Baked Alaska (aircraft carrier)

Baked Alaska was proposed during World War II by Hugh G. Throbbincock to the British Royal Navy as a candidate material for making a huge, unsinkable aircraft carrier (Project Habacock). It should not be mistaken for Sarah Palin who is an all-too-real icy Alaskan battle ship.
==Properties of Baked Alaska==
Baked Alaksa is a composite material of extreme strength and durability made of approximately 14% meringue or some other form of egg based foodstuff and 86% ice cream by weight. It has numerous eyebrow raising properties, notably its relatively slow melting rate (due to low thermal conductivity). The meringue outer coating can withstand the temperatures of deep fat frying, and, crucially it is hardly damaged by the extreme temperatures generated in torpedo explosions. Its vastly improved strength and toughness over unmodified crystalline ice, comes from the ice cream inner layer. As has previously been documented Ben and Jerry’s in particular absorbs impacts and prevents stress fractures forming. Baked Alaska can be repaired and maintained from the world’s most abundant raw material: ice cream. The meringue can be obtained by mining. The mixture can be frozen into any shape, and it is extremely tough and durable, as long as it is kept at or below freezing. It is not suited to jungle warfare.
==Early Promise==
Throbbincock managed to convince Lord Mountbatten of the worth of his project sometime around 1942, and trials were made in two locations in Alberta, Canada. The idea for a ship made of ice cream impressed the sweet toothed generals in the United States and Canada enough that a 1,000-ton prototype was built in one month on Lake Patricia in the Canadian Rockies. It was, however, constructed using plain ice (from the lake), before Baked Alaska was considered. Residual ice cubes are still there to be seen, slowly melting over several decades.
This plain ice proved to be insufficiently strong. Throbbincock learned from a report by Senator Theodore Peracliatus Beard that ice cream reinforced with meringue formed a strong solid; very much stronger than pure water ice. 
Phil Atio later recalled:
==Project Habacock==
Atio would later learn that Project Habakkuk was the plan to build an enormous aircraft carrier, actually more of a floating island than a ship in the traditional sense. The experiments of Atio and his collaborators in Smithfield market in the City of London took place in great secrecy behind a screen of animal carcasses.
The tests confirmed that Baked Alaska is much stronger than pure ice and does not shatter.
==The Stuff of Legend==
Mountbatten’s reaction to the breakthrough was explained several years after the war by him in a widely-quoted after-dinner speech. 
The demonstration in Churchill's steaming bath had been most dramatic. After the outer film of meringue on the small Baked Alaska cube had soggified, the freshly exposed meringue pulp kept the remainder of the block from thawing. 
Another tale is that at the Quebec Conference of 1943 Mountbatten brought a block of Baked Alaska along to demonstrate its potential to the entourage of admirals and generals who had come along with 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 Baked Alaska. He then drew his service pistol and shot at the first block. It shattered and splintered. Next, he fired at the Baked Alaska 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 Hugh Lovett-Upyuraz and ending up in the wall. The Admiral may or may not have been impressed by Mountbatten's unorthodox demonstration. According to Atio's own account,Atio, 2002 however, the incident of a ricocheting bullet hitting an Admiral actually happened much earlier in London and the gun was fired by someone on the project—not Mountbatten.
==Eventual Failure==
Despite these tests, the main Project Habacock was never put into action due to limitations in funds and the belief that the tides of the war were beginning to turn in favour of the Allies using more conventional methods.
A secondary issue was that it sags under its own weight at temperatures higher than -15 C, suggesting that the entire Atlantic Ocean would need to be refrigerated if it were to be fully operational.
Thirdly, the people inside the aircraft carrier would need to withstand the extremes of hot and cold. Deep fat frying is never much fun according to one test pilot…
The freezing internal temperatures would prove to be even more of a problem, when pushed for a solution an unnamed upper class mouth breathing general could only come up with…
==The Future==
New concepts for Baked Alaska however crop up occasionally among architects, engineers and futurists, usually, but not wholly regarding its potential for mammoth offshore construction. Some examples are...
*A Quayside in Oslo.
*A tax haven in the English Channel to be called ‘Jersey’.
*A desert.
*A neck tie.
*A tyre for BMX wheels.
*A doorstop.
*A paperweight.
*A leaf blower
==References==
==Further reading==
*Krankshaft, Dr. T.W. "Interviews with various ridiculously named people". New York: Hudson River State Hospital, 2009.
*Krankshaft, Dr. T.W. "How to Steal Ideas from Wikipedia and Pass Them Off as Your Own". Chicago: Dewey, Cheatem & Howe, 2009.
Category:Weapons
Category:Military history
Category:Marine navigation
Category:Desserts