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The US Army's earth-shaking, off-road land trains
- jldugger 6y ago> visible from space on Google Maps. Note that google maps imagery is generally taken from airplanes not satellites.
- stonogo 6y agoExcept the imagery they link to is actual satellite imagery from Maxar, a space company that sells orbital Earth observation imagery.
- chkaloon 6y agoCool. But I wonder about this stat: 63 manned stations, "would need about 500 tons of materials to create all of these stations" 500 tons seems WAY low.
- runarb 6y ago> 500 tons seems WAY low. Yes, it sees "460,000 tons of materials were moved from the US and southern Canada to the Arctic by air, land, and sea" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Early_Warning_Line#Construction_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Early_Warning_Line#Con...
- jcranmer 6y agoI think they dropped a 1,000 from it, so it should have said "need about 500,000 tons."
- chrisco255 6y agoArticle is worth it just to watch the video of the land-train on the interstate in the 50s / early 60s, with all the classic cars maneuvering around it.
- rjrodger 6y agoI wonder did this somehow inspire The Amtrak Wars[0]? (Probably not, but I'm loving the `strange(truth) > strange(fiction)`) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amtrak_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amtrak_Wars
- afterburner 6y agoVery possible! https://i.imgur.com/Apnf1qN.png https://i.imgur.com/Apnf1qN.png
- bwldrbst 6y agoFirst thing I thought of! Especially the picture in the header.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoSeconded. Perhaps the series is less obscure than I'd imagined.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoLOL, I'm showing my age — I was reminded instead of the Mammoth Car from the Speed Racer cartoon: https://youtu.be/EgSk7yEheLo https://youtu.be/EgSk7yEheLo
- battery_cowboy 6y agoI wish we had a world with zepplins ferrying people around, land trains with several gas turbine engines, and nuclear powered aircraft. I'm bored of the same Material design web sites, phones that look the same, every apartment is the same, etc. I want imagination and crazy ideas to rule the world.
- teh_infallible 6y agoHold my beer..
- officemonkey 6y agoThere used to be steam-powered and battery-powered cars in the early 20th Century. There was an Edison-Westinghouse war in electricity distribution. Typically, a consensus is reached based on technical and economic limitations. For example, nuclear-powered aircraft? You need shielding to protect the human crew. You also need a reactor that can survive a crash. That's why they use nuclear fuel for unmanned probes. There are no humans to protect, and it's a one-way trip.
- acidburnNSA 6y agoShielding is all probably doable, but still really hard and questionable. Here's a good chapter on the Human Factors of Nuclear Powered Flight: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015001555146&view=1up&seq=176 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015001555146&vi...
- catalogia 6y agoIt's my understanding that if not for the development of ICBMs, the US might have created cruise missiles powered by unshielded nuclear reactors. They got as far as running a prototype engine for five minutes, but the whole project became pointless when it became clear ICBMs would work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto Russia has seemingly been developing this same sort of technology in recent years. Presumably this is in response to anti-ballistic missile technology calling into question the future effectiveness of ICBMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik
- jiveturkey 6y agoWARNING: back button hijack. now on my blacklist. non-user-hostile link: https://outline.com/PUh9a5 https://outline.com/PUh9a5
- briandear 6y agoReally? A “warning?” A warning is appropriate for malware, but a faulty UX? That’s a bit extreme. Back button works fine on Safari for iOS.
- lukejduncan 6y agoPet Peeve: they break the back button on the browser
- adrianpike 6y agoNot for me, Chrome 81.
- snazz 6y agoMe neither. Chromium 83 with plenty of adblocking and privacy extensions.
