In another thread over in MPSIMS I needed help with a bunch of trivia questions. Dopers really pulled through and answered just about everything. However, this seemingly simple question (in this title’s thread) has been a bit difficult to nail down so I thought I’d bring it over here.
So far I have the following:
For the largest land based vehicle everColibri came up with the Big Muskie. At 27,000,000 pounds this thing was ungodly large (its operation ate enough electricity to power 27,500 homes). I also think it might hold the record for the slowest vehicle ever with a top speed of 1/10 mph. However, it also no longer exists as it was dismantled in 1999.
For the second largest (that I’ve been able to find) the web page linked above sent me to a page describing Big Brutus. At 11,000,000 pounds it is less than half the size of the Big Muskie but still quite large. On the downside, while this machine still actually exists, it is no longer operational.
For the third thing I could come up with is the Crawler Transporter that is used to carry the Space Shuttle to its launch pad. At 6,000,000 pounds it is much smaller than Big Brutus but it has the benefit of still being operational.
I also seem to remember some enormous beast I saw on Modern Marvels on the History Channel. This thing was (is?) also an excavator that I believe is being used somewhere in Europe. It took something like 10 years to build and is notable for what looks like a HUGE circular saw on the end of a LONG boom arm. The ‘saw’ is actually a bunch of enormous buckets on a wheel that constantly eat into a hillside. Unfortunately I don’t remember the name of this thing but I think it may count as the largest vehicle in the world and maybe the largest vehicle (land based) ever. I’m assuming this thing can move under its own power but I’m not 100% positive on that (although I can’t imagine it’d be much use unless it could move after excavating a site).
So any ideas on these? Any ideas on anything else that might fit the bill?
Yeah I saw that German mining monster thing too. Good Jesus, that was/is big. They said that they have to move entire roads and towns out of its way as it creeps along the countryside, gobbling down the nountains in its path. Yow.
Thanks for the links kniz but unfortunately my trivia question specified a land vehicle. I know that the biggest vehicles of all (by a long shot) float. As for the tunnel boring machine I don’t think it makes the cut. While definitely huge it just isn’t in the same class as some of the machines I’m talking about (the Big Muskie weighed in at 13,500 tons). Also, IIRC, those tunnel boring machines were either dismantled or abandoned in a side tunnel so they are no longer active thus putting them in the same category as the Big Muskie or Big Brutus.
I’m glad stuyguy saw the same thing I did so y’all know I’m not completely nuts. My wife, who couldn’t care less about most machines of any stripe, was half asleep while I was watching the thing on that mining monster and even she piped-up with a “Holy Shit!”. There are big things out there and then there are those things that make you go, “No Way!” This is one of those things and I think it’d be the clear winner if I could find a freakin link.
I’ve searched the History Channel’s website and the best I can do is buy the videos for Modern Marvels and I didn’t even see the one on mining equipment anyway. I’ve searched Metacrawler and Google and get tons of hits on people selling equipment but nothing that talks about these rare beasts.
I finally found a photo of one of those giant bucket wheel excavators that I keep going on about. You can see a picture of it here.
There is also some detail here that states the thing weighs about 13,000 tons. I’d say that’d make it the largest vehicle in the world currently operational as it nearly equals the weight of the Big Muskie and certainly covers more ground.
In Estevan Sask. is a drag line known as Big Lou…it weighs about six thousand tonnes, I have been inside it, it is so large it has a full locker room inside it…it moves at a rapid 0.10 miles per hour and each step compresses the earth about six feet…its also hideously noisy…the inside is rated at 120 db, you have to wear noise protection when you go inside and it still feels like your fillings will be shaken loose.
If you are talking loaded weight, according to this article (at the bottom of the page) an Australian freight train holds the record for the biggest single load of 90,000 tons (180,000,000 pounds). The train was 4.4 miles long and pulled by eight locomotives.
(Seriously, when I first heard the song, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and figured he was off by significantly more than an order of magnitude. Still liked the song, though.)
I realise that Kniz’s post regarding large ships etc was a hijack, and not what the OP was looking for, but I have to correct a misconception. The large ships to which he posted links may be the largest container and cruise ships but they are not by any means the largest ships around. Many bulkers and tankers (for coal, grain, oil etc) are much bigger and the world’s largest ship (the “Jahre Viking”) could swallow two and a half “Regina Maersk”'s and still have room for lunch.
The fully loaded weight of the “Jahre Viking” is somewhere over 564,000 tonnes.
Unfortunately, I don’t think you can count the load as part of the weight, like in that train scr4 mentioned. If you did, the earth movers would weigh much, much more.
How about the Exxon Valdez? It was a land vehicle for a little while…
Well as far as load is concerned, the very large excavators mentioned have a load capacity of only a few hundred tons, so they would not (in the overall scheme of things) weigh much more even if fully loaded.
I have been trying to find a figure for the light ship (ie unloaded) displacement for the “Jahre Viking” but without success. It’s not a figure that has much commercial usage. However given that it is significantly larger than the Empire State, I don’t think that any land based vehicle would come even close to it in weight, even unloaded.
Now you’ve raised the ugly issue of the largest ship to go aground. And I don’t know the answer to that either off the top of my head. I’ll think about it. It certainly wasn’t the Exxon Valdez, which is only a medium sized tanker (and the spill wasn’t that big, in world terms, either).
When I lived in Wichita, Kansas, I drove for seven hours one Saturday to visit Big Brutus. Yes, it is that boring in Kansas. But I gotta say, Brutus was awesome in the true sense of the word. You could climb to the top of the boom and see for miles. A normal-sized bucket loader was parked next to Brutus for comparison. The thing looked like a Matchbox toy.
This page says the Jahre Viking has a GRT of 260,851 metric tons. I don’t know what ‘GRT’ is but they give a separate figure of ‘DWT’ as 564,763 metric tons so I am assuming the smaller number is the empty weight of the ship.
Isn’t the internet grand? Just a matter of wading through the crap to find what you need…
