AHC: Carrier large enough to take B-52s

I am off and on working on a carrier in google sketchup that is able to launch something like a Lancaster bomber. But definitely not a B-52.
 
The necessary size, including striking down a B52, is well within existing Pycrete plans. Just as there are material limits on the size of wooden vessels there are limits on mild steel, even of good quality.

Pycrete is pretty well immune to such limits. Rather the problems are greater with the smaller the Pycrete vessel.

So it has to be a Pycrete hull.

I recall a very old forum where a Pycrete battleship was laid out that was all but invulnerable to any conventional weapon including large mines causing back breaking expanses of gas under the hull centre. The biggest problem was weaponry. All launched weapons (guns, missiles, torpedoes etc.) need a hole reaching the surface and were thus weak points. I liked the suggestions of a ram with the Pycrete battleship sinking opposing naval and merchant vessels by ramming.

In the case of a Pycrete carrier the lifts would be the key weak point.

Originally Posted by iddt3
Britain acutally builds it's pikerete carriers, and they get kept around post war.

A) Most likely use of the B-52 in a strategic sense was a threat (or active use) against USSR, and to a lesser extent PRC. Where better to have a way over station for in flight refueling, retreival of bombing crews, and other issues but the Arctic Ocean

B) No need for pykrete in the Arctic Ocean as you can not go very fast, and thick fresh water ice at least until recently would melt only in many, many decades.

C) There are very few glaciers which calve into the Arctic Ocean, but those spawn long lived ice islands as many as a dozen or more miles wide and long http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drifting_ice_station .

D) Instead of carrier lifts, use hangars of honeycombed structure or nothing. Store explosive materials in under ice or in ice locations, except nukes which might be flown in at critical times.

E) For movement, use sails, possibly circular ones inside the ice island, which can be rotated to get wind effect in dirction wanted. Have rudder for same, including underwater sails. Natural ocean currents tend to keep islands in Arctic, unless escaping through the narrow route towards East Greenland, and hence to Baffin Bay (were it to ever get that far).

Prefectly flat, natural, half way to USSR or Northern PRC/Singkang, it is hard to beat. The disadvantage is there are very few locations besides the Arctic Ocean that might host the "carrier". The Sea of Okhotsk would be technically possible for about half the year, as would the highly questionable purpose of Baffin & Hudson Bays.

Pykecrete was never proven to work. The experiment in the Canadian Rockies according to the principal engineer's surviving son was only so so. What we mostly have are rumors of greater results.
 
How about declaring Diego Garcia a carrier? It has about the same mobility as any other carrier capable of operating B-52, and it's highly unsinkable. It's also warmer than a pykrete carrier, and the fishing is good.
 
Wandering off topic, it makes me wonder if pykrete would be any good as a material for building spaceships in orbit. I mean it's cold in space. All (ha, ha) you need is a source of water and sawdust or a sawdust substitute.
Because we have a very big source of heat nearby (the sun). In direct sunlight, the pykrete would sublimate away into vapour.
 
Because we have a very big source of heat nearby (the sun). In direct sunlight, the pykrete would sublimate away into vapour.

Sort of. Many models of comets are that they vent until such an insulating blanket is formed that they become dead comets and ice asteroids, depending if the average orbit is about earth's or so. With out an atmosphere, temperature of a rotating body is about -20F or so at the equator.

Regolith means sublimation would bounce off so much material before escaping to the surface that the rates would be measured extremely slightly and last essentially forever. Our moon is believed to be mostly an exception as current prevailing model has it largely or nearly totally molten and much of it vaporized before settling back to a spheroid.

Pykrete with any kind of insulation and rotation might last a while, as the residual sawdust might stick together and form a protective blanket, but since water is quite rare in space there are doubts to why one would want to try to find out exact rates, especially with out hard theoretical ones put onto paper.
 
But why? With refueling, B-52s are intercontinental strategic bombers. They don't need to be based on carriers near combat zones. They can fly from wherever.
 
But why? With refueling, B-52s are intercontinental strategic bombers. They don't need to be based on carriers near combat zones. They can fly from wherever.

Asked twice already... The only answer, it seems, is that they are way beyond COOL.
 
Asked twice already... The only answer, it seems, is that they are way beyond COOL.

If we really needed a reason, I can think of one. The B-52s' primary mission for most of its existence has been strategic nuclear strike. In a nuclear war, there's a good bet their bases will no longer exist by the time they finish their mission. A carrier - assuming you could make this thing move enough to not be targetable with ballistic missiles - has a better chance of surviving, allowing you to recover, refuel, and rearm the BUFFs for a second mission.

Probably not worth it IRL, but it's a reason. Alternatively, have the DoD build the Mobile Offshore Base. They didn't set out specifically to make a ship long enough to launch B-52s, but that's what the design ended up as.
 
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Asked twice already... The only answer, it seems, is that they are way beyond COOL.

It certainly wouldn't be worth the cost of developing and building the massive carrier neccessary, but a carrier-based B-52 could have a smaller fuel tank, and use that weight to increase its payload.
 
It certainly wouldn't be worth the cost of developing and building the massive carrier neccessary, but a carrier-based B-52 could have a smaller fuel tank, and use that weight to increase its payload.

Already massive enough?!?:confused:

@Asnys

But how many BUFFs would return? In any instance, something would survive, somewhere. And, yeah, it is doubtful that such a thing (mobile base) would be worth the unknown billions(trillions) probably needed to build it...
 
We're discussing building a 6-kilometre long aircraft carrier, and now giving the B-52 more bombs is excessive?

True. But I said in the start, there are no practical reasons for this. It's just cool to have the BUFF fly off the carrier.

BTW I just remembered that oldie game F-19 Stealth Fighter, where your airplane would take off from USS America on missions to Libya and its counterpart F-15 Strike Eagle II which even included missions in Viet-Nam taking off from USS Kitty Hawk at Yankee Station. I've spent untold hours doing this back in 1989...
 
True. But I said in the start, there are no practical reasons for this. It's just cool to have the BUFF fly off the carrier.
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Which probably is not why the USAF never used the ice islands. USSR and maybe even the PRC would surely copy and follow, once they knew how to do, especially if manuevable to dock at specified resupply areas. Unlike the US bombers, AFAIK the Russian and Chinese were much more challenged. (Actually, the Chinese would be easy to manipulate with such an extended supply line through the Bering Straits.) Half the distance would make quite a leap in latent strike force.
 
If we really needed a reason, I can think of one. The B-52s' primary mission for most of its existence has been strategic nuclear strike. In a nuclear war, there's a good bet their bases will no longer exist by the time they finish their mission. A carrier - assuming you could make this thing move enough to not be targetable with ballistic missiles - has a better chance of surviving, allowing you to recover, refuel, and rearm the BUFFs for a second mission.
A ship capable of taking a B-52 will be so slow it probably will have to worry about ballisitic missiles. I will also have to worry about submarines with nuclear torpedoes (which the Russians had, the Type 65-73, which was unguided, but had a 20 KT warhead and a top speed of 50 kts), which will be even harder to detect than incoming missiles, and will be instantly fatal.
 
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