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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.
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
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
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...
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."
Indeed, I remember it well, it was one of the first stories Slashdot ran after its inception in 1948. The text-only displays of the era didn't do the video justice though.
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.
They were planning to call it "Icy mcIceface"...
I saw the headline and thought to myself "what... again?"
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Mesh (cathode) erosion should be minimal to none; it's your cathode and the current is providing cathodic protection. And if you're providing DC current, your anode should not be sacrificial; it should be as inert as possible (e.g. graphite, titanium, precious metal, etc). But I've not done any experiments myself.
Would the chalky residue not be brucite rather than aragonite? Brucite suggests that your current was too high; lower currents favour aragonite, which is what you want.
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
Geoffrey Pyke, cousin of the well-know 80s pop-star, Magnus Pyke.
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.
Indeed, I remember it well, it was one of the first stories Slashdot ran after its inception in 1948. The text-only displays of the era didn't do the video justice though.
Nice try, but with a seven digit ID, your cover was blown.
Just another day in Paradise
I lost my ID in the move from ENIAC to System/360.
If that were true, your ID would be in two's compliment. But again, a nice try.
Just another day in Paradise