the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, which was being piloted by Jimmy Hoffa.
#DeleteChrome
I am completely and utterly baffled about why the fuck this is posted as an article here. Yes it is an interesting piece of well known history. But why the fuck is it suddenly posted here?
see title
This has been known for decades. I appreciate that some of the /. readership won't be aware of this but there's a lot of other things they're not aware of too. Should a news site be covering all the lesser-known stuff from history?
"News for nerds"? More like "Olds for nerds".
bang goes my karma... again...
A similar article has been posted here every year a few times since the war.
We get it.
This one did not : plenty of web resources available: for example
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Basically, you have the same problem as with a normal iceberg:
1. The damn thing melts, and the cooling systems they installed were costly and unreliable, and
2. It's very hard to move about (tow, steer...)
If this kind of thing was practicable, they'd be towing icebergs to the Middle East and Africa for the fresh water.
Still, a "cool" idea
Ironically, we're facing the same issue of cost and time vs value and don't even want to acknowledge it. Russia's top of the line missiles can already operate well beyond the range of a carrier's jets, which means that if we got into a serious war with China all Hell would break loose for the Pacific Fleet if the carriers had to move into effective operating range. In 50 years, we're likely to regard carriers as having been a technology that only made sense during infancy of radar and missile/rocket tech.
It may surprise any readers who are current or former members of the US Navy, but Royal Navy ships are not "dry".
So if nothing else, this would have prevented one's gin and tonic from getting warm. Because that just wouldn't do, old chap.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I know slashdot is hurting, but now we're scraping the side of UHaul trucks for stories?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
But the mesh erodes a lot faster too, so you need high current low voltage DC, sturdy sacrificial anodes (compressed graphite or a dissimiliar metal. Graphite lasts longer, but some dissimiliar metals have better accretion rates/properties.)
I kept running out of anode material when I experimented with this a few years back in a glass jar. The piece of steel screen I had was covered in a thin layer of chalky residue after about a week of constant accretion. However with anodes irregularly failing over shorter timeframes it didn't appear to accrete much after that point, despite a steady rate of bubbling and testing with 5V and 12V supplies.
The ideal voltages mentioned in the Biorock research papers are ~1.25-1.5V in the saltwater, after other resistances. Supposedly the accretion efficiency drops precipitously above that as electrolysis results in unwanted byproducts like chlorine gas and sodium ions instead of hydrogen+oxygen products.
Half a kook?
have a kook?
Titanic II.
How many nuclear engines does it need for transporting this ice's boat?
"Over 90% of an iceberg's volume (and mass) is underwater."
It's not an ice boat.
It's not an ice carrier.
It maybe an ice submarine.
Geoffrey Pyke, cousin of the well-know 80s pop-star, Magnus Pyke.
Swarm drone attacks can take out any carrier. There's no real defense. A carrier is a big, relatively immobile target. It's fragile, as in, one or two breaks in the hull and the carrier is rendered ineffective (a.k.a. sunk). Fast missiles would work too, especially if the drone swarm kept everyone busy.
What's needed are scalable, separable, waterborne drones, capable of launching it's own complement of fast missiles and airborne drones. We in the USA won't get that in a time frame that matters since military hardware production is now little more than a welfare program for the defense industry. Actually constructing a weapons system that would work against a modern AI driven, swarm oriented offense/defense system isn't on anybody's radar.
Protecting the USA is no longer the goal. Protecting the vested interests of current military hardware providers is.
99% Invisible covered it last December as one of its mini stories. About 15 minutes long, and worth a listen. It's a very well edited podcast.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Because of climate change, provided it exists at all.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
HMS Brexit. At first it looked like a good idea.
Great Power conflicts are the province of the nuclear triad.
Carriers are for asymmetric conflicts with mid-power and smaller countries. Worrying about the loss of carriers during a war with Russia is a little like worrying about the fate of all those desert camo outfits in a war with Russia. It's not relevant. Only a fool would deploy them.
Yes, the military sometimes does foolish things. Sure, a carrier or three might be deployed and lost against a large adversary. None of that makes the carrier an appropriate weapons system to deploy in that context. The military does know this.