Landship

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The Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60 is one of the largest terrestrial vehicles by any physical dimensions. Panorama F60Museum.jpg
The Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60 is one of the largest terrestrial vehicles by any physical dimensions.

A landship is a large land vehicle that travels exclusively on land. Its name is meant to distinguish it from vehicles that travel through other mediums such as conventional ships, airships, and spaceships.

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Military committees

Landship Committee

The British Landship Committee formed during World War I to develop armored vehicles for use in trench warfare. The British proposed building "landships," super-heavy tanks capable of crossing the trench systems of the Western Front. The committee originated from the armored car division of the Royal Naval Air Service. [1] It gained the notable support of Winston Churchill. [2]

Military vehicles

Schematic for the T-42 Soviet tank T-42 Soviet tank.jpg
Schematic for the T-42 Soviet tank

Tank

The tank was originally referred to as the landship, owing to the continuous development from the Landship Committee. The concept of a 1,000-ton armored, fighting machine on land quickly became too impractical and too costly for it to be realistically conceived. [3] As such, the landship project proposed a smaller vehicle. The first conceptual tank prototype was for a 300-ton vehicle that would be made by suspending a "sort of Crystal Palace body" between three enormous wheels, allegedly inspired by the Great Wheel at Earls Court in London. [4] Six of these 'Big Wheel' landships were eventually commissioned. However, even at a revised weight, 300 tons was considered impractical given the technology present, but the influence of the big wheel would persist in the "creeping grip" tracks of the first tanks, which were wrapped around the entire body of the machine. [4]

Mark I tank

The constant revision eventually led to the creation of the first tank. The Mark I and later variations were smaller than the initial behemoths engineers envisioned but still used naval guns, including the QF 6-pounder Hotchkiss, later shortened to the QF 6-pounder guns.

Model of Dora, sister railway gun of Schwerer Gustav. GeschutzDora2.JPG
Model of Dora, sister railway gun of Schwerer Gustav.

Schwerer Gustav

Schwerer Gustav was a German super-heavy railway gun developed in the late 1930s. It was the largest caliber rifled weapon ever used in combat and, in terms of overall weight, the heaviest mobile artillery piece ever built. With a length of 47.3 meters (155 feet, 2 inches), a width of 7.1 meters (23 feet, 4 inches) and a height of 11.6 meters (38 feet, 1 inch), the Schwerer Gustav weighed 1,350 tonnes. The gun's massive size required its own diesel-powered generator, a special railway track and an oversized crew of 2,750 (250 to assemble and fire the gun in 3 days and 2,500 to lay the tracks). By definition, the Schwerer Gustav would have qualified as a landship, albeit one limited to rails.

Super-heavy tank

Super-heavy tanks are massive tanks, concepts of which led to gargantuan vehicles akin to naval warships. Super-heavy tanks such as the British TOG 2 and the Soviet T-42 were built in a similar layout as naval battleships, albeit on a smaller scale.

T-35

The T-35 was a Soviet multi-turreted heavy tank. Nicknamed the "Land Battleship," it continues to be one of few armored historical vehicles named as such. [5]

Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus

The Maus was a German super-heavy tank from the 2nd World War, weighing in at 188 tons. It was heaviest tank ever built. Although 141 were ordered, only one finished prototype and one partially finished prototype were in working order by the end of the war due to the Allies bombing the only factory capable of producing the tank. [6]

An artist depiction of the Landkreuzer P. 1000, with a size comparison to Maus and Tiger I Comparison of Landkreuzer P 1000 Ratte, Maus and Tiger tanks.png
An artist depiction of the Landkreuzer P. 1000, with a size comparison to Maus and Tiger I

Landkreuzer P.1000

The Landkreuzer P.1000 was a super-heavy tank designed by Edward Grote for Nazi Germany in 1942. If completed, the P.1000 would have been 35 meters (115 feet) long and 14 meters (46 feet) wide, with a weight of ranging from 800 to 1,000 tons depending on the variant. The latest variant would have been armed with twin 28 cm guns housed in a central turret and two turrets with twin 12.8 cm cannons mounted towards the front of the hull. [7]

Zubr-class LCAC

Extremely large hovercraft such as the Zubr-class LCAC used by both the Russian Navy and the PLAN could also technically cover some aspect of landship design by factor of it being also capable of traversing overland as a partial-terrestrial vehicle. At over 50 meters long with a max tonnage weight of 555 tons, it is the closest one could get to a modern military landcraft, although it is more of an amphibious hovership than anything else.

