The Habakkuk project: a floating iceberg carrier
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if the real issue was material shortages, what if they’d swapped the sawdust for something more readily available? a pykrete built from shredded tires or ground-up telephone poles might’ve stretched resources further.
the alberta test raft was 60 ft long. the habakkuk estimates were in the 1,000+ ft range. extrapolating from a bathtub model to an aircraft carrier doesn’t pass basic sanity checks on power-to-cooling ratios.
Wait… so was pykrete’s buoyancy ever actually tested with a plane landing on it? Or did they just assume it wouldn’t sink after a few torpedoes?
the us navy tested a pykrete barge in 1943 that sank after 11 days. the habakkuk version was never deployed because the idea was dead in the water before it left port.
last time we had an ice fortress thread, the comments focused on the logistics of keeping it refrigerated. this time the cost point feels different.
what if the Habakkuk wasn’t a weapon at all — just a floating propaganda stunt to convince the Nazis the Allies had an unstoppable iceberg armada? — imagine the headlines in *Der Stürmer* when they spotted it from a U-boat.