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.

Comments

Re:News for nerds?

[hey!]

Well, it's normal for news sources to carry retrospective feature on historical events -- in fact the article was clearly prompted by the BBC doing exactly that. Sometimes it happens on the anniversary of significant events like the Normandy Invasion; other times it's part of a thematic series -- as in this case.

It's actually a good thing for news sources to do this. It keeps the memory of historically significant events alive and ensures the news organization and its readership have some historical perspective. The cost is sometimes you have to skim over stuff you already know; but the alternative is for that knowledge to become ever less widely held.

Would it be bad if the BBC (or Slashdot) only had articles like this? Yep. Would it be bad if BBC never had articles like this? Yep. It follows that something in between these two extremes is optimal -- although of course not equally so for everyone.