Imagine this: a ship made of ice and wood shavings, able to regenerate itself by freezing sea water, one so grand that only the British could envision it. Welcome to Project Habakkuk.
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| I bet if they added flags and dirt and claimed it as British soil and land, and they traveled around the world, the sun would really never truly set on the British Empire. |
During the Second World War, Geoffrey Pyke devised a solution to fighting German U-boats in the Atlantic ocean, where Allied troops had little to no air cover. Pyke thought that an iceberg station in the Atlantic to help store aircraft and fight the German U-boats. Instead of ice, however, he invented a material called pykrete. Pykrete is made of around 14% sawdust and 86% ice, a 6:1 ratio. Pykrete is something like a biological concrete, and it was proposed for the Habakkuk because it can be maintained using seawater.
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| Wood shavings and water. |
The Habakkuk would have giant coolers to maintain the pykrete hull of the ship, and since it would be fighting in seawater, the Habakkuk would have a virtually unlimited source of armor, as long as the Habakkuk didn't run out of power.
The Habakkuk would not have main cannons, just machine guns. Its primary weapon would be its aircraft, since it was going to be an aircraft carrier. Sadly, the British Royal Navy never carried out their weird but wonderful idea due to a "lack of paper" and "paper needed in other industries", which sounds like an excuse to not build the most overpowered ship in the history of ships.
I wonder if they would have stores of tea and biscuits on board.
