Project Habbakuk
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Project Habbakuk was a plan by the British in World War II to construct an aircraft carrier out of ice, for use against German U-boats in the mid- Atlantic, which was out of range of land-based planes.
The Habbakuk, as proposed to Winston Churchill by Lord Mountbatten and Geoffrey Pyke, was to be approximately 4,000 feet long and 600 feet wide, with walls 40 feet thick, and have a displacement of 2,000,000 tons or more, constructed in Canada from 280,000 blocks of ice<ref name="Cabinet Magazine">Template:Cite journal</ref>. The building material was later changed to a mixture of ice and wood pulp known as Pykrete after Pyke, who proposed the Habbakuk project — the material was invented by others. The ship's deep draft would have kept it out of most harbours. Inside the vessel a refrigeration plant would maintain the structure against melting. The ship would have extremely limited maneuverability, but was expected to be capable of up to 10 knots (18 km/h) using 26 electric drive motors mounted in separate external nacelles (normal, internal ship engines would have generated too much heat for an ice craft).Template:Citation needed Its armaments would have included 40 dual-barrelled 4.5" DP (dual-purpose) turrets and numerous light anti-aircraft guns, and it would have housed an airstrip and up to 150 twin-engined bombers or fighters.Template:Citation needed
Image:Image 0010.JPG The Habbakuk was proposed to be virtually unsinkable as it would have effectively been a streamlined iceberg or floating island kept afloat by the buoyancy of its construction materials, and to be highly resilient to damage by the sheer bulk. It was projected to take $70 million and 8000 people working for 8 months to construct, an expenditure which the British were unwilling to make at the time on such an experimental craft. Experiments on ice and pykrete as construction materials were carried out at Lake Louise, Alberta, and a small prototype was constructed at Patricia Lake, Alberta, measuring only 60 feet by 30 feet (18 by 9 m), weighing in at 1,000 tons and kept frozen by a one-horsepower motor.<ref name="Cabinet Magazine"/> Habbakuk itself was never begun.
The name Habbakuk was an Admiralty clerk's misspelling of the biblical name Habakkuk. The choice of this name is said to be a reference to the project's ambitious goal: "...be utterly amazed, for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told." ( Habakkuk 1:5, NIV)
The ship is a fairly popular subject in alternate history fiction.Template:Citation needed
Criticism
The Habbakuk design received criticism, notably from Sir Charles Goodeve, Assistant Controller of Research and Development for the Admiralty during World War II.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In an article published after the war Goodeve pointed out the large amount of wood pulp that would be required, enough to affect paper production significantly. He also claimed that each ship would require 40,000 tons of cork insulation, thousands of miles of steel tubing for brine circulation, and four power stations, but that for all those resources (some of which could be used to manufacture conventional ships of more effective fighting power) Habbakuk would only be capable of six knots of speed. Much of his article also contained extensive derisive comments about the properties of ice as used for ship construction.
References
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