9 ms·

No One Ever Saw the Snow Cruiser Again (2019)

197 points by mortenjorck 5y ago

ISL 5y ago
Though I knew the story of the Snow Cruiser in general terms, I didn't know the information in the last few paragraphs nor the final image. Thanks for posting.
dustintrex 5y ago
Why on earth did they opt for bald tyres? Treaded tires have been known and used since 1905.
- masklinn 5y ago
  Maybe they didn’t have the tech for good ridging on such massive tyres yet? LeTourneau’s overland trains from 15 years (and a world war) later have pretty simple ridging still.
  - kragen 5y ago
    I feel like you can cut ridges into rubber tires with a hacksaw if the rubber is thick enough. I don't think technological limitations are a plausible explanation; they must have thought slicks were actually the right solution for some reason.
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > I feel like you can cut ridges into rubber tires with a hacksaw if the rubber is thick enough. I don’t think that’s how you thread rubber, it’d essentially be like introducing cracks in the material which would weaken it significantly.
      - kragen 5y ago
        I agree that that's not how treads are normally made, but it would definitely work. Rubber is really, really good at resisting crack propagation, at least above its Tg. I mean, it's not that crack propagation is not a consideration at all, but it's not the overriding concern that it is for ceramics and even, at times, metals.
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        That is how it can be done. You can find videos of south asians manually cutting new grooves on worn down truck tires. It was normal practice in the rest of the world before retreading was invented.
        genewitch 5y ago
        They use a hot knife, which I don't know is technically cutting, but probably much less likely to damage the substrate.
        kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        It doesn't require a hot knife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zs34npA41I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zs34npA41I
        kragen 5y ago
        That is seriously impressive workmanship. Do you suppose this is in Sialkot?
MattGaiser 5y ago
There is a lot of fascinating history out there, just hidden beneath the waves, ice, and snow.
speeder 5y ago
I wonder why when they found it in 1946 they decided to not use it.
- masklinn 5y ago
  Probably because it had no way to fit in operation highjump (which was a military expedition).
EdwardDiego 5y ago
I've always loved how Edmund Hillary modified some tractors to drive to the South Pole. I suspect the heating was less congenial though. https://collection.canterburymuseum.com/objects/9331/tractor-massey-ferguson https://collection.canterburymuseum.com/objects/9331/tractor...
- overkalix 5y ago
  On the other hand, I've always found the Scott Expedition very... illuminating. They had 2 proto-snowmobiles. One fell into the ocean when they were unloading it. The other one had a mechanical failure shortly after the final team departed the last camp, and Scott didn't bring the engineer with him because an officer of higher rank threw a pissy fit that the engineer was going but not him. Only one of a rather long list of poor decisions.
  - timonoko 5y ago
    Where is that list of poor decisions? I have some: 1. Clothing was inadequate. Scottish wool and leather riding boots. Looks like Scott realized that the crew was losings fingers too fast, and they made fur mittens and boots at sometime afterwards. 2. Horses instead of dogs. Scott was a Great Humanist, so forbid to eat those horses. Horses taste Good, better than reindeers, imho. -- Dogs eat themselves, solving part of the fodder problem. 3. All kinds of craziness with thoses tractors, as mentioned.
    - EdwardDiego 5y ago
      The Terra Nova expedition had dogs as well as ponies and who knows, if they'd been purchased by someone who knew horses, they might've done a lot better. Scott sent his dog handler Meares to purchase the ponies (and I can't really nail down the breed here, they're either described as Manchurian or Siberian, but they look like Yakut horses[1] in photos), and Scott insisted, for some reason, on white ponies, because he either thought that they did better in cold environments, or were stronger. And apparently the only white ones available when Meares was purchasing, were old and apparently underfed. Of course, if Captain Oates, an experienced calvary man had accompanied Meares as Scott requested, he could've chosen good ones. It also didn't help that the horses had their summer coats when they arrived in Antarctica. Also, they did eventually shoot the ponies to store as meat in caches when they had lost condition. Many other polar explorers, both Arctic and Antarctic, used ponies successfully. When fed correctly. Meet Ernest Shackleton's meat eating pony, Socks, part of an expedition in 1907. [2] Shackleton fed his horses "Maujee pemmican", which, according to him "consists of dried beef, carrots, milk, currants and sugar, and it provides a large amount of nourishment with comparatively little weight." Scott, however, while replicating Shackleton's use of ponies, didn't feed them the same rations, preferring compressed wheat. The Jackson-Harmsworth expedition to Franz Josef Land in the Arctic (the one that found Fridtjof Nansen) used ponies. Wilhem Filchner used ponies successfully in Antarctica around the same time as Scott was dying, to the extent that he was able to release them on South Georgia Island after the expedition. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakutian_horse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakutian_horse [2]: http://www.mikaelstrandberg.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/16-Shackletons-meat-eating-Siberan-horse-Socks.jpg http://www.mikaelstrandberg.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/1...
