Project Habbakuk
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Project Habbakuk was a plan by the British in World War II to construct an "unsinkable" aircraft carrier out of ice, for use against German U-boats in the mid-Atlantic, which was out of range of land-based planes.
Pycrete_bouthouse.jpg
The Habbakuk would have been virtually impossible to sink, as it would have effectively been a streamlined iceberg kept afloat by the buoyancy of its construction materials. However, 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), but 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 alternative history fiction.
References
- Perutz, M. F. (1948). A Description of the Iceberg Aircraft Carrier and the Bearing of the Mechanical Properties of Frozen Wood Pulp upon Some Problems of Glacier Flow. The Journal of Glaciology, 1 (3), 95–104
External Links
- History of project Habbakuk (http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/7/floatingisland.php)he:פרויקט חבקוק