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"QUANTUM SHOT" #32
Link - by Avi Abrams



Titanic mechanism "devours" its prey - a bulldozer!

If you discount CERN's Large Hadron Collider (which is officially the Largest Machine in the World; see the Google Earth picture below, and read our article about it)



then the biggest MOVING machine build by humans would be the giant bucket wheel excavator "Bagger 288" built by Krupp in Germany in 1978.







This enormous mining machine (300 meters long, weight: 45,500 tons) is capable of moving on its treads to the various open-air mine locations.

The last such epic transition happened in 2001, when it crawled from one mine to the other - across 22 kilometers of fields, roads, railway crossings, villages and countryside... As it could not go around the obstacles, it headed in a straight line, so the workers prepared the way by piling up sand cushions on top of highways and train tracks, removing power-lines and seeding the fields with special grass to make its progress smoother.


(the ultimate driver seat)


(images source)

Imagine seeing such a sight at breakfast, looking out of your kitchen window in a quiet suburbia... Look out, It's Comin Atch Ya! Anyway, it took them 3 weeks to move it. Once in place it started to bite into the coal, rock and earth with the vengeance...

But as the following chilling series of photographs testifies, it was chewing up not only the scenery, but an occasional stray bulldozer:





(images source)

By the way, Krupps home page shows some other relatives of this "monster family": -spreader, -crushing plants, -transport crawlers:



Update: (Courtesy Miss)
Check out this Bagger 288, Photoshop Version :)




CONTINUE TO PAGE TWO! ->

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YOUR COMMENTS::

43 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"it was chewing up not only the scenery, but an occasional stray bulldozer"
OMG that thing is freakin enormous.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

"OMG that thing is freakin enormous."

Funny, that's what my girlfriend said!

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't understand the Google Earth image posted at the top of this blog entry. It looks like just a patch of ground with a red circle around it. I'm pretty sure the machine isn't as big as the area surrounded by the red circle. And I'm pretty sure the other smaller circles don't hilite the machine, because there are several circles and only one machine...

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

Read the text above the image...

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Blogger Unknown said...

It's an underground particle accelerator, with 27 km circumference. So yes, the circle does represent the size of the machine. But it's hollow in the middle :)

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is not the biggest machine. Compare it to a Nimitz class aircraft carrier:

333 m in length
102,000 tons
powered by 2 A4W nuclear reactors
manned by 5000+ sailors
carries about 80 aircraft

which would you bet on in a knife fight?

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh my gosh. That entrencher is a beautiful thing. Awesome and humbling in that small-thing-in-the-face-of-very-large-thing philosophical bent and all that.

As for the chilling photos of the chewed up bulldozer, I was prepared for bloody brainmeats and carnage, not that I am disappointed that there was not. I think I just read rotten.com too often.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

OMG that thing is freakin enormous."

Funny, that's what my girlfriend said!

Funny, that is what your girlfriend said to me last night as well :O

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

That is the most awsome thing ive ever seen!! WOW!! It ate a bulldozer... SWEET!

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Blogger Unknown said...

Alright....the guy who mentioned the nimitz...that is a vehicle, which is NOT a single piece of machinery.

In any case, that would be the CERN particle accelerator.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hahaha it picked up a bulldozer?! That's ridiculous. I want one of those.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

Knife fight? The CERN accelerator. They've got anti-protons in that thing. Ponder on eequalsemceesquared in light of total conversion of mass to energy in a matter-antimatter collision, as opposed the the miniscule fraction of one percent conversion in either the reactors or the Hbombs on the Nim. And any Nimitz would be a little tired after sailing to Switzerland...

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Blogger Unknown said...

To the latest anonymous: particle accelerators can only produce as much antimatter as electricity can be pumped into them, and at nowhere near 100% efficiency. To generate even a gram of antimatter takes more energy than the entire world generates.

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Blogger Miss Cellania said...

Take a look at the Photoshop version.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

And why can't someone build me an AT-AT?

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

“Tell me the secret code Mr. Bond or I will feed you to the Crushing Plant.”

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

They could have won WW1 with this one.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

quarry lorries, quail before your lord.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

Big, but definetly not the largest moving machine of the world... USS Nimiz? meh.... Google supertanker "Jahre Viking" (over 458 meters long) and then check out http://www.f60.de/index_e.htm That thing is 502 meters long and runs on railroad tracks!!! Part of the carriage of F60 can be seen here: http://www.hfinster.de/StahlArt2/archive-Lausitz-BW-72-5-22.11.2000-en.html Have fun :)

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

I suppose they used anchor chain for dental floss to get the cat out!!

