Project Habakkuk

[EwenS]

There was an alternative to bulges and armour. Anti-torpedo nets which, for a variety of reasons, did not prove very effective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo_net
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...y#v=onepage&q=ships anti torpedo nets&f=false

WW2 Liberty ship with net defence. Note the longer booms to handle the nets.

 

[A_Random_Guy]

A single merchant ship with 400.000 t built of Pykrete could have easily transpoted as much as 20 to 30 frighters of it's day. at the same time, the loss rate would have been close to zero (if all the stories about Pykrete are true) and the production cost would have been much lower. a very low number of these ships could have replaced all the convoys and their escorts. I thin the main reason against it, was the lack of suitable harbours for such a giant.

Building torpedo bulges around a 15.000 t freighter is simply no option at allc the ship would be more than twice as wide with that bulge. Thick amour can only be applied to large ships, otherwise the ships would become submarines...

The US built almost 2000 merchant ships in 1943. There is no realistic way you are going to scale up your Habbakuk construction to replace that before 1944 or 45. Even by mid 1943 the uboat threat was in sharp decline.

And that ignores the large pre-existing fleet such efforts could not benefit. The best option was to improve escort of convoys and form hunter-killer groups which is what the career professionals in the allied navies opted to pursue.

 

[Nicknick]

The key advantafe of Pykrete is thatt it allows to built large volumes of ship vessels for very little money and spares critical reciurces. This is true for a gigantic aircraft carrier of a highe fleet of very large vessels. Anyway, in both cases, the realisation would have taken to long, the whole idea came to late.