ehnto 5y ago
I think this is a good lesson to test often and test in private. Those failures are all very reasonable, it's just a shame it had to be during public fanfare.
- wolrah 5y ago
  > Those failures are all very reasonable Except for the whole part about non-treaded tires. That should have been obvious to anyone who gave it even a half second's thought.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    Yes that part is surprising. I wonder if it had to do with manufacturing limitations at the time? Even still, some off the vehicle tests probably could have saved them some pain.
  - monkeycantype 5y ago
    was it a failure? we're all assuming the purpose of the snow cruiser was to cruise snow, if the purpose was to get goodyear sponsorship perhaps it was a success?
  - fanf2 5y ago
    And the sand dune mishap: why aren’t the wheels near the corners?
    - SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
      That was a justified design decision, they needed the body protruding flat in front and back of the wheels to be able to cross crevasses. And the terrain in antártica is very flat, so that was not a problem (unlike the lack of traction, which was a very big problem).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
foobarbecue 5y ago
Why are some words bolded?
- glitchcrab 5y ago
  I had the same thought; they make it a strange and off-kilter read
- kragen 5y ago
  Operator error, I think.
djmips 5y ago
"Simply put, Poulter didn’t know better because no one knew better." I highly doubt that. Also full winter climes for testing were readily available just hours north.
- leoedin 5y ago
  Yeah, this part is crazy. There's vast parts of North America which are frozen solid for 5 months of the year. The fact they'd ship it all the way to Antarctica without testing on snow is just crazy! I guess it's the waterfall method in extreme.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    > I guess it's the waterfall method in extreme. That’s a good (and fairly accurate) observation. I suspect a lot of the reason for not going north, was for publicity. It sounds like a great deal of hucksterism was involved. Maybe going to Canada would not have generated enough press. The budget for development was absurdly low, even adjusted for today’s dollars. I suspect funding was always foremost in their minds.
  - analog31 5y ago
    Indeed there were probably truck drivers in the area who were already experienced with winter driving on bald tires. If not, they could have brought it up to Da Frozen Tundra, aka Green Bay.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    The issue is moving it is really expensive, slow and there's not the capacity in those areas to make iterations on the design. There may not have been enough money to actually test it.
    - sulam 5y ago
      "We don't have the time to test it!" "We don't have the budget to test it!" I guess hope _is_ a strategy!
masklinn 5y ago
If you like the cruiser look up the karkovchanka, they’re dedicated expedition vehicles from 20 years later (which helped a lot technologically and thus they were significantly more successful).
- 7demons 5y ago
  Those are vehicles! Karkovs helped a lot to explore not only cold regions.
  - kubanczyk 5y ago
    Guys, if you omit a letter, omit the "K". Because Harkov or Harkovchanka are close enough to the original pronounciation (Kharkov, Kharkovchanka), while Karkov or Karkovchanka do not even ring a bell. I've recently discovered that my entire country mispronounces "sheikh", so for now it's my pet peeve of sorts.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      In the case of Russian, the transliteration kh is used because it was developed for rendering Russian words in French, which has no H sound. For sheikh, I assume, like Achmed, that having the sound in a syllable-final position didn't work for whatever the target language was. It might have been English; we can't do /x/ or syllable-final /h/. > I've recently discovered that my entire country mispronounces "sheikh", so for now it's my pet peeve of sorts. If you expect everyone in your country to accurately produce a sound they've never heard, you're in for some disappointment.
      - kubanczyk 5y ago
        > If you expect everyone in your country to accurately produce a sound they've never heard, you're in for some disappointment. It's Polish and we have all sorts of sounds, this and much worse. The atrocious story is that we even have an earlier Persian-sourced word "szach" which we pronounce sensibly as <<shakh>>. But at some point we've got a duplicate via English, pronounced <<sheik>> (written "szejk"). Ouch...
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
An extremely glorious failure.
kragen 5y ago
Pretty funny. More than anything else this reminds me of Atlas Survival Shelters on wheels, and it seems like it actually worked pretty well as a survival shelter; it was just the "wheels" part that failed. I wonder why he didn't use tracks? In the US, Holt (the corporate ancestor of Caterpillar) was building tracked farm tractors to improve traction in farm mud from 01904 (getting a patent in 01907), and surely it wasn't news to anybody in Massachusetts that snow was soft and hard to keep traction in, like mud; and tracked vehicles were also being developed in England, and both France and England had deployed Holt tractors in World War I, and deployed tracked tanks by 01916, while Germany had built their own tracked tank by 01918. Muscott built his snowmobile with rear tracks and front skis in 01915. And apparently tracked vehicles were being used in Antarctica from 01911: > In a memorandum of 1908, Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott presented his view that man-hauling to the South Pole was impossible and that motor traction was needed.