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

What a CAT-tastrophy!

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

God, I’ve always wanted a bulldozer. I always thought, what could stop a bulldozer? Snow? Nope. Ice? Nope. Rain? Nope. Mud? Nope. But apparently the Germans figured a way.

Now all I want is a Bagger 288!

Anyone know what gas mileage it’d get?

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

Something like 3 gas stations per mile.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

Let's just hope it doesn't gain sentience by being struck by lightning or something, else we're all in trouble.

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Blogger Luke H said...

Ok, so, two errors:
- Its 240 m long, not 300.
- Its the largest tracked vehicle in the world, not the largest moving machine.

That is all.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

that's right, this is not the biggest machine, but still it can freak me.. I can imagine the noice when the machine is running..

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

i guess it doesn't make extreme noise since it's powered by electricity.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

USS Nimitz is a ship, not a machine.

You can compare USS Nimitz with another ship, like the biggest ship in the world

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

I has it's own generators to make the electricity it uses, so there is some noise. However, the grinding of the huge excavation wheel should make a lot of noise as well...

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

"BURP!" ... (Excuse me.)

Krupp? Aren't these the same people who make my coffee maker?

"Yes please. Make mine black."

--- OK, from the US. I'm impressed. I would travel to Germany just to see this thing. Where is it? Can you get close? Tour it? Drive it?

--- Why don't we take to Iraq or Afghanistan? I doubt that Osama's IED's would have much effect on it!

WOWSER! My hat's off to the Germans!

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

First, Germany wouldn't have won WW1 with this type of machine, as it is not really fast - about 10 meters per minute.

Second, the weight is about 13000 metric tons.

Third, it does not use own generators, but gets its power by a long cable. The power sockets are a bit larger than the wall sockets at home, of course. ;-)

Then, the coffee maker would be from Krups, not Krupp. But fridges from Liebherr share the producer with the big cranes.

And last: It is possible to visit the Bagger 288 and a few of his smaller brothers. Three times in a year, there is "Open House", where people can visit the Garzweiler open cast pit. It is located western of Cologne. You will not come really close to 288, but almost be able to touch a slightly smaller machine. There are also a few view points around the pits "Garzweiler" and "Hambach", where it is possible to take photographs.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

The U.S. government should be using this type of earthmoving equipment to trench out and securie the U.S. southern border

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Blogger Avi Abrams said...

good idea, haha

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

You shouldn't anthropomorphize machines. They don't like it.

via

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Blogger UnforGiven said...

Frank says Germany wouldn't have won WW1 with type of machine. Well Frank, I got some sad news for ya, they didn't win.

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Anonymous jbaseven said...

Not sure how many of you are Halo fans, but just stumbled across this a few moments ago and thought it was worth posting here as it involves Bagger 228. I thought it was pretty cool my self, but anywho, here is the link:

http://halo.xbox.com/en-us/news/blog/halo-reach-bagger-288-forged/7438

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Telephone system is the largest machine ever made, not the collider.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

This reminded me of a section in Roger Zelazny's "Nine Princes in Amber"

"The second was a thing - I don't know how to describe it. It was a thing that looked like a smelter with arms, squatting in the middle of the road, reaching down and picking up cars, eating them"

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

Large machines gotta love it. Gotta to visit one of the worlds biggest copper mines in Chile a while back.

http://www.quarryed.co.uk/images/biggest%20truck.jpg

This picture shows one of the largest dump trucks down there... they look like specs down at the bottom of a open pit mine, but when they come to the top, wheels more than 2 x bigger than average person, dump bed I think I was told could hold four large cars with four more on top.

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Anonymous Noa Noa said...

The most powerful land vehicle I can think of would be the Terex Titan 33-19. It is a dump truck capible of hauling 350 tons. It has a giant 170-liter, 3300 horsepower V-16 turbodiesel and a matching electric drive system. This vehicle would run over any other land vehicle I can think of.

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Anonymous Good Reading said...

It doesn't necessarily apply "the bigger the better"...

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

To the nitwit who said uss Nimitz is not a machine, it is a machine, just like a car is a machine, or a drill press, or a cement mixer, or an x box, or the tiny mechanical surgical tools that save lives.

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Blogger Unknown said...

Hey Guys
We've made a video on the worlds biggest machines!
Check it out, thanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0-Nhy9jg2M

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