Apologies to the dial up folk, I'll be linking 8 pics in, all around 200K. Need 'em.

Anyway, got an email with a powerpoint in it of this earth-mover. I'll transpose the contents of the powerpoint here:

This is the largest earth mover in the world..... built by the German company, Krupp, and seen here crossing a federal highway in Germany en route to its destination (an open-pit coal mine). It is cheaper to move the thing like this, than to construct or reassemble onsite.





Specifications:
~ The mover stands 311 feet tall and 705 feet long.
~ It weighs over 45,500 tons
~Cost $100 million to build
~ Took 5 years to design and manufacture
~ 5 years to assemble.
~ Requires 5 people to operate it.
~The Bucket Wheel is over 70 feet in diameter with 20 buckets,
each of which can hold over 530 cubic feet of material.
~ A 6-foot man can stand up inside one of the buckets.
~ It moves on 12 crawlers (each is 12 feet wide, 8' high and 46 feet long). There are 8 crawlers in front and 4 in back. It has a maximum speed of 1 mile in 3 hours (1/3 mile/hour).
~It can remove over 76,455 cubic meters each day.
(100,000 large dump trucks at 40yds. each)


Apparently they had a little "Bulldozer mishap". Ooops. Look in the upper middle of the wheel.





This thing looks like a machine from a video game. Crazy.

If I wasn't mistaken, it looks like they took the catepillar off of NASA's mobile launch platform and slapped it with some port harbor loading cranes. Impressive nonetheless, btw, what's that thing at the back, is that a counterweight of somekind?

Also, I know there's that yellow regular bulldozer, but why is it laid up-side-down in the gutter of the big bulldozer?

Either that's some damned good compositing, or the Germans just went Anime.

There are so many more cost effective ways to do what that machine can do, but that thing looks hella badass.

EDIT: Coraxus, the Marion Power Shovel Company makes the NASA shuttle transports. Somehow, I don't think the originals would've been made by Germans.

I am thoroughly impressed. I now have a strong, manly desire to build one for myself, only bigger. Maybe three hundred and twelve feet tall and able to move 5,281 feet in two hours and fifty-nine minutes.

Who wants to help? We could use it to attack ATT!

edit: wayward apostrophe eleminated.

Hey now - that's my first home

And besides, just let them have their fun.

Coming soon: World's biggest hilarious hard-hat related mishap.

Cute

I have a hard-hat with a winged beaver on it. It's not a mishap but I find it hilarious nonetheless.

You fool! That's no bulldozer, it's a building on steel treads!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

. . . I can't believe it only takes 5 people to run that thing. Basically, it's a moving rock quarry with all the equipment, minus the rocks.

What powers it? How much horse power? Gas mileage? God forbid you should ever actually have to send it anywhere, unless you want to wait until the next millenium to get it done.

Ya it's a counter weight and that bulldozer was most likely in the path of DESTRUCTION!!!!

They use an even bigger bulldozer to push it around.

Wow. That's so kickass. If World War III is sometime in the near future (I hope not), I see that thing being used.

You see a giant bulldozer being used to kill enemy troops, when you have easy-to-use disposable nuclear and chemical weapons? Sorry, but the only thing that it's good for is bulldozing and digging stuff up

(Although it would be cool to see it drive through a house...
"What's that sound?"
"I don't know. OH GOD! Look out the window!"
"Run for it!"
*Later*
"Ok... getting bored..."

Yeah.)

It's 4 realz. The first picture is of it being moved; it's cheaper to just build roads and move it really slowly than to disassemble it and put it together somewhere else.

Dang thats a big machine. Another, "We built it because we could" devices.

My point exactly. There are smarter ways of killing, this is just the cool way!

Ohhhh....



/me slowly reaches for a piece of paper, and as if in a trance writes down Christmas Wishlist at the top...

I think I'm in love.

*whistle*

Imagine the size of a coal mine that would need that thing.

Very Very Cool! It should be a villain in the next sonic the hedgehog game. The next good one, anywhoo. They should have Robotnik hijack it, and replace the bucketwheel with a rotary saw (a really big one!), and replace all the slow moving earthmover stuff with lightning fast, fictional servomotors. He'd also have to put mortars, or lasercannon, or missle launchers on the back. Wow. I should write Sonic Team right now.

How about a lifesize lego model of that?

I want an army of those.


I'd like this too.

But....why is there a yellow bulldozer in the monster's starboard gutter? I mean if it's for a size comparison, that's a pretty fecked up way of doing it, and it wouldn't make sense, so umm...why?

Do you think they nicknamed it LawnGnome?

With that kind of big-ass machine, a puny bulldozer could easily be, er, assimilated.

That thing is pretty freaking cool.

I remember back in my school days I went to a coal power plant and saw "bigfoot," which at that time had the biggest bucket in the world (I believe it was a little over 5,000 cubic feet). The fact that you could fit pretty much every other piece of equipment in the mine into the bucket was neat. And I also recall that they had some HUGE dump trucks to haul the stuff away (if I recall correctly, they lined five trucks up side by side and the coal was dumped into all of them simultaneously). And these dump trucks had beds that were 60 feet wide. The road from the mine site to the power plant looked like a deserted six lanes either direction freeway, but it was in reality only one lane in either direction. Our huge school bus was probably the smallest vehicle there.

But one thing they told me was that the days of single bucket haulers was nearing an end - apparently, everyone was going with multiple buckets, something like... what you posted, I guess.

Next challenge: Make it Fly.

I remember seeing those massive dump trucks out around Cumberland where my grandparents used to have a farm. I think they topped out fully loaded at 1.6 million pounds or something outrageous like that. And silly me, I thought they were the biggest earth movers out there. Psh.

Wasnt that little bulldoser obviously scooped up by the giant one?

Not that I understand why a 100million dollar piece of equipment was put in the hands of people obviously not fit to use it, but it still seems like it would be hard to coordinate 5 peoples effort on a such large, unweildy beast.

Very awesome though.

Count Dooku?

...but why build it in the first place? Is it more efficient than a fleet of conventional equipment?

Wow... just... wow...

Now... I bet there's a secret Nazi/Communist/Socilist/Anarchist plot involved in which this thing houses a nuclear weapon and the evildoers try to hold the world ransom. Only to find their plan terribly thwarted by a dashing British secret agent. What an awesome Bond movie plot.

Who cares about efficience? It is sexier!

Does it really need roads?

It would probably wreck any roads it drives on or over. Your average road is not designed to handle 45,000 tons in one spot.

That's what I mean. Can't it just chug along over fields and whatnot?

Possibly. "Lost his head"

No, it would sink to the center of the earth.

Sweet!

Actually, no.

Keep Marvin Heemeyer away from that mother.

No. LawnGnome is the new one with the spiked sharpened shovels, rocket launchers, 6000 rpm shovel wheel and million watt Dolby 36.16 surround sound system. You're not supposed to know about it until your birthday though.