[29] Snow vehicles did not yet exist however, and so his engineer Reginald Skelton developed the idea of a caterpillar track for snow surfaces.[30] These tracked motors were built by the Wolseley Tool and Motor Car Company in Birmingham, tested in Switzerland and Norway, and can be seen in action in Herbert Ponting's 1911 documentary film of Scott's Antarctic Terra Nova Expedition.[31] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_track#Snow_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_track#Snow_vehicles> You'd think they would have done some testing of prototypes in more conveniently located frozen tundras before asking Congress for funding to built the full-scale vehicle and ship it halfway around the planet. Then again, maybe the goal was getting the funding, not delivering a working vehicle. What if you wanted to attack the problem for real? Maybe instead of a single gigantic vehicle (the medieval units used in the article translate to 17 m by 5.2 m in modern units) you could use 2-4 smaller vehicles so that a single steering-system failure, uncontrolled fire, or carbon monoxide leak in the middle of Antarctica wouldn't consign the whole expedition to death. Maybe you could build a relatively lightweight dome that could be rapidly erected when you were parked, or perhaps even suspended on springs around the moving flotilla of vehicles.
- folli 5y ago
  Okay, I'll bite: why are you writing years with 5 digits? Prevention of a Y10K bug?
eesmith 5y ago
In Google Ngram there's a distinct spike for "Snow Cruiser" right at 1939, reflecting no doubt the public interest. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Snow+Cruiser&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CSnow%20Cruiser%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Snow+Cruiser&y...
deepsun 5y ago
How did Amundsen knew that he's on the South Pole? There were no markings, and stars were not visible during whole-day daylight.
- Thlom 5y ago
  I heard a podcast about this some time ago. They used a wheel on one of the sleds to measure distance travelled and navigated using a compass. They did rough calculations using the suns height over the horizon and time of culmination and more precise calculations using a sextant from time to time.
- unnouinceput 5y ago
  I suspect he had a little gizmo called magnetic compass, though that one would measure the magnetic pole, not the true pole. Difference between those 2 are 17 degrees if my memory serves me correctly. More info here: https://airplaneacademy.com/whats-the-difference-between-true-and-magnetic-heading-explained/ https://airplaneacademy.com/whats-the-difference-between-tru...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deepsun 5y ago
    But they couldn't know that its 2 degrees until someone went there.
- snickerer 5y ago
  In my naïve thinking I would just follow my compass in the south direction to find the magnetic south pole. When the compass flips around at 180° then you crossed the pole. I don't know if they understood the difference between the pole and the magnetic pole at that time. I learnt in the Fram museum in Oslo that they did a lot of magnetic field measurements, which led to new and important scientific insights. So they navigated by compass (and sextant). But not only. Amundsen did 'sensor fusion'. He did pace-counting and had meter-wheels fixed to sledges to measure their traveled distance. In addition to that he erected snow beacons every three miles. The source for this is the article 'The Long Journey Home' from the magazine 'Navigation News'. But I didn't find the article itself online. I found only a blog that talks about it: https://www.naturalnavigator.com/news/2014/11/navigation-on-amundsens-south-pole-expedition/ https://www.naturalnavigator.com/news/2014/11/navigation-on-...
Gunax 5y ago
This is a great example of poor market/customer fit. He was giving what he thought was needed, not what was actually needed. Small-scale iterations and testing could have discovered these issues. Instead he wanted to make a big splash and have his little research station on wheels all upfront.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Sort of reminds me of Damnation Alley: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075909/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075909/ A movie so bad, that recalling it triggers PTSD.
pmbr 5y ago
There's a Scottish guy named Calum on youtube who has made some really nice videos on strange vehicles, like the snow cruiser: https://youtu.be/zR0M7KjnJTE https://youtu.be/zR0M7KjnJTE He also made a video on the Kharkovchanka: https://youtu.be/f6R-h06IsJw https://youtu.be/f6R-h06IsJw
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stevespang 5y ago
The Russky's build snow machines that work very well . . . fueled on vodka !
mLuby 5y ago
Am I the only one surprised that nuclear-powered snow cruisers weren't used in Antarctic exploration, during the height of the atomic age? Maybe RTGs just don't produce enough power.
- katmannthree 5y ago
  They were used by the soviets for unmanned arctic lighthouses, but even the largest RTGs only put out a couple hundred watts of electrical power (a small fraction of what this vehicle would need).
- giantrobot 5y ago
  RTGs definitely don't put out enough power for a vehicle. They put out only tens of watts of electrical power. So for the expense and weight they'd be a really complicated battery for the radio.
mikewarot 5y ago
My wife's grandfather worked on it, and welded the names of his children into a hidden corner of the historic vehicle, or so the story goes.

