[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Demo *
Highlighting mine.
DWT I understand but I don’t get this Gross Registered Tonnage (GRT) thing. Since when is volume measured in weight? If DWT is the total weight a ship can carry then what does GRT have to do with anything?
I’m probably missing something obvious here but please help me out.
I suspect it’s another one of those Maritime English things. (My dad was in the navy, so we had a lot of unusual expressions around the house when I was growing up…) I believe the word ‘ton’ originally came from ‘tun’ which was a large barrel used on the sailing ships. So on ships it became a unit of volume, not weight. But I could be wrong.
I don’t know about the etymology of the word, but yes, GRT relates to cargo volume, not mass. There are more ways to measure a ship than you can imagine. I have a book on my desk with a whole chapter on the subject.
I should have figured as much, but he did have a large following outside of Maine.
I hear that these things are pretty damn big…
You are probably right, but the only weight I saw on the tunnel boring machine was that the head weighed 95 tons. Since it is 300 ft. long that is only part of the weight.
That enormous machine you found a picture of says that it is designed for the site to be excavated, so I assume it has to be dismantled or scaped after the digging is done.
In another thread it was mentioned that the highest point in Kansas is an overpass on the freeway. That means that temporarily you were standing on what was at the time the highest point in Kansas.
Oh, boy! Can I borrow it?
The poster was being facetious, of course. The high point in Kansas, as I posted a link to in that thread, is “Mount Sunflower”, which is over by the CO border (and very close to the LOWEST point in CO), and is about 4000 ft (and is only a mountain to somebody with a very vivid imagination). It’s in the middle of nowhere, and it is doubtful that there is a highway overpass in the vicinity which can beat it. Flat as Kansas is, it slopes up running east to west, and, in most of the state, it would take a very tall manmade object to reach 4000 feet. Wichita, where the big vehicle is, is under 2000 feet.
Now, there ARE several states in which manmade objects beat the highpoint - the highest point in Florida is 345 feet. I’m sure there are buildings in the major cities which top it.
Strangely enough, “states in which permanent manmade structures top the highpoint” doesn’t seem to be a category the highpointers club has considered. You would have to disallow structures actually placed on or near some of the highpoints I suppose.
BTW, US highpoint info may be found at:
Okay, so this doesn’t even rate on the “biggest ever” scale, but the largest tank ever built was the KV-5 “Maus” weighing in at a puny (compared to “Big Muskie”) 188 tons.
Only 3 were ever made and they proved basically useless as anything other that a stationary pillbox due to the huge amounts of fuel required to run it (in a time of extreme fuel shortages), it’s incredibly slow speed, and the fact that it was far too heavy to cross most bridges in Europe at the time.
More information, as well as some pictures can be found at
http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Quarters/8662/giants.html
or
http://www.kithobbyist.com/AFVInteriors/maus/maus1.html
Oops. The poster said he drove 7 hours from Wichita to see it. On further inspection, the vehicle was in southeastern Kansas somewhere. Remarks concerning the elevation still apply - it’s probably even lower than Wichita.