A
dreeness said:There was also a secret plan to construct massive floating islands in Canada out of frozen wood pulp ('pykrete') and use them as colossal aircraft carriers which would head for the high seas and menace the Third Reich, but nothing came of this scheme, possibly because people gradually realized that it was a very dumb idea.
Invented by the brother of the great, and windmilling, Magnus Pyke. Is he still going?dreeness said:There was also a secret plan to construct massive floating islands in Canada out of frozen wood pulp ('pykrete') and use them as colossal aircraft carriers which would head for the high seas and menace the Third Reich, but nothing came of this scheme, possibly because people gradually realized that it was a very dumb idea.
Fortis said:Invented by the brother of the great, and windmilling, Magnus Pyke. Is he still going?
Weren't there a discovery in real life of a similar substance? Or am I making this up?
Building a warship out of ice was just as hard as it sounds. "One problem was that if you wanted to launch aircraft off of something, it had to have 50 feet of freeboard above the water, but because icebergs are 90% submerged, that meant having almost 500 feet below the water," said Langley.
Such a vessel would be almost impossible to move. Also, when the tip of an iceberg melts, it makes it turn and roll, which would be a problem with aircraft trying to refuel on it. Finally, a flight deck of some other material was required for planes to land and take off.
"So they decided to have a hull of ice, but build it like a conventional ship, which meant it had to be kept frozen through some kind of refrigeration system."
The proposed warship would be the largest ever built: 2,000 feet long and 200 feet wide -- more than twice as big as the Titanic -- with a weight of over 2 million tons and enough space for 300 aircraft. It would sail the seas at a speed of 7 knots (8 miles per hour) and withstand waves of 50 feet, giving Churchill his secret weapon against the U-boats. ...
... I'd have liked to see that...
Last time I read anything of pykrete the plan was only abandoned because the war changed (or ended entirely?) in such a way that huge aircraft carriers weren't actually necessary anymore ...
... nothing came of this scheme, possibly because people gradually realized that it was a very dumb idea.
... It worked, but it wasn't all smooth sailing. Some of the piping arrived damaged, so water couldn't be used for the cooling system and air was pumped through instead. There were doubts about the strength of the ice and the viability of the structure itself; although a better building material called "pykrete" (from Pyke and concrete) was developed around this time by adding wood pulp to the ice mix, it wasn't used in the prototype, and manufacturing it in the huge quantities needed for the Habbakuk seemed impractical. ...
The test had shown that the ice ship wasn't pure fantasy. But by mid-1943, the project started to sink.
Its demise was a combination of three factors, according to Langley[*]. First, Iceland could be used as a permanent base in the North Atlantic, which negated the need for floating aerodromes. Second, newer planes that could patrol for longer were introduced. And finally, the development of the centimetric radar helped track U-boats more accurately. The war was starting to turn in favor of the Allies.
"Those three things made it obsolete before it even reached fruition," said Langley[*]. "It was viable, but not at the scale that Churchill wanted and as quickly as he wanted. It was feasible to build the structure, but impractical to actually implement it."
By the same logic, steel ships wouldn't float.Dr Langley said:{aircraft carriers} had to have 50 feet of freeboard above the water, but because icebergs are 90% submerged, that meant having almost 500 feet below the water
That's a good point. Ms. Langley's statement was playing on the above / below proportionality of a mass of solid ice (i.e., a natural iceberg)
...There's a chance she was referring to the initial idea of essentially building runways on natural icebergs (or artificial analogues), but I didn't get that sense from the text.
Someone, possibly Kim Newman, did a series of stories, published in Interzone in the early 90s at least one of which involved this kind of aircraft carrier.I'm copyrighting 'icepunk' and I'm writing a series of novels set in a parallel universe where this idea took off.
Wikipedia says that Pykrete comes up in Neal Stevenson's Seveneves. I read it but don't remember that detail.Someone, possibly Kim Newman, did a series of stories, published in Interzone in the early 90s at least one of which involved this kind of aircraft carrier.