197 points by mortenjorck 5y ago

ISL 5y ago

Though I knew the story of the Snow Cruiser in general terms, I didn't know the information in the last few paragraphs nor the final image. Thanks for posting.

dustintrex 5y ago

Why on earth did they opt for bald tyres? Treaded tires have been known and used since 1905.

masklinn 5y ago
Maybe they didn’t have the tech for good ridging on such massive tyres yet? LeTourneau’s overland trains from 15 years (and a world war) later have pretty simple ridging still.
- kragen 5y ago
  I feel like you can cut ridges into rubber tires with a hacksaw if the rubber is thick enough. I don't think technological limitations are a plausible explanation; they must have thought slicks were actually the right solution for some reason.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > I feel like you can cut ridges into rubber tires with a hacksaw if the rubber is thick enough. I don’t think that’s how you thread rubber, it’d essentially be like introducing cracks in the material which would weaken it significantly.
    - kragen 5y ago
      I agree that that's not how treads are normally made, but it would definitely work. Rubber is really, really good at resisting crack propagation, at least above its Tg. I mean, it's not that crack propagation is not a consideration at all, but it's not the overriding concern that it is for ceramics and even, at times, metals.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      That is how it can be done. You can find videos of south asians manually cutting new grooves on worn down truck tires. It was normal practice in the rest of the world before retreading was invented.
      - genewitch 5y ago
        They use a hot knife, which I don't know is technically cutting, but probably much less likely to damage the substrate.
        kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        It doesn't require a hot knife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zs34npA41I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zs34npA41I
        kragen 5y ago
        That is seriously impressive workmanship. Do you suppose this is in Sialkot?

MattGaiser 5y ago

There is a lot of fascinating history out there, just hidden beneath the waves, ice, and snow.

speeder 5y ago

I wonder why when they found it in 1946 they decided to not use it.

masklinn 5y ago
Probably because it had no way to fit in operation highjump (which was a military expedition).

