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Giant Canadian Ice Ship! (Project Habakkuk)

I remember reading about that in a dusty book in a dusty shop someplace. Rather a good idea, if very specific to one theatre of operations by warship standards.
 
As I'm a nit-picker, I must point out that the correct Biblical spelling is Habakkuk and not Habbakuk. :cool:

Bill Robinson
 
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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.
 
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.
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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 :) I think they all still believed it was a good theory, and some people still do (e.g. very strong in that it could withstand direct hits from torpedoes and other missiles and was easy to repair) ;)
 
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.
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Invented by the brother of the great, and windmilling, Magnus Pyke. Is he still going?
 
I really hope so. He was the first 'populist' scientist on the telly, a real god-send to impersonators. His participation on the song "Blinded Me With Science" by Thom Dolby was masterful!

Him and Heinz Wolff were the friendly face of scientists.
 
Fortis said:
Invented by the brother of the great, and windmilling, Magnus Pyke. Is he still going?
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Unfortunately not - he passed away in 1992, at the age of 84 :(. He was great, wasn't he?

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Just from an iceberg, as far as know.
 
Here we are:

Pykrete is a frozen composite material made of approximately 14 percent sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86 percent ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight). During World War II, Geoffrey Pyke proposed it as a candidate material for a huge, unsinkable aircraft carrier for the British Royal Navy. Pykrete has some interesting properties including its relatively slow melting rate (because of lowthermal conductivity) and its vastly improved strength and toughness over ice; it is closer in form to concrete. ...

Geoffrey Pyke managed to convince Lord Mountbatten of the worth of his project (actually prior to the invention of pykrete) some time around 1942, and trials were made at two locations in Alberta, Canada. The idea for a ship made of ice impressed the United States and Canada enough that a 60-foot (18 m)-long, 1,000-ton ship was built in one month on Patricia Lake in the Canadian Rockies. It was, however, constructed using plain ice (from the lake), before pykrete was considered. It took slightly more than an entire summer to melt. ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete
 
CNN has recently posted an extended article concerning Project Habakkuk (aka Habbakuk) which includes some illustrations, additional notes on the project's history, and a photo of the ice ship's remains lying on the bottom of Lake Patricia.

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. ...
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SOURCE: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/project-habbakuk-ice-aircraft-carrier/index.html
 
Anonymous said:
... I'd have liked to see that...
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Here are some concept illustrations from the period ...

Here's an overview.

Habakkuk-Habbakuk-Concept.jpg

​
Here's a cross section illustrating how the Pykrete was intended to be sandwiched inside a structural hull.

habbakuk-habbakuk-X-Section.jpg

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... And here's a concept illustration of its size relative to an existing carrier ...

Habbakuk-Comparo-Illo.jpg
 
Electric_Monk said:
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 ...
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dreeness said:
... nothing came of this scheme, possibly because people gradually realized that it was a very dumb idea.
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According to the recent article from CNN (see link above):

... 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."
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[*] Susan Langley, a professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland who's done doctoral research on the subject
 
Thanks. The pic of the submerged remains is interesting.
UKTV Yesterday's series "World War Weird" had a piece on Habbakuk (series 2 episode 1). I don't recall they showed any remains.

But I'm unimpressed with this quote:
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
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By the same logic, steel ships wouldn't float.
 
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).

It's not clear this same proportionality would necessarily apply to a hollow shell / hull. 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.

I've never seen any deep nautical engineering analyses of the proposed ice ship, probably because they abandoned the idea while still attempting to figure out how to configure a hull consisting of ice or Pykrete.

According to Wikipedia Pykrete is more weighty per unit volume than plain ice - 980 kg per cubic meter versus 910 for plain ice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete
 
EnolaGaia said:
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.
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I thought she could be referring to a modified natural iceberg, if so it's not a helpful comment: fabricating the ship from pykrete was what made the project even remotely feasible. Pyke's original idea for a levelled-off berg wouldn't have survived past his first conversation with Max Perutz
 
James_H said:
I'm copyrighting 'icepunk' and I'm writing a series of novels set in a parallel universe where this idea took off.
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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.
 
Timble2 said:
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.
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Wikipedia says that Pykrete comes up in Neal Stevenson's Seveneves. I read it but don't remember that detail.
 
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