Ultimate Earth Mover

[Bryan]

grimw wrote:

I did enough research to not find "Krupp" right away.  All I found were forum posts about the thing and someone mentioning that rivers had to be moved.  It doesn't make sense that rivers would have to be moved and that would somehow take less time than building these on-the-spot.  That was plenty of "research" for me.

My point was more that the entire internet has gotten this way, only worse than you see here.  Stuff posted on the internet is met with one of two responses.  Either it's A) older than time and space you and you are dumbass for posting it or B) it's really amazing and therefore COMPLETELY FAKE!

I've sat through many psychology classes and have been pondering getting my PhD in it so I can study the internet as a culture.

[William Grim]

ModernDayDarwin wrote:

Either it's A) older than time and space you and you are dumbass for posting it

Nothing new here.  People have long called other people stupid for not knowing common sense ideas.

ModernDayDarwin wrote:

or B) it's really amazing and therefore COMPLETELY FAKE!

Again nothing new here.  People have long known the saying, "If it's too good to be true, it PROBABLY is."

Having said that, there is reason to believe these are fake.  It's not to say they are not fake; they could in fact be real and in use all over Germany.  However, the pictures did look odd, and it was difficult to find good info quickly on the Internet.  Plus, I'm not sure who would want to be responsible for the costs of ecological damage.

[raptor]

I recently did a little research of my own.  My father works with a mining engineer.  They moved an earth mover from Indiana to Kentucky.  It wasn't AS big as the one picutred but pretty close.  The drove it just like this claim and they DID cross rivers, there are picutres of it.  What they do is put a strip of land down in the river twice the length of the earth mover and the mover literaly moves the dirt as it goes.  So at no point is the river completely diverted, but they do semi-dam it and drive over it.  

-Scott

[Bryan]

This thread was made almost a year ago.   This morning I checked my email at work and had this email:


Hi, my name is and I came across your posts re the laughable idea that the  Baggertransport Rheinbraun AG (the actuall name of the vehicle) was a conspiracy, looking around further I found some information you may find interesting. I thought it was impressive that you had gone to some trouble to research the monster. All the best.

Cheers,



World's Largest Vehicle:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/facilities/crawler.html

Krupp's Badger:
http://www.wisoveg.de/rheinbraun/bagger290504/29052004bagger3.html

[Bryan]

For anyone that's curious, the person that emailed me was a student at the Unviersity of Melbourne in Austrailia.  Kind of goes to show how things on a local college message board can have far reaching effects.

[Geoff Schreiber]

Again, after the fact - but Bucyrus is a large dragline manufacturer, I think maybe they are the mfg's of the current largest dragline in the world right now.  The only thing I question on this machine is the tread to move it.  I watched Peabody Coal move a dragline along the interstate as a child, and it was a fraction of the size of this mammoth.  They had to place railties under the treads the whole way to keep from completely crushing all beneath it, and again, it was tiny compared to this thing.  

The new Bucyrus lines are "walking" draglines - they have two "feet" that are attached to an offset cam, as the cam rotates, the belly of the dragline is set on the ground, and the feet move forward just a couple feet, the cam then puts the weight back onto the feet and lifts the belly off the ground, and forward a bit as well.  VERY neat engineering stuff :)

Mining is a neat industry to get into right now - they're working on programming all the large machines to be line/cable followers, without making them so exact that the road washes out where the machines are dead-on the same tracks every time.  Basically, they're following a cable as randomly as possible to avoid having to fix the haul roads as often.

[Bryan]

This thread never seems to die. I was browsing Digg and saw an article entitled "7 images you will never believe were NOT photoshopped."

#1 on the list?  Our very own earth mover that spawned so much discussion in this thread...

http://www.cracked.com/article_16556_15-images-you-wont-believe-arent-photoshopped.html

[Tony]

They had a special on the History channel about a year ago about these.  They are real.  They use them a lot for mining.  They can also put a bucket type front end on it.  They usually blow up a large area and use the bucket style to fill up those huge dump trucks you might have seen before.  What is nuts is that they fill these dump trucks with one scoop.  The trucks look miniature compared.  Pretty cool.