EdwardDiego 5y ago

I've always loved how Edmund Hillary modified some tractors to drive to the South Pole. I suspect the heating was less congenial though. https://collection.canterburymuseum.com/objects/9331/tractor-massey-ferguson https://collection.canterburymuseum.com/objects/9331/tractor...

overkalix 5y ago
On the other hand, I've always found the Scott Expedition very... illuminating. They had 2 proto-snowmobiles. One fell into the ocean when they were unloading it. The other one had a mechanical failure shortly after the final team departed the last camp, and Scott didn't bring the engineer with him because an officer of higher rank threw a pissy fit that the engineer was going but not him. Only one of a rather long list of poor decisions.
- timonoko 5y ago
  Where is that list of poor decisions? I have some: 1. Clothing was inadequate. Scottish wool and leather riding boots. Looks like Scott realized that the crew was losings fingers too fast, and they made fur mittens and boots at sometime afterwards. 2. Horses instead of dogs. Scott was a Great Humanist, so forbid to eat those horses. Horses taste Good, better than reindeers, imho. -- Dogs eat themselves, solving part of the fodder problem. 3. All kinds of craziness with thoses tractors, as mentioned.
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    The Terra Nova expedition had dogs as well as ponies and who knows, if they'd been purchased by someone who knew horses, they might've done a lot better. Scott sent his dog handler Meares to purchase the ponies (and I can't really nail down the breed here, they're either described as Manchurian or Siberian, but they look like Yakut horses[1] in photos), and Scott insisted, for some reason, on white ponies, because he either thought that they did better in cold environments, or were stronger. And apparently the only white ones available when Meares was purchasing, were old and apparently underfed. Of course, if Captain Oates, an experienced calvary man had accompanied Meares as Scott requested, he could've chosen good ones. It also didn't help that the horses had their summer coats when they arrived in Antarctica. Also, they did eventually shoot the ponies to store as meat in caches when they had lost condition. Many other polar explorers, both Arctic and Antarctic, used ponies successfully. When fed correctly. Meet Ernest Shackleton's meat eating pony, Socks, part of an expedition in 1907. [2] Shackleton fed his horses "Maujee pemmican", which, according to him "consists of dried beef, carrots, milk, currants and sugar, and it provides a large amount of nourishment with comparatively little weight." Scott, however, while replicating Shackleton's use of ponies, didn't feed them the same rations, preferring compressed wheat. The Jackson-Harmsworth expedition to Franz Josef Land in the Arctic (the one that found Fridtjof Nansen) used ponies. Wilhem Filchner used ponies successfully in Antarctica around the same time as Scott was dying, to the extent that he was able to release them on South Georgia Island after the expedition. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakutian_horse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakutian_horse [2]: http://www.mikaelstrandberg.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/16-Shackletons-meat-eating-Siberan-horse-Socks.jpg http://www.mikaelstrandberg.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/1...

ehnto 5y ago

I think this is a good lesson to test often and test in private. Those failures are all very reasonable, it's just a shame it had to be during public fanfare.

wolrah 5y ago
> Those failures are all very reasonable Except for the whole part about non-treaded tires. That should have been obvious to anyone who gave it even a half second's thought.
- ehnto 5y ago
  Yes that part is surprising. I wonder if it had to do with manufacturing limitations at the time? Even still, some off the vehicle tests probably could have saved them some pain.
- monkeycantype 5y ago
  was it a failure? we're all assuming the purpose of the snow cruiser was to cruise snow, if the purpose was to get goodyear sponsorship perhaps it was a success?
- fanf2 5y ago
  And the sand dune mishap: why aren’t the wheels near the corners?
  - SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
    That was a justified design decision, they needed the body protruding flat in front and back of the wheels to be able to cross crevasses. And the terrain in antártica is very flat, so that was not a problem (unlike the lack of traction, which was a very big problem).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

foobarbecue 5y ago

Why are some words bolded?

glitchcrab 5y ago
I had the same thought; they make it a strange and off-kilter read
kragen 5y ago
Operator error, I think.

djmips 5y ago

"Simply put, Poulter didn’t know better because no one knew better." I highly doubt that. Also full winter climes for testing were readily available just hours north.

