Return to Land Ships--Really Big, Really Bad Ideas: the 1,500 Ton Truck

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 856

Nothing quite gives me the rumbles as seeing pictures of Great Heavy Land Things on the move.  The NASA launch crawler is one of the biggest, though it doesn’t come close to this impossible LandClad pictured in Brett Holman’s excellent AirMinded blog:  the terrestrially-motorized and tankified version of obsolete ironclad (and I guess pre-Dreadnought) battleships.  I doubt that there would be more things more fearful than seeing something like this coming over the rise, Martian tripod death machines notwithstanding. The ironclad/pre-dreadnought would certainly have some problems moving around on the land, considering the huge power sources needed to move them while they were floating in water.  The giant tank also looks pretty pervious, all things considered, and (among many other things) looks as though it probably wouldn’t do so well in rainy weather—it looks like it would generate its own Operation Barbarossa mud wherever it went.  My guess too is that if got stuck, it was, well, stuck.  

The pursuit of sea-land machines has always had a huge ‘wow” factor, if for no other reason than it was just out-of-place and big.   I’ve written earlier here on Elmer Cotherell and James Eads proposal to build a combination railroad ship canal across the Tehuantepec isthmus in Nicaragua, hauling ships up and out of the water and transporting them across land on six railroad tracks pulled by juggernaught teams of locomotives.  In the fiction-made-fact world, Werner Herzog hauled a real steamship up and over a mountain for the filming of his quixotic Fitzcaraldo, which was simply a fabulous thing to see. (The film is a glory as is the film made on the making of the film.)

Getting back to Holman’s landship—I remembered something similar to this, and actually found a picture of it right here in my bizarre-archive.  Popular Science (December 1933) published this account of professor Eric R. Lyon’s¹ conception of the Diesel-powered “Navitruck” (its name looking like quite something different and not so pretty at the thing’s stern), a 1,500-ton amphibious truck with (what Lyon states to be ) 30’-tall (and 10’-wide) tires. Given this I approximate the monster would be 40’ wide and 100+’ long, and I guess at least 35’ tall.  A flattening tire on land would be a problem; I guess a blowout would be catastrophic. 

Did I mention that this thing could float?

Anyway Prof. Lyon envisioned a veritable Western ribbon of these things radiating from Denver to Duluth, to Kansas City (MO) and Galveston, and to Phoenix and on to Los Angeles.  Special gravel roads would be built for his trucks (cutting down on construction costs for more permanent roadways), and in the case of no roads, Lyon saw that the bow of his ship could both cut through impenetrable South American jungles as well as break ice in frozen Arctic waters.  Somehow the roads are seen as being 40’ wide for single lane traffic, and 80’ for double lanes, which doesn’t leave much room for error.

There are some real mammoth trucks rumbling around mining operations, the Caterpillar 797e and Terex trucks, being two of the world’s biggest.  They are 22’ and 24’ high and 300 and 280 ton machines, respectively, and although they begin to approximate the brutishness of the Lyon machine, it would still take five (or ten) of these beasts to fill the shoes of the “Navitruck”.   Also, a big point which isn't addressed with the Lyon's machine is fuel.  The thing would have to have something like a 10,000-gallon fuel tank--which means the fuel alone would weigh 60 or 80 tons--to avoid having fuel stations spread like flies along the landship byways.  Fuel consumption wouldn't be measured by the gallons/mile with something as monumentally heavy as this--it would be measured by the gallons/minute.  Since the Caterpillar 797e drinks about a gallon a minute with a modern efficient engine, I'll make the wild iterative guess that the Navitruck would gulp 20/gallons a minute (?!), which would be a very hard rate of pumping at the gas station this afternoon.  That means that this trucks would be filling-up twice a day after getting 225 miles/tank.  At 15 cents a gallon (in 1933) that would make a $3,000 fill-up, which means it would cost about six thousand 1933 dollars to make it from Denver to L.A. Provided it didn't break down.  [The wheels were on a fixed axle.  Yikes.] The average salary in 1933 was a little more than half the cost of this fill-up, or about $72,000 in 2009 dollars.  On the other hand, if these things hauled 3 million pounds the fuel costs for moving each pound would be about 2 (2009) cents. Or maybe not.  (All of this scratch-pad reasoning might be wrong, but not horribly so, I don't think.)

There were definitely more convenient and already-exiting ways of hauling freight at this time, and the system had  a much more robust delivery system and reach.  That system was called "railroads".

All in all, I’ve come to the conclusion that ship should stay in the water.

Note:

1.  Professor Lyons (Kansas State University physics department), was no stranger to big ideas, appearing frequently in popular magazines like this and the Electrical Experimenter, among others.  

Comments

[Ray Girvan]

"(All of this scratch-pad reasoning might be wrong, but not horribly so, I don't think.)"

Agreed - unless we go to the even more gruesome possibility of a colossal nuclear-powered land truck...

[Dave Dubé]

I have a photograph taken in the Forties of a rather large vehicle that I've never seen before, taken by an Army photographer. I'd like to id the thing, but everyone I've shown it to is at as big a loss as I am for an explanation. It could be a fuel hauler, but there's a door in the side of it for stepping into it, and no hoses or external connections for fuel. The tires are about ten foot tall...

[Ray Girvan]

Sounds fascinating! Let's see it.

[Dave Dubé]

I sent a scan of it to lily@segalbooks.com

If that's not the right place to send it, let me know: ddcachets@gmail.com

[John Ptak]

Yes, send it on Dave. Email it to jfptak@thescienceboosktore.com

[Ray Girvan]

Thanks, Dave. Interesting. It's obviously not an APC (which was my first thought). The location appears to be a racecourse. There's some kind of logo on the side. Is that as high a resolution as you can get? I'd say best bet is get a more high-res scan and throw it open for identification. If you're not a member, I'll happily post it to Ask Metafilter http://ask.metafilter.com/