Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Project Habakkuk: An Aircraft Carrier Made of Ice

Whoa.

Props to U-Haul for putting a picture and information about this on the side of one of their vans. I thought I knew just about every weird thing about WWII there was to know...but apparently not.

One proposal was for a super-massive aircraft carrier made of ice...or, actually, pykrete, which is a mixture of ice and wood pulp. Other proposals were for pykrete islands on which planes could take off and land.

This is the coolest thing since Project Pigeon (a.k.a Project Orcon)...

1 Comments:

Anonymous Phil said...

The Mythbusters did some mockups of this model, and built an actual boat out of ice. IIRC, their testing indicated that newspaper was an even better binder than raw wood pulp so that's what they used. They floated their boat in some Alaskan bay and it worked for a while. But alas ice melts even in 35degree water, so their boat didn't last too long. Still a cool idea though.

10:10 AM  

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