Pykrete carrier

Sachyriel

Banned
Are you talking Habakkuk? If it was made, the timeline wouldn't only be a wank, it's be a Habakkuk-Bukkake!
 
An iceberg carrier... one thing that always puzzled me about making a ship out of any type of ice. When an airplane lands, how is it suppose to stop? It should just slide right off the ship.


Disclaimer: Do not take literally, repeat do not take literally.
 
An iceberg carrier... one thing that always puzzled me about making a ship out of any type of ice. When an airplane lands, how is it suppose to stop? It should just slide right off the ship.


Disclaimer: Do not take literally, repeat do not take literally.
ignoring your disclaimer, I would have thought that either a) the planes used were planes that had been adapted to land on ice, or b) they put mats down for planes to land on.
 
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Just one of many shortcomings of the concept was the frozen crew. And the price of the test example built belied the promise that it was cheap. It turns out that escort carriers were cheap, and warmer. His aircraft carrier wasn't the inventer's craziest idea, and he was, in fact, in charge of a crazy idea department.
 
They dont show it very well on the Hitler Channel Docu, but only the hull was made from pykrete. The rest of the ship was all "normal" construction.

As near as I can tell the most advanced of the designs had a 40 foot thick pykrete hull, 2000 foot long, and the final ship would have displaced 1,800,000 tons. It was going to carry twin engine bombers and would have had 40 twin 4.5 inch AA mounts.

It was to be powered by diesels sending power to external electric motors, normal propulsion would have been too hot. Other diesels would pump refrigerated brine thru a complicated piping system embedded in the hull to keep the pykrete cold. Later they figured it would have been very slow, like 6 knots. There were a LOT of design issues unresolved when the program was dropped.
 

Bearcat

Banned
There were a LOT of design issues unresolved when the program was dropped.

Like some of the 'super-battleship' designs, it was very impressive, and utterly implausible. Way too expensive, would take way too long to build, and by the time its actually done, the mid-Atlantic air gap is closed anyway.
 
The HEAT of Battle

This ship might not have anti-aircraft guns. They produce heat too. The ships range would be limated to upper or lower latitudes. The ice ship Bismark is heading south to elude it's persuers. At some point it either will melt or fight. So it was unnecessary to scuttle the Bismark as it melted in Movadao harbor.
 
People talking about icebergs and flame thrower cruisers seem to be unaware that pykrete isn't ice. It's a water/woodpulp mixture the physical properties of which are closer to concrete than regular ice, and which is very resistant to melting which means it could operate in quite warm waters with comparatively modest amounts of refrigeration. The sheer size of the thing also meant it would be virtually unsinkable (a torpedo that can blow a twenty foot wide hole in something is less than impressive when the hull is over forty feet thick and the hole can be patched simply by freezing up a fresh batch of seawater).

Saxon dog's right though - there were design problems which probably made it impractical. Some were avoidable - the designers wanted to steer it using differential thrust, the Navy insisted it had to have a rudder (and nobody had a clue how to build and control a rudder capable of steering 2 million tons of ship), but some were not (above a certain weight pykrete tends to deform under it's own mass, necessitating increasingly large amounts of steel reinforcement).
 
Some were avoidable - the designers wanted to steer it using differential thrust, the Navy insisted it had to have a rudder (and nobody had a clue how to build and control a rudder capable of steering 2 million tons of ship)

This was not avoidable. If they had gone with the differential thrust proposals of the designers, the maintenance crews, complexity of transmissions, and the spare parts required would have skyrocketed.
 
even Mythbuster look on pykrete (water/woodpulp mixture )
in episode 115
they optimized it to Super Pykrete" Water/newsprint paper
bulid a boat with it and drive in it !

from wiki
The MythBusters then built a full-size boat out of the super pykrete, dubbing it Yesterday's News, and subjected it to real world conditions. Though the boat managed to float and stay intact at speeds of up to 23 miles per hour (37 km/h), it quickly began to spring leaks as the boat slowly melted. After twenty minutes the boat was deteriorating, and the experiment was ended. The boat lasted another ten minutes while being piloted back to shore. Though the boat worked, it was noted that it would be highly impractical for the original myth, which claimed that an entire aircraft carrier could be built out of pykrete.

note this boat had no build-in coolingsystem in hull (like propose Pykrete Carrier)
only Adam Savage with CO2 fire extinguisher to frees the leaks...
 
IMHO the biggest problem was that the concept was workable, but once it became a viable program, Mission Creep quickly made it unfeasible on many levels, mainly schedule and cost.

If they'd have kept to the original idea, a huge artifical iceberg with an airfield on top, flying off scouts to fill the U-Boat Gap, they might have gotten something deployed before the war was over. It would have been ultra-slow, but essentially unsinkable, and probably wouldnt have melted until a year or two after the war ended.

But once the naval Engineers got ahold of it, it became a group of studies, mainly focused on building an attack carrier that would be capable of placing significant numbers of medium bombers anywhere that regular carriers were already going. These concepts were easily cancelled when the inevitable engineering problems of a design so novel cropped up.

A large floating raft with an airstrip set atop would have been easy to build. It wouldnt have been any more complicated than the US method of building a wooden flight deck on a normal carrier. What you'd have gotten was a very large, very slow Lexington with minimal AA capability. (I'd assume you could park some Army 40mm and 3 inch guns around the edges without too much effort at building support structure) It would have needed to be very long to provide takeoff roll for the planes, since there would be no forward motion to give "wind over the bow". However, unlike an on-land airstrip, they might have been able to swing the airstrip into the wind as needed.

If it stayed out in the Air Gap, the AA requirement would have been minimal anyway. The crew would have had to live in "huts" atop the hull. Stowage of bombs and fuel for the Air Wing would have been airstrip primative too. More like Henderson Field than a carrier.

The big design problem with a "raft" would be attaching the necessary items like anchors and ladders without damaging the supporting pykrete with repeated use. Anything you can merely set on top of the raft is good, stuff that hangs over the side would cause problems. You could solve this by attaching things with long anchor bolts, or mounting things in pairs, with items counter balanced by the same item on the opposite side, and held together by cables. Things like cargo and boat cranes would be very difficult to mount.
 
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