Siege towers

The Helepolis was the largest of the siege towers. Helepolis siege tower, 4th century BC, Greece (model).jpg
The Helepolis was the largest of the siege towers.

Siege towers were ancient forms of superheavy ground vehicles and siege engines that grew in prominence during the ancient world right up to the Renaissance. They required dozens of men or beasts of burden to move their bulk. They were exceptionally tall, had multiple decks, staircases and ladders, and some were armed internally with emplaced weapons such as ballistas, catapults or onagers and cannons. The largest of them all was the ancient Helepolis, a superheavy siege tower from ancient Greece that was 40 meters tall, 20 meters wide, 160 tons in weight and required a crew of 3,400 men. By definition, siege towers were effectively the medieval equivalent of a ground-based attack transport troopship. [8]

Armoured trains

Even though they are technically a conglomeration of individual vehicles, armoured trains are often the closest one would get to a modern landship design. Armoured trains are often extraordinarily fast for their size and commonly measure over a hundred meters long carrying hundreds of passengers. Likewise, armoured trains are incredibly variable and often used as a mobile headquarters on rails. They are powerful enough to mount naval weapons, with many railroad guns being comparable to actual naval calibers. Likewise, like ships, the majority of armoured trains were often christened with a name. Currently, the only country utilizing armoured trains in the modern era is Russia, where it is used more akin to a land-base landing ship on rails as of December 2023. [9] [10]

Civilian vehicles

The vast majority of the world's largest terrestrial vehicles come from the engineering and mining sector. As their role involves the collection of vast underground resources in large bulk, their physical dimensions dramatically increased to accommodate the transferral of those materials and easily dwarf any other ground vehicles by several orders of magnitude. These vehicles listed are:

Antarctic Snow Cruiser

An unsuccessful vehicle designed to explore Antarctica.

Bucket-wheel excavators

The Bagger 288 bucket-wheel excavator Bagger-garzweiler.jpg
The Bagger 288 bucket-wheel excavator

A large civilian mining vehicle. Their large size are compared to ocean liners on land. The SRs 8000-class or Type SRs 8000 bucket-wheel excavators (of which Bagger 293, the lead SRs 8000, is the heaviest land vehicle ever made) remain the only ground vehicle to be referred with a naval classification. [11] [12]

Conveyor bridges

Large mining vehicles used in open-pit mining. The Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60 is considered the largest vehicle in physical dimensions of any type and has been referred to as a "lying Eiffel Tower." [13] [14]

Bucket chain excavators

Similar in size to bucket-wheel excavators and used in surface mining and dredging, the largest of which are the Type Es 3750s.

Dragline excavators

Massive excavators that move by "walking" on two, pneumatic feet. The Big Muskie was one of the largest terrestrial vehicles ever built.

Superheavy power shovels

Extremely large power shovels The Captain rivaled bucket-wheel excavators and dragline excavators in sheer size. [15]

Spreaders

Spreaders are incredibly large ground vehicles that are meant to 'spread' overburden into a neat, consistent and orderly manner. They closely resemble both a bucket-wheel excavator and a stacker in appearance. They are identifiable by their long discharge boom which can range as long as 195 meters in length. [16]

Stackers

Stackers are mining vehicles that exclusively run on rails and are imposing in size, with some stacker-reclaimer hybrids having a boom length of 25 to 60 meters. [17] These vehicles may resemble a spreader, however, a stacker's role is to pile bulk material onto a stockpile so that a reclaimer could collect and redistribute the materials. Stackers, therefore, often work in conjunction with reclaimers.

Reclaimers

Reclaimers are mining vehicles that, like stackers, run exclusively on rails. Reclaimers are traditionally very wide vehicles that come in various shapes and types; from bridge reclaimers to overarching portal reclaimers and the bucket-wheel reclaimers which superficially resemble a bucket-wheel excavator in appearance. Reclaimers, as its name implies, 'reclaim' bulk material such as ores and cereals from a stockpile dumped by a stacker and are quite large, with bucket-wheel types usually having a boom length of 25 to 60 meters. [16] As such, these two vehicles often work in conjunction with each other.

Tunnel boring machines

Large underground vehicles designed to drill and create subterranean subway transits, some of which weigh about 5,000 tons.

