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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.
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]
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]
The constant revision eventually led to the creation of the first tank. While the Mark 1 and later variations were smaller than the initial behemoths engineers envisioned, they still used naval guns, including the QF 6-pounder Hotchkiss, later shortened to the QF 6-pounder guns.
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 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.
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]
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]
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 800-1,000 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]
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 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]
Even though, by technicality they are 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]
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 these materials; easily dwarfing any other ground vehicles by several orders of magnitude. These vehicles listed are:
An unsuccessful vehicle designed to explore Antarctica.
A large civilian mining vehicle. Their large size are compared to ocean liners on land. The Bagger 293 remains the heaviest land vehicle ever made. [11] [12]
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]
Similar in size to bucket-wheel excavators and used in surface mining and dredging.
Massive excavators that move by "walking" on two, pneumatic feet. The Big Muskie was one of the largest terrestrial vehicles ever built.
Extremely large power shovels – The Captain rivaled bucket-wheel excavators and dragline excavators in sheer size. [15]
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 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 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 superfluously 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.
Large underground vehicles designed to drill and create subterranean subway transits, some of which weigh about 5,000 tons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The crawler-transporters, formally known as the Missile Crawler Transporter Facilities, are a pair of tracked vehicles used to transport spacecraft from NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) along the Crawlerway to Launch Complex 39. They were originally used to transport the Saturn IB and Saturn V rockets during the Apollo, Skylab and Apollo–Soyuz programs. They were then used to transport Space Shuttles from 1981 to 2011. The crawler-transporters carry vehicles on the mobile launcher platforms used by NASA, and after each launch return to the pad to take the platform back to the VAB.
Bagger 288, built by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine.
A bucket-wheel excavator (BWE) is a large heavy equipment machine used in surface mining.
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.
A power shovel, also known as a motor shovel, stripping shovel, front shovel, mining shovel or rope shovel, is a bucket-equipped machine usually powered by steam, diesel fuel, gasoline or electricity and used for digging and loading earth or fragmented rock and for mineral extraction. Power shovels are a type of rope/cable excavator, where the digging arm is controlled and powered by winches and steel ropes, rather than hydraulics like in the modern hydraulic excavators. Basic parts of a power shovel include the track system, cabin, cables, rack, stick, boom foot-pin, saddle block, boom, boom point sheaves and bucket. The size of bucket varies from 0.73 to 53 cubic meters.
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.
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 Seawise Giant, 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.
In transportation, heavy lift refers to the handling and installation of heavy items which are indivisible, and of weights generally accepted to be over 100 tons and of widths/heights of more than 100 meters. These oversized items are transported from one place to another, then lifted or installed into place. Characteristic for heavy-lift goods is the absence of standardization, which requires individual transport planning.
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.
P&H Mining Equipment sells drilling and material handling machinery under the "P&H" trademark. The firm is an operating subsidiary of Joy Global Inc. In 2017 Joy Global Inc. was acquired by Komatsu Limited of Tokyo, Japan, and is now known as Komatsu Mining Corporation and operates as a subsidiary of Komatsu.
Joy Global Inc. was a company that manufactured and serviced heavy equipment used in the extraction and haulage of coal and minerals in both underground and surface mining. The company had manufacturing facilities in Alabama, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin, Australia, Canada, China, France, South Africa, Poland and the United Kingdom. In 2017, Joy Global was acquired by Komatsu Limited and was renamed Komatsu Mining Corp.
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.
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.
Bagger 1473 is a bucket-wheel excavator left abandoned in a field in the municipality of Schipkau in Germany.
The XGC88000 crawler crane is an 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.