leoedin 5y ago
Yeah, this part is crazy. There's vast parts of North America which are frozen solid for 5 months of the year. The fact they'd ship it all the way to Antarctica without testing on snow is just crazy! I guess it's the waterfall method in extreme.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > I guess it's the waterfall method in extreme. That’s a good (and fairly accurate) observation. I suspect a lot of the reason for not going north, was for publicity. It sounds like a great deal of hucksterism was involved. Maybe going to Canada would not have generated enough press. The budget for development was absurdly low, even adjusted for today’s dollars. I suspect funding was always foremost in their minds.
- analog31 5y ago
  Indeed there were probably truck drivers in the area who were already experienced with winter driving on bald tires. If not, they could have brought it up to Da Frozen Tundra, aka Green Bay.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  The issue is moving it is really expensive, slow and there's not the capacity in those areas to make iterations on the design. There may not have been enough money to actually test it.
  - sulam 5y ago
    "We don't have the time to test it!" "We don't have the budget to test it!" I guess hope _is_ a strategy!

masklinn 5y ago

If you like the cruiser look up the karkovchanka, they’re dedicated expedition vehicles from 20 years later (which helped a lot technologically and thus they were significantly more successful).

7demons 5y ago
Those are vehicles! Karkovs helped a lot to explore not only cold regions.
- kubanczyk 5y ago
  Guys, if you omit a letter, omit the "K". Because Harkov or Harkovchanka are close enough to the original pronounciation (Kharkov, Kharkovchanka), while Karkov or Karkovchanka do not even ring a bell. I've recently discovered that my entire country mispronounces "sheikh", so for now it's my pet peeve of sorts.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    In the case of Russian, the transliteration kh is used because it was developed for rendering Russian words in French, which has no H sound. For sheikh, I assume, like Achmed, that having the sound in a syllable-final position didn't work for whatever the target language was. It might have been English; we can't do /x/ or syllable-final /h/. > I've recently discovered that my entire country mispronounces "sheikh", so for now it's my pet peeve of sorts. If you expect everyone in your country to accurately produce a sound they've never heard, you're in for some disappointment.
    - kubanczyk 5y ago
      > If you expect everyone in your country to accurately produce a sound they've never heard, you're in for some disappointment. It's Polish and we have all sorts of sounds, this and much worse. The atrocious story is that we even have an earlier Persian-sourced word "szach" which we pronounce sensibly as <<shakh>>. But at some point we've got a duplicate via English, pronounced <<sheik>> (written "szejk"). Ouch...

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

An extremely glorious failure.

kragen 5y ago

Pretty funny. More than anything else this reminds me of Atlas Survival Shelters on wheels, and it seems like it actually worked pretty well as a survival shelter; it was just the "wheels" part that failed. I wonder why he didn't use tracks? In the US, Holt (the corporate ancestor of Caterpillar) was building tracked farm tractors to improve traction in farm mud from 01904 (getting a patent in 01907), and surely it wasn't news to anybody in Massachusetts that snow was soft and hard to keep traction in, like mud; and tracked vehicles were also being developed in England, and both France and England had deployed Holt tractors in World War I, and deployed tracked tanks by 01916, while Germany had built their own tracked tank by 01918. Muscott built his snowmobile with rear tracks and front skis in 01915. And apparently tracked vehicles were being used in Antarctica from 01911: > In a memorandum of 1908, Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott presented his view that man-hauling to the South Pole was impossible and that motor traction was needed.[29] Snow vehicles did not yet exist however, and so his engineer Reginald Skelton developed the idea of a caterpillar track for snow surfaces.[30] These tracked motors were built by the Wolseley Tool and Motor Car Company in Birmingham, tested in Switzerland and Norway, and can be seen in action in Herbert Ponting's 1911 documentary film of Scott's Antarctic Terra Nova Expedition.[31] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_track#Snow_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_track#Snow_vehicles> You'd think they would have done some testing of prototypes in more conveniently located frozen tundras before asking Congress for funding to built the full-scale vehicle and ship it halfway around the planet. Then again, maybe the goal was getting the funding, not delivering a working vehicle. What if you wanted to attack the problem for real? Maybe instead of a single gigantic vehicle (the medieval units used in the article translate to 17 m by 5.2 m in modern units) you could use 2-4 smaller vehicles so that a single steering-system failure, uncontrolled fire, or carbon monoxide leak in the middle of Antarctica wouldn't consign the whole expedition to death. Maybe you could build a relatively lightweight dome that could be rapidly erected when you were parked, or perhaps even suspended on springs around the moving flotilla of vehicles.

