Pykrete Ice Berg Ship, Floating Iceberg

This iceberg ship if ever made, would probably be the best food transport ship.

1) Thick walls

2) Its cold, so it helps to keep meat and vegetables fresh

Kinda sad they never became a reality, or else it would be great to read some first hand accounts of German U-boat captains writing about engaging a floating Ice Cube, that delievers food to the UK.

Ja, sink ze HMS Icecube.

at the food transport idea. It probably would make a great food hauler.


So does anyone have any idea on how they planned to house the crew and equipment without it freezing considering its a ship built of ice? Did they plan to insulate and heat certain parts of the ship and if so how did they plan to heat certain parts without melting others??

Things to keep in mind:

1. At room temperature Pykrete melts very slowly because the slurry of sawdust substantially changes it's black body characteristics on reradiance vs. internal dissipation of heat. I would /suspect/ that it also further alters the composite mass distribution for buoyancy as well.

2. Ice is funny stuff. Get it cold and it is rock solid. Get it too cold (especially too fast) and it becomes brittle and striated. Maintaining it somewhere inbetween is not simple. What's more, because it is a temperature variable fluid crystalline, cleavage effects and thus damage isolation and load transfer would change substantially with modifications to the basic shape.

3. Today, we would use something like the sound dampening isolation mounts on a submarine to isolate the propulsive equipment. However; metal cladding would still be required for safety reasons as well as to minimize direct contact transfer of heat in SUBSTANTIAL areas. Quite possibly across the whole of the lower 'hull' area for instance and possibly in the fuel bunkers. Another area which we would probably remote today is the propulsor system. We would use turbo-electric diesel generators and pod the motors underneath the ship. This would go some ways to slow do erosion due to direct contact with high speed shaft seals and turbulence off the props. Areas which would pose constant flooding risks to the ship otherwise.

4. Brit carriers may have been 'short on steel' but they never the less pioneered all-steel flight decks. And did vastly better against the kamikaze threat than equivalent USN vesels did. Don't get into a 'sigh, there but for the grace of a small nation' psyche trip when you did _just fine_ with your own 'more conventional' designs.

5. If you want to win the Atlantic Sub War:

a. Shift early on to turbine powered Victory designs
b. Resplit the convoys.
c. Move to active containment of the Baltic and Biscayan Nordic approaches using LARGE Hunter Killer groups able to survive for the most part within landbased air coverage (at least two decks).

17 knot ships on lone-sprint transits defeat the purpose of pack-massing and while there is a slight penalty inherent to increased (staggered) patrol times for smaller total numbers of active patrols in a given area; the overall target density to 'blue void' distances shifts almost entirely towards the commerce side of the equation.

Merchies were right when they complained that the Liberty plus Convoy system served only as just tempting enough of a target to bring the UB's in close enough to be annihilated as a force without ever really increasing the self defense or rescue odds of the target group at all.

If you combine the above with an active campaign to jam or hard kill the UBoat HF comms, FW-200/Ju-290/Do-217 ASST, their command assets and the transport logistics supporting pen-cities like Le Havre and Brest; things become MUCH more 'interesting' for the UB crews, much more quickly. As they are attacked in their pre-deployment necessities and their in-cruise coordination in a way that is vastly more (constantly) efficient for their ready visibility and access.


KPl.