Project Habakkuk: Memory Hole? Mandela bullshit? ( conspiracy )

submitted by RodentLord

I kept getting reminded of Project Habakkuk recently out of nowhere, kept coming back to mind for some inapparent reason. So I look it up again.

Apparently, a test ship was built out of ice (not pykrete) and the pykrete aircraft carrier was rejected because they felt the allies were winning the war already.

Now, call me daft but... I distinctly recall the pykrete aircraft carrier having been built, divided up into chunks and shipped off to some base in Canada. It never got used, for the same reason given now: The war was already nearly over and it was no longer needed. But it totally got built.

Is this just another case of a government asset being hidden?

Tallest_Skil

Test boats (dinghy size) weren’t stable outside of arctic conditions. It just didn’t work.

RodentLord

Okay now that's brand new information entirely. Where'd you get that?

Tallest_Skil

Oh, uh… wikipedia had some. They did a test on a Canadian lake and the material kept flowing naturally out of place (because ice is like glass; despite being a solid, it slowly deforms due to gravity), so it would have had to be braced by other materials, defeating the purpose of a mobile ice aircraft carrier.

RodentLord

That sounds like you're describing the tests done with ice models. The entire point of the pykrete is that the sawdust acts as a brace, like rebar in concrete.

RodentLord

Disappointing if true. I'd be interested to see the exact schematics they followed, mixture/proportion chosen for pykrete and design for the ship itself. Their concept may have failed for reasons entirely unrelated to the base concept; did they test 4% sawdust vs 12% sawdust, or use other materials in the admixture, etc.

The stuff apparently performed amazingly well at stopping bullets. You'd think there'd be some use for it.