- falcolas 6y agoNot just a little broken; I’m literally unable to use the back button to leave the site. I had to use the long press feature to leave the site. Firefox mobile
- afterburner 6y agoOh, so I guess a real machine inspired this? https://i.imgur.com/Apnf1qN.png https://i.imgur.com/Apnf1qN.png
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI remember seeing a documentary about this vehicle as a kid. Everything about it just seemed so oversized. I had not realized it was the heavy lift helicopters that eventually outmoded it. Kind of sad, since it can be handy to have the logistic capability to move thousands of tons when you can't fly. It also got me wondering about what a Tesla version of this would look like :-)
- drivebycomment 6y agoThe closest I can think of for "a Tesla version": https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a28748306/worlds-largest-electric-vehicle-dump-truck/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...
- avmich 6y agoHeard a legend that when USSR planned the manned Moon program, one of ideas for how to bring a humongous rocket to Baikonur was manufacture it in Moscow, then move by rivers to Caspian Sea and then move over land east, to the launch pads. For that purpose USSR started to construct a pretty big off-road vehicle - rather similar to what's pictured here, but dropped the project, as N-1 was decided to be built on Baikonur itself. Remnants of the vehicle surfaced somewhere on the Web... Wonder if somebody could confirm or disprove this :) .
- orbital-decay 6y agoYes, the diesel-electric ZiL-135Sh. [1][2] 120t payload, zero-turn radius. The prototype looks deceptively small, those are motorized Il-18 landing gears, and the payload was supposed to go on top of them. The full-scale vehicle was being tested but there are no photos left, apparently. [1] http://www.gruzovikpress.ru/article/6377-zil-135sh-transporter-tyajelovoz-dlya-transportirovki-krupnogabaritnyh-blokov-raketonositeley-zemnaya-sostavlyayushchaya-lunnoy-programmy/ http://www.gruzovikpress.ru/article/6377-zil-135sh-transport... (in Russian) [2] https://truck-auto.info/zil/304-135sh.html https://truck-auto.info/zil/304-135sh.html (less info, some more photos of the prototype with the wheels turned 90)
- avmich 6y agoThank you! Glad to read details :) .
- D_Alex 6y agoSo, in my industry, moving 10,000 tonne loads is routine(-ish). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wp41alE8Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wp41alE8Mg
- orbital-decay 6y agoYeah, it was supposed to look similar but obviously non-modular and with less wheels. It was USSR in 1967, nothing like that was available, so they had to improvise. More like a wheeled version of NASA crawler-transporter designed to cover fairly long distances across Kazakh Steppes.
- moneytide1 6y agoThis reminds me of the Speed Racer movie where one of the competitors in the race drove a land train made of pure gold. Not sure what the plot was but they were the villan trying to hide the gold. Speed Racer had to use his steering-wheel-radial-menu to summon equipment embedded in his aerodymanic car (up against this extraordinarily heavy freighter with lots a drag).
- karatestomp 6y agoThe Bond film Goldfinger featured a villain smuggling gold as parts of cars.
- moneytide1 6y agoAnd the master Plan was to irradiate all the gold in Ft. Knox so it would be out-of-play for the duration of the half-life.
- Shivetya 6y agoAppeared in movie and series https://speedracer.fandom.com/wiki/The_Mammoth_Car https://speedracer.fandom.com/wiki/The_Mammoth_Car
- joe_the_user 6y agoNot sure what the plot was but they were the villan trying to hide the gold. Kids' show are not ones for sophisticated plots - "they were the villan trying to hide the gold" was the plot in total.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoI just posted about that and then saw your comment. See: https://youtu.be/EgSk7yEheLo https://youtu.be/EgSk7yEheLo What kind of professional auto race allows a car the length and size of a train? Love that they green-lighted (greenlit?) that script.
- moneytide1 6y agoHaha thank you for this. I was cracking up at so many things - 1500 HP per wheel as told to the inspector LOL. 500 mph on any kind of road. Over the top in so many ways, love it. The signature sound it made when it was imposing in a scene resonates with me in such a deep, nostalgic way.
- jokoon 6y agoOff road, maybe, but it's still required to scout the terrain and find a proper itinerary, and possible bulldoze dirt or cut some trees.
- monkeycantype 6y agosnowrunner mod please (https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/snowrunner/home https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/snowrunner/hom...)
