Beautiful Drawing, is that a BB next to the carrier? and a 4 engine bomber taking off? I'd hate to see the displacement and shutter at the power and crew requirements, possibly take halve the RN manning post war.
The Whale has Wings
- Thread starter Astrodragon
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I'm pretty sure the poor sods in the transports weren't consulted...
I may have to sig that...We need more info on TTL Attack titties.
Sorry, got confused between the 1st Carrier Striking Force, the Midway Invasion Force Main body (which has all the BB's & the 3 CVL's in it) & the Midway Occupation Force (the transports).
Oh no, not Habakkuk again... You could build the damn thing out of steel with less problems!
Very true. If a strike force from the Invasion Force Main finds Force Z, then the illusion that they're US Escort carriers will last until they see the CAP & realise that they're Fleet Carriers.
Whether the surviving pilots will be believed when they return is another story; either way, the Japanese aren't likely to think that their communications have been compromised (like the Germans, they'll probably write it off as espionage).
I know you weren't being serious, but if wiki is right on that thing, it needed nearly as much steel as a real carrier and you couldn't have the ships engines inside the icecube...
Not to mention of course the idea of performing aircraft maintenance in "winter Alaska" all year round...
wonder why they actually would want to use steel, with that much flotation capacity, why not use concrete for many of the construction. Gas concrete insulates better too.
That still won't solve the main problem with the idea, which is that you need massive amounts of engine power to shift the thing. The prototype (which was to scale) suggested that maximum speed would be about 6 knots.
Judging from the picture, it looks like an altered USS United States (CVA-58, the proposed first Supercarrier)...
Do not get diverted by the demon Habakuk - 2million tons, it is lanc and no issues with ice for the G&T in the wardroom.- let Astro post his update.
That still won't solve the main problem with the idea, which is that you need massive amounts of engine power to shift the thing. The prototype (which was to scale) suggested that maximum speed would be about 6 knots.
That's only a problem if you insist on thinking of it as an aircraft carrier rather than as an artificial island - after all, nobody says Midway is strategically useless because it has a "top speed" of a few feet a century (or whatever the continental drift rate in the North Pacific is, anyway). Habbakuk was intended to do things like plug the Atlantic gap, not hunt Kido Butai over the central Pacific - speed is far less important for the former mission.
This isn't to argue it was practical of course, (though it was extremely cool...), but merely that speed wasn't the reason why it was impractical.
No, the construction material is ice. The steel is for things like refrigeration plants and pipes.
Ah ok, was thinking the deck and such. because in the pic that looks like it is steel.
Ah. Right. Hmmm... you probably could use concrete for the deck.
I wouldnt trust that image as accurate, though.
Pykrete floats, concrete doesn't. This is important if you're planning on things like a 30 foot thick hull to resist torpedo strikes or a similarly thick flight deck to resist bomb or shell damage.
However Pykrete melts so the long term viability of such a ship would have been questionable.
Very slowly, and Habakkuk was to be built with an integrated refrigeration system to keep the structure solid. For reference, the 1,000 ton prototype assembled on a Canadian lake was kept frozen throughout the summer with a refrigeration unit powered by a 1 KW motor.
steel does not float either, but still they build ships out of it.
They build concrete pontoons all the time.
its all about buoyancy, and a construction that big would no doubt have sectioned construction, double walled hull.
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the tries that mythbusters and "bang goes the theory" did at it were very telling in that respect. it melted too fast to be practical
The obvious problems with those vessels are (a) they were much smaller than Habbakuk - the bigger something is, the longer it takes to melt - and (b) neither included refrigeration or insulation components to prevent melting. Nobody is suggesting Habbakuk could sail without such components (it probably couldn't anyway, but...).
The concrete boat is an interesting idea though if what you want is more a mobile air base than an aircraft carrier. Habbakuk has at least one other advantage though - if the hull does get cracked then the stuff pouring through the breach is also the material you need to patch it. Repair under way will be somewhat more complex with a concrete hull...
(PS for the record, I like Habbakuk strictly on "rule of cool" grounds. I'm well aware it's highly unlikely to work as advertised.)
Anybody who likes Habbakuk on the grounds of 'rule of cool' owes it to him or herself to check out the Warship Naval Gunner Series for PS2.
It is also a cheap way to create blueprints for your ahistorical ship building needs
It is also a cheap way to create blueprints for your ahistorical ship building needs
No too speak that from what I remember the project called for the ship made mostly solid and be kept at northern latitudes, while the ship made for mythbusters was made from thin planks, and tested in California.
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