5 ms·

Project Habbakuk: Britain’s ice “bergship” aircraft carrier project (2017)

143 points by not_a_boat 3y ago

akarve 3y ago
This is one of those “so cool yet so silly” brainstorms that I’m grateful someone was audacious enough to entertain. I’m both relieved and saddened that it never came to fruition. There’s a word, chindogu, to describe things that are less than useless. In some sense this project engendered more problems than it solved. Like so many other attractive brainstorms.
euroderf 3y ago
It's probably worth the trouble to try making some DIY pykrete. Take a chain saw to it. Take a sledgehammer to it.
- dmurray 3y ago
  Unsurprisingly, Mythbusters have tried it - not at the scale of an aircraft carrier, but a boat displacing a few tons: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a4101/4313387/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a4101/4313387/
  - euroderf 3y ago
    "Some leaks sprang here and there, but a few sprays from carbon-dioxide fire extinguishers sealed them pretty well, at least for a little while." Excellent!
- zoeysmithe 3y ago
  Pykrete is one of those things that makes sense in theory, but in practice and from a practical perspective just isn't great. There aren't a lot of places in nature where you have tons of trees and easy to get ice. So a society would never default to pykrete because those two things tend to be the opposite of each other. Its a somewhat unnatural thing to do. Industrialized societies just can make steel and steel doesnt start to soften until 500-600 degrees F. There's no need for a 24/7 refrigerator power plant to keep steel from melting. Steel also is strong and rigid. Steel is of course still used today for both war and civil ships, and has been since the day it became technically and economically feasible to do. Its really hard to beat steel. This project has some nice technical merits and pykrete itself is interesting, but it just doesnt seem to ever have a practical use.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    > There aren't a lot of places in nature where you have tons of trees and easy to get ice. I take issue with this - there are vast swathes of canada, sibera, and northern europe where this is the case. I would say however finding all three year-round near liquid water may be harder, although not exactly an insurmountable challenge compared to say, moving quarried rock 5 miles to build a house
- philwelch 2y ago
  This reminds me of my favorite part of this story. In 1943, the first Quebec Conference between the US and UK military brass was a very contentious and heated affair, with the top generals and admirals on either side almost coming to blows. At one point they all dismiss their aides and go into a closed session, and Lord Mountbatten takes this opportunity to brief everyone on Project Habbakuk, using some samples of pykrete to demonstrate its resilience compared to ordinary sea ice. At one point in the demonstration, he draws his service revolver and fires at the pykrete. Now, both the US and UK aides and staff officers are outside the room where this is happening, and they don’t know what’s going on, but they all remember how heated the earlier discussions were, so naturally, when they start to hear gunshots from inside the room, they all panic and assume the worst and burst through the door. Fortunately, everyone was unharmed—the bullet ricocheted off the pykrete and embedded itself into the wall, only grazing the trouser leg of Ernest King.
renewiltord 3y ago
I believe they didn't actually use pykrete in the Canadian test model. It was just ice.
pfdietz 3y ago
The outcome of this project is an illustration of a rule of thumb from materials science: many solid materials begin to lose their mechanical properties at about half their absolute melting point. This is why (for example) ordinary steel should not be used above about 550 C; there's too much creep.
- kjellsbells 3y ago
  Can you expand on this comment in the context of ice/water? It implies ice changes behavior at about 140K, but that isnt close to a phase change boundary, so what would you expect to be seeing here?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    At a guess, movement like that seen in glaciers and ice sheets?
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      That's right -- plastic deformation under stress.
  - denotational 3y ago
    The glass transition temperature of amorphous ice is approximately 140 K.
- 0x457 3y ago
  This is that how jet fuel melted steel beams?
  - afterburner 3y ago
    Not melt, soften slightly
KineticLensman 3y ago
Check out Hobart's Funnies [0] and the great Panjandrum [1] for some other awesome WW2 British out-of-the-box thinking. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart%27s_Funnies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart%27s_Funnies [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panjandrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panjandrum
Theodores 3y ago
This concept could be done today with newer materials such as mylar film and polystyrene to keep the sun at bay. Although a YouTuber would be able to do it for internet likes, in reality, when the horse manure gets real, every aircraft carrier is a dead duck when the enemy has hypersonic missiles.
mistrial9 3y ago
[flagged]
- larkost 3y ago