folli 5y ago
Okay, I'll bite: why are you writing years with 5 digits? Prevention of a Y10K bug?

eesmith 5y ago

In Google Ngram there's a distinct spike for "Snow Cruiser" right at 1939, reflecting no doubt the public interest. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Snow+Cruiser&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CSnow%20Cruiser%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Snow+Cruiser&y...

deepsun 5y ago

How did Amundsen knew that he's on the South Pole? There were no markings, and stars were not visible during whole-day daylight.

Thlom 5y ago
I heard a podcast about this some time ago. They used a wheel on one of the sleds to measure distance travelled and navigated using a compass. They did rough calculations using the suns height over the horizon and time of culmination and more precise calculations using a sextant from time to time.
unnouinceput 5y ago
I suspect he had a little gizmo called magnetic compass, though that one would measure the magnetic pole, not the true pole. Difference between those 2 are 17 degrees if my memory serves me correctly. More info here: https://airplaneacademy.com/whats-the-difference-between-true-and-magnetic-heading-explained/ https://airplaneacademy.com/whats-the-difference-between-tru...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deepsun 5y ago
  But they couldn't know that its 2 degrees until someone went there.
snickerer 5y ago
In my naïve thinking I would just follow my compass in the south direction to find the magnetic south pole. When the compass flips around at 180° then you crossed the pole. I don't know if they understood the difference between the pole and the magnetic pole at that time. I learnt in the Fram museum in Oslo that they did a lot of magnetic field measurements, which led to new and important scientific insights. So they navigated by compass (and sextant). But not only. Amundsen did 'sensor fusion'. He did pace-counting and had meter-wheels fixed to sledges to measure their traveled distance. In addition to that he erected snow beacons every three miles. The source for this is the article 'The Long Journey Home' from the magazine 'Navigation News'. But I didn't find the article itself online. I found only a blog that talks about it: https://www.naturalnavigator.com/news/2014/11/navigation-on-amundsens-south-pole-expedition/ https://www.naturalnavigator.com/news/2014/11/navigation-on-...

Gunax 5y ago

This is a great example of poor market/customer fit. He was giving what he thought was needed, not what was actually needed. Small-scale iterations and testing could have discovered these issues. Instead he wanted to make a big splash and have his little research station on wheels all upfront.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Sort of reminds me of Damnation Alley: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075909/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075909/ A movie so bad, that recalling it triggers PTSD.

pmbr 5y ago

There's a Scottish guy named Calum on youtube who has made some really nice videos on strange vehicles, like the snow cruiser: https://youtu.be/zR0M7KjnJTE https://youtu.be/zR0M7KjnJTE He also made a video on the Kharkovchanka: https://youtu.be/f6R-h06IsJw https://youtu.be/f6R-h06IsJw

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stevespang 5y ago

The Russky's build snow machines that work very well . . . fueled on vodka !

mLuby 5y ago

Am I the only one surprised that nuclear-powered snow cruisers weren't used in Antarctic exploration, during the height of the atomic age? Maybe RTGs just don't produce enough power.

katmannthree 5y ago
They were used by the soviets for unmanned arctic lighthouses, but even the largest RTGs only put out a couple hundred watts of electrical power (a small fraction of what this vehicle would need).
giantrobot 5y ago
RTGs definitely don't put out enough power for a vehicle. They put out only tens of watts of electrical power. So for the expense and weight they'd be a really complicated battery for the radio.

mikewarot 5y ago

My wife's grandfather worked on it, and welded the names of his children into a hidden corner of the historic vehicle, or so the story goes.