- gerberus 6y agoHaha, I was thinking the same thing
- _iqha 6y ago"You need to get 500 tons of supplies from Fairbanks, Alaska to the Arctic Ocean" -- this is the lead sentence in the article, and I don't understand it
- ceejayoz 6y agoRead a few more sentences in?
- monkeycantype 6y agoI'm so glad this was made and worked, does anyone else find themselves haunted by the dumb failed utopian projects of the past? That somehow stupid engineering of the past sits in your imagination beside the dumb software development in shitty languages of your personal history? - What's that employer? you want a contract management system entirely in microsoft word macros - and it has to produce a scrollable map of government infrastructure, and it's 1995, and this is all in word, is there a database?, no?, no database, all in the word template - sure why the hell not, I guess you're paying and no doubt I will experience immense person satisfaction wasting my youth in your strange beige office attempting and repeatedly failing to realise this hideous monstrosity and cherish the downward spiral of shame and self recrimination. excellent! Thank you snow train - finally I can relinquish the weird melancholy I've always got thinking about the Antarctic snow cruiser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Snow_Cruiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Snow_Cruiser
- voz_ 6y agoI think it is incorrect to compare ambitious (crazy?) utopian projects of decades gone with the mundane bullshit contract style work you describe. If anything, there is more of these crazy projects to be found today. It just so happens we don't bother remembering the inane and mundane work, so all that we have of the past is large (fond) memories of projects like this one, or that awesome snow cruiser.
- bacon_waffle 6y agoYes, there may be more of those crazy projects today, but a major difference is the way abstraction in software obscures the insanity of the bigger picture. The current South Pole Station was designed by an architectural company based in Hawaii; I'd imagine the architects felt like they were working on a really cool project. In the station they designed, the dorm rooms all have windows without blackout curtains, but the sun rises and sets once a year at South Pole and there's an awful lot of ice outside. It's very bright there in the summer, and the dorms are hardly used for anything other than sleeping. There is a large pile of decorated pieces of repurposed cardboard that polies fit in the windows - I can assure you that decorating those window covers feels a bit silly, even if it is novel to play cut-and-paste with the world spinning around you. Byrd's Snow Cruiser and the CMS made in word macros are more alike than different.
- dheera 6y agoIn Australia there are apparently civilian equivalents of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iFkKRh5kcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iFkKRh5kcM
- antoncohen 6y agoThere are a couple Australian TV shows about these trucks and truckers: Outback Truckers (on Netflix in the US) and MegaTruckers.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jcrawfordor 6y agoAnother unusual type of vehicle designed for arctic transport applications is the Rolligon: https://jalopnik.com/weird-tech-friday-the-rolligon-for-when-you-want-to-r-1724171889 https://jalopnik.com/weird-tech-friday-the-rolligon-for-when... Rolligon-type vehicles (mostly not under the Rolligon name today) are still used in mine and oilfield applications in the Canadian and Alaskan arctic. This is often motivated less by their snow/ice capability (which is similar to tracked vehicles), than by environmental regulations which specify a maximum ground pressure exerted by vehicles to prevent excessive damage to plant life. There's a whole world of "low ground pressure" vehicles for this reason, although in non-arctic situations they usually achieve this by use of exceptionally wide rubber tracks.
- D_Alex 6y agoSpeaking of "low ground pressure' vehicles: if you have not seen it before, take a look at the Sherp! https://sherpatv.com/ https://sherpatv.com/
- kwhitefoot 6y ago> the Rolligon Also used on the Moon (in Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress").
- dimitar 6y agoThey look incredible but what are their downsides? Are they exceedingly expensive? High Ground pressure is what destroys roads - road maintenance will be much cheaper if not for all the trucks. Does it make sense to require trucking to use such vehicles? Also, these vehicles being all terrain why haven't millitaries shown interest?