  I am sure that it has been presented as wester aggression in some circles... but it is not really a great example if look at the whole story: This was (very) late in WW1 and the Russian Revolution turned a solid ally of Czarist Russia into a mess of waring groups more-or-less causing the Russian front of that war to more-or-less collapse. The Whites looked more like they would be in favor of continuing the war, while the Reds explicitly made a pease that did not include the west (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk). And the U.S. had been supplying Russia with arms, with many of them still sitting in warehouses in Murmansk. There was legitimate fear that German forces (who had just invaded Finland) would take this large stockpile of arms, and combined with the lack of an eastern front, that would turn the tide of war. From the Western perspective they needed to do something. Please remember that Russia was in Civil War at this point, and pretending it was clear who was (or rightfully should be) in charge of things is not realistic. The West chose a side (the one more likely to favor it), and it turns out that was not the winning side. If the other side had won history would be very different (that is a safe statement, anyone who gives you more is just guessing), but that invasion probably would have been welcomed if it had turned out different. With 20/20 hindsight it was wrong to do more than grab the arms shipments and leave: the Russian Civil War should have been an internal matter. But pretending that the West was just being aggressive, or trying to take over Russia is a bit disingenuous.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    you are right that there was serious conflict.. please note that I did not "pretend" anything.. as a serious place for discussion and learning, let's agree here at YNews to apply information tools and good reasoning on this important topic. I am not taking sides. Historical documents show that the Germans in WW II bombed the city with ferocity and an intent to destroy it completely. Of course that was a different political era, yet it is relevent today.
  - genman 3y ago
office_drone 3y ago
> they called it Project Habbakuk, in reference to ... "I am working a work in your days, which ye will not believe though it be told you." This is a slightly more subtle way of calling it Project You Ain't Gonna Believe This
- quartesixte 3y ago
  How many regular mass attending, God fearing Anglicans could even recognize on the spot the minor prophet Habbakuk? Bizarre project all around.
- davidwritesbugs 3y ago
  Every war should have a role for the Panjandrum.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Think most peoples gut reaction would be that it would melt. But "it took three hot Canadian summers for the test vessel to completely melt." Seems like in north sea, it would have worked and probably would have happened if it wasn't for un-related changes like airfields and re-fulling planes.
msarrel 3y ago
It was either going to be ice or concrete https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-concrete-fleet-of-wwii/ https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-concrete-fleet...
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  The material they used (water mixed with wood, frozen) is called pykrete. > Blocks of ice containing as little as four percent wood pulp were weight for weight as strong as concrete; in honor of the originator of the project, we called this reinforced ice "pykrete". When we fired a rifle bullet into an upright block of pure ice two feet square and one foot thick, the block shattered; in pykrete the bullet made a little crater and was embedded without doing any damage. My stock rose, but no one would tell me what pykrete was needed for, except that it was for Project Habakkuk. (from I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier by Max Perutz, via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete)
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Unfortunately it turned out to be basically impossible to keep a ship-sized block of it frozen, and modern attempts at replicating it have found the strength claims to be a bit "optimistic".
FrojoS 3y ago
This could be straight out of the Command and Conquer: Red Alert series. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert
elwell 3y ago
Can't get sunk by an iceberg if you are an iceberg. taps side of head
meeks 3y ago
What if, instead of building a full carrier out of pykrete, you instead build very simple pykrete ships that follow around the outside of a carrier group to add a layer of protection from torpedoes and sea drones?
- WorkerBee28474 3y ago
  From https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2020/august/key-role-convoys https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2020/a... > By definition, a convoy consisted of two or more merchant ships under the escort of one or more warships, but typical transatlantic convoys during the war consisted of large numbers of ships—the largest composed of 166, with typical convoys consisting of 45 to 60 ships—steaming in 9 to 12 columns with 1,000 yards between columns and 600 yards between ships in the individual columns. Because of their extra vulnerability, tankers and ammunition ships were placed in the innermost columns, and the convoy commodore in charge would be in the lead ship in the center column. That is a lot of attack surface. But they kind of already do your idea, just with metal ships carrying goods.
  - meeks 2y ago
    Yeah makes sense, if you already have metal ships carrying goods there is no need to make additional ships just for protection. I suppose there could be an economic advantage if the pykrete ships can be made significantly cheaper and faster than the cargo ships. It makes me wonder why Ukraine is so successful in the black sea with their sea drones vs. the Russian navy? Why wouldn't Russia have ships or something else blocking their battleships at port? It seems Ukraine is able to sink everything with ease at the moment.
Yeul 3y ago
If memory serves there was a plan to invade the Azores in WW2 which would have been immensely ironic. After WW2 the US was gracefully handed over a few islands to serve as aircraft bases. The Chinese still lack such soft power so they have to make their own islands.
Qem 3y ago
That makes me wonder if that guy that was killed by his girlfriend while attempting a dumb stunt, using a encyclopedia as ballistic shield, would succeed if he had soaked the book in water and put it in the freezer overnight, beforehand: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5878953/Prosecutors-release-pictures-bullet-holed-book.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5878953/Prosecutors...
- tomcam 3y ago
  He just had to use the same book twice. He ran several successful tests but with different books.

