Wacky Allied fighter ideas (1 Viewer)

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Project Habbakuk
According to some accounts, at the Quebec Conference in 1943 Lord Mountbatten brought a block of pykrete along to demonstrate its potential to the admirals and generals who accompanied Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mountbatten entered the project meeting with two blocks and placed them on the ground. One was a normal ice block and the other was pykrete. He then drew his service pistol and shot at the first block. It shattered and splintered. Next he fired at the pykrete to give an idea of the resistance of that kind of ice to projectiles. The bullet ricocheted off the block, grazing the trouser leg of Admiral Ernest King, and ended up in the wall.

Sir Alan Brooke's diaries support this account, telling how Mountbatten brought two blocks, one of ice and one of pykrete. After first shooting at the ice, with a warning to beware of splinters, Mountbatten said "I shall fire at the block on the right to show you the difference". Brooke reported that "the bullet rebounded out of the block and buzzed round our legs like an angry bee".

Max Perutz gave an account of a similar incident in his book I Wish I Made You Angry Earlier. A demonstration of pykrete was given at Combined Operations Headquarters (COHQ) by a naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Douglas Grant, who was provided by Perutz with rods of ice and pykrete packed with dry ice in thermos flasks and large blocks of ice and pykrete. Grant demonstrated the comparative strength of ice and pykrete by firing bullets into both blocks: the ice shattered, but the bullet rebounded from the pykrete and hit the Chief of the Imperial Staff (Sir Alan Brooke) in the shoulder. Brooke was unhurt.

Later in 1943 Habbakuk began to lose priority. Mountbatten listed several reasons:
Demand for steel for other purposes was too great.
Permission had been received from Portugal to use airfields in the Azores, which facilitated the hunting of U-boats in the Atlantic
The introduction of long-range fuel tanks allowed British-based aircraft extra patrol time over the Atlantic
The numbers of escort carriers were being vastly increased.

In addition, Mountbatten himself withdrew from the project.

The final meeting of the Habbakuk board took place in December 1943. It was officially concluded that "The large Habbakuk II made of pykrete has been found to be impractical because of the enormous production resources required and technical difficulties involved."

The use of ice had actually been falling out of favour before that, and other ideas for "floating islands" had been considered, such as welding Liberty Ships or landing craft together (Project TENTACLE).

A prototype scale model of the pykrete took three hot summers to completely melt the prototype constructed in Canada. A full scale version

Perutz wrote that he stayed in Washington D.C. while U.S. Navy engineers evaluated the viability of Habbakuk. He concluded: "The U.S. Navy finally decided that Habakkuk was a false prophet. One reason was [that] the enormous amount of steel needed for the refrigeration plant that was to freeze the pykrete was greater than that needed to build the entire carrier of steel, but the crucial argument was that the rapidly increasing range of land-based aircraft rendered floating islands unnecessary."
 
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PS March 1945.jpg

March 1945 Popular Science magazine - they were still revealing war's secret weapons.
 
On the Miles M.39 Libellula - the designer, George Miles, wrote an article for Flight magazine in 1944 explaining the design (attached). Apparently it was named after the Libellula family of dragonflys, including the Libellula Rafibomba:

Twelve_Spotted_Skimmer_Libellula_Pulchella_zpstxvimsyv.gif
 

Attachments

  • Miles M.39 1944.pdf
    2.4 MB · Views: 308
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I watched that clip without sound, but as I recall the deck had been coated with some sort of absorbent bouncy rubber. Gutsy effort by eric brown just the same....

One of the reasons the Germans discontinued their carrier was that they had convinced themselves that carriers and jets could not operate together. In a way, they were right to say that......the straight through decks of WWII were not suitable. carrier decks had to be altered to angled deck configuration to operate jets properly
 
...One of the reasons the Germans discontinued their carrier was that they had convinced themselves that carriers and jets could not operate together. In a way, they were right to say that......the straight through decks of WWII were not suitable. carrier decks had to be altered to angled deck configuration to operate jets properly
You lost me on this statement.

Germany hasn't possessed an aircraft carrier since the close of WWII and prior to that, only had 8 (not including the two Italian carriers seized in shipyards when Italy jumped the fence).

Of those 8:
The Ausonia conversion in WWI came about too late.
The Graf Zepplin and Flugzeugträger B (un-christened sister ship) were both victims of a leader's irrational decision making, particularly over a temper tantrum at the failure of the Kreigmarine at the battle of the Berents Sea.
The Europa conversion was a technical disaster and abandoned.
The Potsdam and Gneisenau conversions were also doomed to be complex conversions and both ended up being troop transports.
The DKM Seydlitz still baffles me to this day. This Hipper class cruiser was nearly completed when the war started and instead of completing her, work was halted and conversion to an auxiliary carrier was started (to be renamed Weser) and never finished.
The De Grasse conversion (partially completed French cruiser captured at Lorient) was never started and the ship languished in the shipyard until she was recaptured by the Allies (and eventually completed and put into service).

All of these projects came to a halt or were abandoned between 1942 and 1943 at a time when the Me262 was still being developed and the He280 had come and gone having never impressed the RLM. All the ships listed above (except for the WWI Ausonia conversion) were intended to be complimented by the Bf109T and Ju87C/E types.
 
Maybe Im mistaken, but somewhere ive read that at about the time of its final cancellation in August 1943, Hitler, in defending his decision to cancel the carrier's completion, stated something about how carriers were now rendered obsolete by the new jet technologies and stand off weaponary then under development. Its been some years, but I recall him also citing a report that the German carrier would never be able to accommodate such aircraft.
 
Here is a clipping from an unidentified 1946 magazine about a British Idea for a flexible, floating runway. It must have been like a roller coaster!
1946 Lily - Copy.jpg
 
Here is a drawing of what the Flying wing was supposed to look like. Note it has no gun turrets or rudders.
Flying wing.jpg
 

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