- grendelt 6y agoR.G. LeTourneau also built LeTourneau College to train his workforce. It's evolved into LeTourneau University, my alma mater. www.letu.edu
- JackMorgan 6y agoWhoa a fellow Letu grad in the wild! My wife and I graduated back when it was top flight school in the nation 2009. Beat out Embry Riddle and the Air Force Academy that year. She wasn't on the Sting team though, just a regular student. I worked for IT for a year before we moved off into the wild world. When did you graduate? Are you into programming?
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoHe was quite a character. I read his biography a few years ago after chasing down an internet rabbit hole of construction equipment. Very interesting read once you get past all the religious stuff.
- RangerScience 6y agoI am reminded of the Burning Man 747 in terms of "things that could be done with this".
- fit2rule 6y agoFrom the linked article, a juicy tidbit: ---- "Jungle Destroyer The Morrow Project purchased two of these as driver training vehicles, and for heavy load carrying -- though also because the manufacturer had them "lying around" -- SAC had tested them in the late 1950s for clearing crashed bombers from runways in a hurry. The same width as the Overland Train (5.25 meters), these are 17.5 meters long and 5 meters tall (over the blade-lifting arm) -- 3.4 meters from the ground to the cargo deck. Weighing 50 tons unloaded, they can carry 95 tons of cargo. Similarly to the Control Car of the Overland Train, the four rear wheels are not steered; all shock-absorbing is from the low pressure tires. When purchased by the Project, these were powered by a 600 HP Cummins diesel, driving an electrical generator; the Project removed the diesel engine and generator, and installed a fusion reactor. " ---- .. ummm .. what? A fusion reactor? Like, nuclear powered jungle destroyer? That is bonkers. Glad these things didn't make it out of the Armys' toy box. Imagine what the world would be like if we had fusion-powered jungle destroyers on the market .. EDIT: This picture is a sad end to this story: http://golddaughters.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/museum_4836.jpg http://golddaughters.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/museum_4... Somehow it doesn't look so huge!
- mkl 6y agoThat seems to be from a different article: http://asmrb.pbworks.com/w/page/53070717/Morrow%20Project%20Overland%20Train http://asmrb.pbworks.com/w/page/53070717/Morrow%20Project%20... And, as the casual mentions of fusion reactors suggest, it is fiction: http://asmrb.pbworks.com/w/page/9958836/FrontPage http://asmrb.pbworks.com/w/page/9958836/FrontPage
- fit2rule 6y agoWell, it was linked in the original article directly, which used that page as a source reference for a lot of things, so .. if there is fiction, its sprinkled throughout the original source material.
- mkl 6y agoHm, maybe the thedrive.com article has been changed since then. I can only find one link to that page, in the final paragraph.
- altacc 6y agoIt's interesting that it featured regenerative electric braking. Whilst regenerative braking is an old idea, I couldn't find an earlier example of this applied to electric regeneration. It seems the first mention of this in a car is 1967's AMC Amitron concept but this industrial use predates that by over a decade.
- jzwinck 6y agoSome diesel electric trains had regenerative braking in the 1930s.
- ryanwinchester 6y agoMy dad worked on one of the radar stations on the dew line in Canada. He's got some cool photos. Like photos of a Polar Bear looking in the windows of his cabin.
- tumetab1 6y agoI imagine this would make more sense now with electric motors and a diesel generator. You would get a massive cargo transport and also a diesel generator at the same time. Still an helicopter might be more better, it just seems a nice thing to imagine, a beast like this moving around in these days.
- saalweachter 6y agoBefore reading the article I was planning to complain that a tractor pulling a few wagons in a, well, train does not an off-road train make. But after reading the article, you know what, I’m willing to concede it’s an off-road train.
- MrZongle2 6y agoI wonder if we might see something like this operate on Mars one day, to haul cargo from landing areas to inhabited areas (or mining operations). These were apparently doomed by heavy-lift helicopters, which likely won't be an option in the thinner atmosphere there.
- Synaesthesia 6y agoStrikes me as wasteful and pointless, like a lot of military projects.