143 points by not_a_boat 3y ago

This is one of those “so cool yet so silly” brainstorms that I’m grateful someone was audacious enough to entertain. I’m both relieved and saddened that it never came to fruition. There’s a word, chindogu, to describe things that are less than useless. In some sense this project engendered more problems than it solved. Like so many other attractive brainstorms.

euroderf 3y ago

It's probably worth the trouble to try making some DIY pykrete. Take a chain saw to it. Take a sledgehammer to it.

dmurray 3y ago
Unsurprisingly, Mythbusters have tried it - not at the scale of an aircraft carrier, but a boat displacing a few tons: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a4101/4313387/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a4101/4313387/
- euroderf 3y ago
  "Some leaks sprang here and there, but a few sprays from carbon-dioxide fire extinguishers sealed them pretty well, at least for a little while." Excellent!
zoeysmithe 3y ago
Pykrete is one of those things that makes sense in theory, but in practice and from a practical perspective just isn't great. There aren't a lot of places in nature where you have tons of trees and easy to get ice. So a society would never default to pykrete because those two things tend to be the opposite of each other. Its a somewhat unnatural thing to do. Industrialized societies just can make steel and steel doesnt start to soften until 500-600 degrees F. There's no need for a 24/7 refrigerator power plant to keep steel from melting. Steel also is strong and rigid. Steel is of course still used today for both war and civil ships, and has been since the day it became technically and economically feasible to do. Its really hard to beat steel. This project has some nice technical merits and pykrete itself is interesting, but it just doesnt seem to ever have a practical use.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  > There aren't a lot of places in nature where you have tons of trees and easy to get ice. I take issue with this - there are vast swathes of canada, sibera, and northern europe where this is the case. I would say however finding all three year-round near liquid water may be harder, although not exactly an insurmountable challenge compared to say, moving quarried rock 5 miles to build a house
philwelch 2y ago
This reminds me of my favorite part of this story. In 1943, the first Quebec Conference between the US and UK military brass was a very contentious and heated affair, with the top generals and admirals on either side almost coming to blows. At one point they all dismiss their aides and go into a closed session, and Lord Mountbatten takes this opportunity to brief everyone on Project Habbakuk, using some samples of pykrete to demonstrate its resilience compared to ordinary sea ice. At one point in the demonstration, he draws his service revolver and fires at the pykrete. Now, both the US and UK aides and staff officers are outside the room where this is happening, and they don’t know what’s going on, but they all remember how heated the earlier discussions were, so naturally, when they start to hear gunshots from inside the room, they all panic and assume the worst and burst through the door. Fortunately, everyone was unharmed—the bullet ricocheted off the pykrete and embedded itself into the wall, only grazing the trouser leg of Ernest King.

renewiltord 3y ago

I believe they didn't actually use pykrete in the Canadian test model. It was just ice.

pfdietz 3y ago

The outcome of this project is an illustration of a rule of thumb from materials science: many solid materials begin to lose their mechanical properties at about half their absolute melting point. This is why (for example) ordinary steel should not be used above about 550 C; there's too much creep.

kjellsbells 3y ago
Can you expand on this comment in the context of ice/water? It implies ice changes behavior at about 140K, but that isnt close to a phase change boundary, so what would you expect to be seeing here?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  At a guess, movement like that seen in glaciers and ice sheets?
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    That's right -- plastic deformation under stress.
- denotational 3y ago
  The glass transition temperature of amorphous ice is approximately 140 K.
0x457 3y ago
This is that how jet fuel melted steel beams?
- afterburner 3y ago
  Not melt, soften slightly

KineticLensman 3y ago

Check out Hobart's Funnies [0] and the great Panjandrum [1] for some other awesome WW2 British out-of-the-box thinking. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart%27s_Funnies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart%27s_Funnies [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panjandrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panjandrum

Theodores 3y ago

This concept could be done today with newer materials such as mylar film and polystyrene to keep the sun at bay. Although a YouTuber would be able to do it for internet likes, in reality, when the horse manure gets real, every aircraft carrier is a dead duck when the enemy has hypersonic missiles.

