Britain's Plan To Build a 2,000 Foot Aircraft Carrier Almost Entirely From Ice (bbc.com) 78
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.
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They were planning to call it "Icy mcIceface"...
Very relevant news (Score:2)
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The slashdot "editors" need to read their own site a bit more. I've seen this one thing mentioned here at least thrice before.
Maybe the world has run out of new things to try, eh.
Re:Very relevant news (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah! Where else can we all go to learn that aliens built the pyramids, Bigfoot has been captured, and Hitler didn't die in World War II?
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Hitler didn't die in World War II
I don't know when he died, but somebody has been cloning him. I keep hearing that many people are literally Hitler.
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Maybe the History Channel of 15 years ago. These days, I'd recommend CuriosityStream, or BBC programming on Netflix or Amazon Prime. The History Channel long ago realized it was more profitable to show trashy reality or pseudo-science shows.
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Maybe the History Channel of 15 years ago. These days, I'd recommend CuriosityStream, or BBC programming on Netflix or Amazon Prime. The History Channel long ago realized it was more profitable to show trashy reality or pseudo-science shows.
Same with Discovery - 15-20 years ago, there were plenty of shows about actual science, ancient civilisations, history, space, dinosaurs etc etc. Now it's reality shows and crime.
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Ugh, I know. Those two used to be among my favorite channels. Now, literally nothing they show holds any interest for me. I certainly acknowledge that they're probably better off financially, but it's a shame it came at the expense of intellectually stimulating programming.
Pretty sure this was a mythbusters episode. (Score:2)
http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh... [discovery.com]
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.
Re:Pretty sure this was a mythbusters episode. (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh... [discovery.com]
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.
Mayhaps not, but IIRC Mythbuster's constructions were not very big/thick. It's possible scaling up might provide better longevity as mass/volume goes up by the cube of the length. Icebergs tend to stick around for a while, and IIRC, tests showed Pykrete to melt slower than plain ice.
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Why don't you read the article you link?
Basically, they tried to build a boat with 'pykrete' in the arctic and found that it fell apart PDQ.
Actually, it did not.
Re:Pretty sure this was a mythbusters episode. (Score:5, Interesting)
In the real world, Pykrete was never designed to be a miraculous substance that didn't melt. The aircraft carrier was designed - and its prototype built - to use electrically powered cooling systems to keep the ice solid. The thing that adding wood fibre brought to the table was that it turned ice from a brittle substance into a composite; for a modern composites analogy, the wood fibre acts equivalent to fibreglass or carbon fibre, and the ice acts equivalent to epoxy.
There've been a number of attempts to make structures "straight from the sea", and they've had success on the small scale but never been attempted on the large scale. One I kind of like is called "Biorock" or "Seacrete"; you build a steel skeleton in the shape of what you want, then run a small DC current through it; this causes minerals (mainly calcium carbonate, aka limestone) to precipitate out on it, forming a very hard steel-reinforced rock. Even better, it's self-healing, as anywhere that gets damaged becomes the easy path for current to conduct, and most growth switches to that area. Calcium and carbon dioxide, unlike some minerals (such as iron) are never in short supply in the ocean; carbon dioxide is quickly replaced by gas exchange with the air and sea life respiration, while calcium exchanges with the seafloor at a quick rate. If the electrical power source (which isn't huge) is carbon neutral, the construction acts as a carbon sink. And the electrical current oxygenates the water around the structure slightly, which leads to sea life flourishing. Indeed, the latter property is the only one that's successfully been exploited with biorock thusfar - growing artificial reefs (the growth rate has proven too slow for growing large structures like ships or artificial islands, mainly because the rock that gets laid down acts like an electrical insulator - the thicker it gets, the more the resistance).
Still, it'd be interesting to see some new approaches to get the growth rate up, such as meshes, "fuzzy" steel rods, maybe even conductive gels where wave action isn't of significance.
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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
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In the real world, Pykrete was never designed to be a miraculous substance that didn't melt. [...] One I kind of like is called "Biorock" or "Seacrete"; you build a steel skeleton in the shape of what you want, then run a small DC current through it; this causes minerals (mainly calcium carbonate, aka limestone) to precipitate out on it, forming a very hard steel-reinforced rock. Even better, it's self-healing, as anywhere that gets damaged becomes the easy path for current to conduct, and most growth switches to that area.
Sounds like a reasonable way to make walls of a space station. If not in reality, at least in decent science fiction. It may not be able to handle the accelerations of a space ship, but space stations don't need much of that.
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Prototype Dismantling (Score:4, Funny)
I'm assuming they melted it down for scrap.
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The pykrete eventually melted, but the sub-structure and the ducts from the cooling mechanisms are still at the bottom of Patricia lake. It's diveable within recreational scuba limits. Always been on my to-do list but I've never made it out there.
Re:Prototype Dismantling (Score:5, Funny)
I'm assuming they melted it down for scrap.
During WWII, the British MI6 Secret Service used it for strategic purposes:
"Shaken . . . not stirred!"
Stalin's spies in Canada discovered the project, and the Soviets commissioned an elite team of scientists to develop a weapon to combat the ice carrier in the coming Cold War.
The scientists decided that vodka laden bombs and torpedoes would melt the ice, and started extensive testing.
Stalin was later furious when he learned that the scientists had simply quaffed the vodka.
A similar project was started Los Alamos, using cheap Mexican Tequila . . . which ended up in margaritas for the staff. Richard Feynman told this story in his book, "Surely, you want salt on the rim, Dr. Feynman".
The Los Alamos margarita ice experiments were essential in leading Feynman to find ice as the cause of the space shuttle explosion, and demonstrated this before Congress by putting a space shuttle rubber O-ring in a frozen margarita.
Would that make it... (Score:2)
an ice boat? :-D
Little known fact (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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I actually was worried that someone might think I was serious... so I decided to add the Jimmy Hoffa part.
WTF is this doing here (Score:1)
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I saw the headline and thought to myself "what... again?"
Great for a cold war (Score:3)
see title
News for nerds? (Score:2)
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The words "Future Video" might be a hint. Slashdot got used.
Slashvertisement, not used.
Re:News for nerds? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Indeed (Score:1)
A similar article has been posted here every year a few times since the war.
We get it.
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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.
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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.
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I lost my ID in the move from ENIAC to System/360.
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If that were true, your ID would be in two's compliment. But again, a nice try.
Chuchill loved wacky ideas - some worked (Score:2)
This one did not : plenty of web resources available: for example
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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
And our carriers are going the same route (Score:3)
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.
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Yes I remember reading about how vulnerable carriers are when the whole hypersonic missile issue come up a number of years ago. Basically as I recall it was that their seems to be a lot of "hype" (sorry) about the new technology and what it meant in terms to carrier defence. In that while yes, they would be very deadly, they aren't really all that needed. In that if a "real war" broke out with theaters that aren't just terrorists or rogue states, normal missiles would do just fine. In that while carriers ha
It may surprise US sailors (Score:2)
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.
Re: It may surprise US sailors (Score:2)
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Rum? Not in the wardroom. That's for those in front of the mast.
Where won't we scrape for news now? (Score:2)
Famous cousin of.... (Score:1)
Also covered on the 99% Invisible podcast (Score:2)
99% Invisible covered it last December [99percentinvisible.org] as one of its mini stories. About 15 minutes long, and worth a listen. It's a very well edited podcast.
Not a good idea (Score:2)
Because of climate change, provided it exists at all.