Day 3 of posting facts for your culture

On todays post i will be talking about one of the most bizarre projects ever planned, an attempt to build what today will still be the biggest ship ever made, and not only that… it would be made almost entirely on ice . This is the history of the most ambitious ship design ever made, an attempt to help the UK win WWII, indeed, so ambitious that was never built. This is the history of project Habakkuk .

During the middle of WWII, the idea of ships carrying boats to extend the range of the air forces was just starting to take shape on some engineers' heads, it would be the perfect armamentistic vehicle an army could have. Obviously no one had attempted something similar before and catapults didnt exist. By that time, a new advanced(somehow) composite material was just invented… named Pykrete, a mixture of the inventor's name Geoffrey Pyke with the term "concrete" , the material wasnt other than wood fibres inside blocks of ice, more precisely 20% wood and 80% ice.
Now yo will be probably asking what the hell has woody ice in common with advanced military vehicles from WWII… Well, as strange as it sounds, Pykrete is extremely resistant and hard. To prove how capable was the material, Mr. Pyke met with some important people in the army and brought a block of ice and a block of Pykrete, he then asked the navy officers to give him a gun from their uniforms, he shot the ice block and it instantly deintegrated, then he shot the Pykrete block and the bullet just bounced off and hit an officer in the leg, showing how great the material was at resisting impacts, it also was lighter that iron and was less propense to melting when hit by certain kinds of munitions. This made it the perfect material for an armoured floating fortress, or for giving tanks extra armour, like nowadays composite ceramic plates .
Aiming to help british bombers reach the german U-Boots in the Atlantic Ocean, engineers had to design a boat big enough for bombers to take off and land on it. The designs showed a runway 600 meters long (2000 feet) and the ability to carry up to 1200 aircraft . To put it into perspective, lets take, for example, a standard Nimitz-class carrier: it is 340 meters long and carries about 70 aircraft. Another great example could be the crude oil tanker Seawise Giant (later named: Happy Giant, Knock Nevis, Jahre Viking, and finally Mont) which to this day remains the biggest ship to be ever built, measuring a stunning 456 meters if i do remember it well, and it still is 1/4 shorter than the Habakkuk would have been. If you guys want i can do the next post talking about the Seawise Giant, whose story is one of the most amazing and interesting, if not the most, a ship has ever had.
Continuing with the Habakkuk, as you may have noticed, the project was absolutely ridiculous, and so it was logistically not viable, and as the battle front moved from the Atlantic to the north of France and south of England, the project was eventually abandoned and by that time had been proven a nonsense. There is an episode of mithbusters on which they build a Pykrete boat, however the size of the Habakkuk would have been its fatal flaw.