NASA crawler-transporter

An ultra-heavy transporter used to ferry spacecraft to the launching pad. At 2,000 tons each, they are the second largest ground vehicle that still use an internal combustion engine as its source of propulsion rather than being reliant on an external power source.

Gantry cranes and container cranes

Mobile gantry cranes and container cranes are notable for their large, imposing size and dimensions with weights varying from 900 tons up to 2000 tons. These vehicles are either driven by wheels or rails and require a small crew for their size. The largest gantry cranes such as Samson and Goliath are known to be one of the largest movable land machines in the world, with the Honghai Crane being the largest and the most powerful of its kind at 150m tall, a span of 124m and the total weight of 11,000 tons, with the strength to lift up to 22,000 tons.

Ultraheavy crawler cranes

Certain crawler cranes are known to reach gargantuan size. Whilst not the same extant as gantry or container cranes, the very largest, such as the XGC88000 crawler crane remains the largest self-propelled ground vehicle to date, beating out the crawler-transporters in both gross tonnage and sheer dimensions.

Breitspurbahn

A proposed civilian railway line envisioned by Adolf Hitler. These super enlarged transit lines would have accommodated ultra-wide trains that would be 500 meters (1,640 feet) long.

Design concepts

Parades and events

Fictional examples

1904 illustration of H. G. Wells' The Land Ironclads, showing huge ironclad land vessels, equipped with pedrail wheels HG Wells Land Ironclads 1904.jpg
1904 illustration of H. G. Wells' The Land Ironclads , showing huge ironclad land vessels, equipped with pedrail wheels

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Military engineering vehicle</span> Battlefield support vehicle

A military engineering vehicle is a vehicle built for construction work or for the transportation of combat engineers on the battlefield. These vehicles may be modified civilian equipment or purpose-built military vehicles. The first appearance of such vehicles coincided with the appearance of the first tanks, these vehicles were modified Mark V tanks for bridging and mine clearance. Modern military engineering vehicles are expected to fulfill numerous roles such as; bulldozer, crane, grader, excavator, dump truck, breaching vehicle, bridging vehicle, military ferry, amphibious crossing vehicle, and combat engineer section carrier.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heavy equipment</span> Vehicles designed for executing construction tasks

Heavy equipment, heavy machinery, earthmovers, construction vehicles, or construction equipment, refers to heavy-duty vehicles specially designed to execute construction tasks, most frequently involving earthwork operations or other large construction tasks. Heavy equipment usually comprises five equipment systems: the implement, traction, structure, power train, and control/information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dragline excavator</span> Piece of heavy equipment used in civil engineering and surface mining

A dragline excavator is a heavy-duty excavator used in civil engineering and surface mining. It was invented in 1904, and presented an immediate challenge to the steam shovel and its diesel and electric powered descendant, the power shovel. Much more efficient than even the largest of the latter, it enjoyed a heyday in extreme size for most of the 20th century, first becoming challenged by more efficient rotary excavators in the 1950s, then superseded by them on the upper end from the 1970s on.

Bagger 288 Bucket wheel excavator built by the German company Krupp

Bagger 288, previously known as the MAN TAKRAF RB288 built by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bucket-wheel excavator</span> Heavy mining excavator

A bucket-wheel excavator (BWE) is a large heavy equipment machine used in surface mining.

Big Muskie Former dragline excavator

Big Muskie was a dragline excavator built by Bucyrus-Erie and owned by the Central Ohio Coal Company, weighing 13,500 short tons (12,200 t) and standing nearly 22 stories tall. It mined coal in the U.S. state of Ohio from 1969 to 1991. It was dismantled and sold for scrap in 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heavy equipment operator</span>

A heavy equipment operator operates heavy equipment used in engineering and construction projects. Typically only skilled workers may operate heavy equipment, and there is specialized training for learning to use heavy equipment.

TAKRAF Group (“TAKRAF”), is a global German industrial company. Through its brands, TAKRAF and DELKOR, the Group provides equipment, systems and services to the mining and associated industries.

The Landkreuzer P 1500 Monster was a purported German pre-prototype super-heavy self-propelled gun designed during World War II. While it is mentioned in a number of popular works about World War II projects, there is no solid documentation for the program’s existence, and it may have only been a semi-serious proposal, or even an outright hoax, much like the Panzer IX and Panzer X.

Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60 Mining equipment

F60 is the series designation of five overburden conveyor bridges used in brown coal (lignite) opencast mining in the Lusatian coalfields in Germany. They were built by the former Volkseigener Betrieb TAKRAF in Lauchhammer and are the largest movable technical industrial machines in the world. As overburden conveyor bridges, they transport the overburden which lies over the coal seam. The cutting height is 60 m (200 ft), hence the name F60. In total, the F60 is up to 80 m (260 ft) high and 240 m (790 ft) wide; with a length of 502 m (1,647 ft), it is described as the lying Eiffel Tower, making these behemoths not only the longest vehicle ever made—beating Prelude FLNG, the longest ship—but the largest vehicle by physical dimensions ever made by humankind. In operating condition, it weighs 13,600 metric tons making the F60 also one of the heaviest land vehicles ever made, beaten only by Bagger 293, which is a giant bucket-wheel excavator. Nevertheless, despite its immense size, it is operated by only a crew of 14.

Marion 6360, also known as The Captain, was a giant power shovel built by the Marion Power Shovel company. Completed and commissioned on October 15 1965, it was one of the largest land vehicles ever built, exceeded only by some dragline and bucket-wheel excavators. The shovel originally started work with Southwestern Illinois Coal Corporation, but the owners were soon bought out by Arch Coal. Everything remained the same at the mine except for the colors which were changed to red, white, and blue. Like most mining vehicles of extreme size, Marion 6360 only required a surprisingly small amount of men to operate, a total of four consisting of a operator, oiler, welder, and a ground man who looked after the trailing cable.

Bagger 293 Giant bucket wheel excavator made by the German industrial company TAKRAF

Bagger 293, previously known as the MAN TAKRAF RB293, is a giant bucket-wheel excavator made by the German industrial company TAKRAF, formerly an East German Kombinat.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spreader (mining)</span>

Spreaders in mining are heavy equipment used in surface mining and mechanical engineering/civil engineering. The primary function of a spreader is to act as a continuous spreading machine in large-scale open pit mining operations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bucket chain excavator</span> Heavy equipment used in surface mining and dredging

A bucket chain excavator (BCE) is a piece of heavy equipment used in surface mining and dredging. BCEs use buckets on a revolving chain to remove large quantities of material. They are similar to bucket-wheel excavators and trenchers. Bucket chain excavators remove material from below their plane of movement, which is useful if the pit floor is unstable or underwater.

A conveyor bridge is a piece of mining equipment used in strip mining for the removal of overburden and for dumping it on the inner spoil bank of the open-cut mine. It is used together with multibucket excavators, frequently bucket chain excavators, that remove the overburden which is moved to the bridge by connecting conveyors. Conveyor bridges are used in working horizontally layered deposits with soft overburden rock in areas where mean annual temperatures are above freezing. They are frequently used in lignite mining.

The XGC88000 crawler crane is class of extremely large ultraheavy crawler crane made by XCMG. With a lifting capacity of 3,600 to 4,000 tons, a total boom length of 144 meters and a total gross weight of 5,350 tons. The XGC88000 crawler crane became the largest tracked mobile crane in the world, beating out the previous record holder, the Liebherr LR 13000 when it officially came into production in 2013. However, when it comes to absolute size, movability, and strength, the title still goes to the Honghai Crane which runs on rails.

Type SRs 8000 bucket-wheel excavator Family of Bucket wheel excavators

The Type SRs 8000 or less commonly known as the SRs 8000-class, is a family of bucket-wheel excavators known for being one of the largest terrestrial vehicles ever made by man, with Bagger 293 its - "lead vessel" - being the largest ground vehicle in history. The Type SRs 8000 classification was coined by TAKRAF to describe specifically, Bagger 293, although it is unclear if this extends to its other "sibling vehicles" within the same bulk.

Type SRs 2000 bucket-wheel excavator Series of Bucket wheel excavators

The Type SRs 2000 is a class of medium-sized bucket-wheel excavators built by TAKRAF. It is by far, one of the most common and recognizable BWEs built and sold by TAKRAF, with 56 Type SRs 2000s being commissioned and launched as of 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crawler excavator</span> Type of heavy construction equipment

A crawler excavator, also known as a track-type excavator or tracked excavator, is a type of heavy construction equipment primarily used for excavation and earthmoving tasks. It is characterized by its tracked undercarriage, which provides superior mobility and traction compared to wheeled excavators, especially in soft, uneven, or unstable terrain..

References

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  14. "Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60".
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