mistrial9 3y ago

[flagged]

larkost 3y ago
I am sure that it has been presented as wester aggression in some circles... but it is not really a great example if look at the whole story: This was (very) late in WW1 and the Russian Revolution turned a solid ally of Czarist Russia into a mess of waring groups more-or-less causing the Russian front of that war to more-or-less collapse. The Whites looked more like they would be in favor of continuing the war, while the Reds explicitly made a pease that did not include the west (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk). And the U.S. had been supplying Russia with arms, with many of them still sitting in warehouses in Murmansk. There was legitimate fear that German forces (who had just invaded Finland) would take this large stockpile of arms, and combined with the lack of an eastern front, that would turn the tide of war. From the Western perspective they needed to do something. Please remember that Russia was in Civil War at this point, and pretending it was clear who was (or rightfully should be) in charge of things is not realistic. The West chose a side (the one more likely to favor it), and it turns out that was not the winning side. If the other side had won history would be very different (that is a safe statement, anyone who gives you more is just guessing), but that invasion probably would have been welcomed if it had turned out different. With 20/20 hindsight it was wrong to do more than grab the arms shipments and leave: the Russian Civil War should have been an internal matter. But pretending that the West was just being aggressive, or trying to take over Russia is a bit disingenuous.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  you are right that there was serious conflict.. please note that I did not "pretend" anything.. as a serious place for discussion and learning, let's agree here at YNews to apply information tools and good reasoning on this important topic. I am not taking sides. Historical documents show that the Germans in WW II bombed the city with ferocity and an intent to destroy it completely. Of course that was a different political era, yet it is relevent today.
- genman 3y ago

office_drone 3y ago

> they called it Project Habbakuk, in reference to ... "I am working a work in your days, which ye will not believe though it be told you." This is a slightly more subtle way of calling it Project You Ain't Gonna Believe This

quartesixte 3y ago
How many regular mass attending, God fearing Anglicans could even recognize on the spot the minor prophet Habbakuk? Bizarre project all around.
davidwritesbugs 3y ago
Every war should have a role for the Panjandrum.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Think most peoples gut reaction would be that it would melt. But "it took three hot Canadian summers for the test vessel to completely melt." Seems like in north sea, it would have worked and probably would have happened if it wasn't for un-related changes like airfields and re-fulling planes.

msarrel 3y ago

It was either going to be ice or concrete https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-concrete-fleet-of-wwii/ https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-concrete-fleet...

wizzwizz4 3y ago
The material they used (water mixed with wood, frozen) is called pykrete. > Blocks of ice containing as little as four percent wood pulp were weight for weight as strong as concrete; in honor of the originator of the project, we called this reinforced ice "pykrete". When we fired a rifle bullet into an upright block of pure ice two feet square and one foot thick, the block shattered; in pykrete the bullet made a little crater and was embedded without doing any damage. My stock rose, but no one would tell me what pykrete was needed for, except that it was for Project Habakkuk. (from I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier by Max Perutz, via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete)
- TylerE 3y ago
  Unfortunately it turned out to be basically impossible to keep a ship-sized block of it frozen, and modern attempts at replicating it have found the strength claims to be a bit "optimistic".

FrojoS 3y ago

This could be straight out of the Command and Conquer: Red Alert series. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert

elwell 3y ago

Can't get sunk by an iceberg if you are an iceberg. taps side of head

meeks 3y ago

What if, instead of building a full carrier out of pykrete, you instead build very simple pykrete ships that follow around the outside of a carrier group to add a layer of protection from torpedoes and sea drones?

WorkerBee28474 3y ago
From https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2020/august/key-role-convoys https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2020/a... > By definition, a convoy consisted of two or more merchant ships under the escort of one or more warships, but typical transatlantic convoys during the war consisted of large numbers of ships—the largest composed of 166, with typical convoys consisting of 45 to 60 ships—steaming in 9 to 12 columns with 1,000 yards between columns and 600 yards between ships in the individual columns. Because of their extra vulnerability, tankers and ammunition ships were placed in the innermost columns, and the convoy commodore in charge would be in the lead ship in the center column. That is a lot of attack surface. But they kind of already do your idea, just with metal ships carrying goods.
- meeks 2y ago
  Yeah makes sense, if you already have metal ships carrying goods there is no need to make additional ships just for protection. I suppose there could be an economic advantage if the pykrete ships can be made significantly cheaper and faster than the cargo ships. It makes me wonder why Ukraine is so successful in the black sea with their sea drones vs. the Russian navy? Why wouldn't Russia have ships or something else blocking their battleships at port? It seems Ukraine is able to sink everything with ease at the moment.

Yeul 3y ago

If memory serves there was a plan to invade the Azores in WW2 which would have been immensely ironic. After WW2 the US was gracefully handed over a few islands to serve as aircraft bases. The Chinese still lack such soft power so they have to make their own islands.

Qem 3y ago

That makes me wonder if that guy that was killed by his girlfriend while attempting a dumb stunt, using a encyclopedia as ballistic shield, would succeed if he had soaked the book in water and put it in the freezer overnight, beforehand: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5878953/Prosecutors-release-pictures-bullet-holed-book.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5878953/Prosecutors...

tomcam 3y ago
He just had to use the same book twice. He ran several successful tests but with different books.