Bagger 288: The World’s Biggest Machine

By Alex in Science & Tech, World Records on Jan 26, 2010 at 3:24 pm


Photo: Snorky [wikipedia]

In the coal stripmine Hambach in Germany, there was a machine so big that it boggles the mind.the Bagger 288:

This is the 45,000 ton Bagger 288 digger built by Krupps in Germany, and it is the largest land based machine built by humans on the face of the planet.

It’s not fast, moving at about 2 meters a minute, but boy can it shift rubble.

It can dig up 240,000 cubic meters of dirt a day. That’s about the same as a football field sized hole that’s 30 metres deep.

And why do you need a machine so absurdly big? So we can strip mine coal out of the ground, transport it hundreds of miles on massive trains and take it to power stations where we burn it to make electricity. And where does quite a chunk of this electricity go? Strangely back to the digger, as it requires 16.56 megawatts of electricity to operate. You’re not going to find a lot of solar panels on this leviathan.

Once it starts digging, it literally will not stop. Anything in its path will be chewed up, including this 60 ton bulldozer. How, I ask you, do you miss a 60 ton bulldozer?

Link

But what is the true purpose of such a machine? Let’s all welcome our new digger overlord, as explained by Rathergood.


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  1. Minnesotastan
    Jan 26th, 2010 at 3:34 pm

    As long as the machine isn’t self-aware, I think we’re all right. (That’s an awesome video at the Rathergood link, btw…)

  2. Zavatone
    Jan 26th, 2010 at 4:12 pm

    Krupps? Hope is has a coffee maker in it.

  3. CheeseDuck
    Jan 26th, 2010 at 4:59 pm

    I guess the LHC isn’t a machine?

  4. l'elk!
    Jan 26th, 2010 at 5:25 pm

    this has alway been my favorite picture of the machine. really gives a great size comparison: http://www.lakata.org/arch/bagger288.jpg

  5. Justin
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 12:44 am

    Reminds me of the mining machines we saw in Avatar.

  6. Kr0nos
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 7:38 am

    impressive engineering

    “as it requires 16.56 megawatts of electricity to operate”
    per hour // day // minute ?

    thanks to the subvention of the german state it’s cheeper to built such a monterious beauty to burn pure dirt(brown coal), as anything else

  7. geoff pedder
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 8:35 am

    yeah, cheeseduck is correct, the LHC is considered the worlds biggest machine.

  8. George
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 8:59 am

    @Kronos
    1 Watt = 1 Joule per second.

    You might be confusing this with KWh, Kilowatthours, the amount of energy that is consumed in one hour by something that has a power of one kilowatt

  9. Alician
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 12:31 pm

    This is considered the world’s largest MOVING machine.

    Not that it is what you’d call “portable”….

  10. Gary
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 5:11 pm

    Its going to eat me.

  11. charlie
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 7:04 pm

    a football field is 100 yards not 100 feet. Nice try though.

  12. EZengineer
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 7:08 pm

    Ceeseduck & Geoff Pedder: This is the biggest machine on the face of the earth, as it is stated (“land based”). The LHC may be the biggest, but it is below the face of the earth, so the statement remains valid.

    Cheers,

    EZ

  13. omgsun
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 7:48 pm

    I’ve been on this sucker. My students worked for Laubag and they took me on a tour. It’s huge – you have to walk up three flights of stairs to get to the office. Yes, there’s an office the size of a small studio apartment with a kitchenette and bathroom.

    Even the tires for the trucks used to haul away stuff are taller than me with my hands up!! I felt like Alice in Wonderland LOL

  14. omgsun
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 7:50 pm

    Oh, and the bit about it chewing up everything in its path is also true. IT’s the only way to get at the brown coal. They moved entire small towns, including a centuries-old church, out of the way!

  15. mack butcher
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 8:25 pm

    and all the tree huggers are bitchin at the coal miners in WV, and KY. whay dont they jump on hat band wagon and leave us alone

  16. big dred
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 9:11 pm

    it says “largest land based machine”

    the LHC is underground. so its not techincally a land based machine.

  17. bronco351
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 10:07 pm

    well it is awsome but who can forget about the shuttle transport.I believe it weighs as much or more ..and it actually has to move how many thousands of tons on it to the launch site.

  18. Gerald
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 10:12 pm

    Kinda looks like Devastator from Tranformers 2.

  19. the Juice
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 10:14 pm

    “The Bagger 288 can dig a 100-foot-deep hole that’s the size of a football field in a day.”

    Isn’t a football field measured in yards? 3ft=1yard right? Did somebody make a mistake or did I miss something? And that’s not that impressive considering its size as a machine… if the hole was as big as a football field and was 3 football fields in depth… for a day’s work that’s something to write about…

  20. GB
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 10:46 pm

    The cost to run that puppy, never mine the money that went into designing, maintaining a machine that large. Could and should have been put towards a nuclear power plant.
    No power used to find fuel, no dust put into air, no old town moved in the name of digging brown coal. Were’s the green idea behind this machine, I’ll tell ya! Green in someones pocket not in the greater good of man and global warming issues.
    My two cents, sorry thats all I can afford.
    GOD Bless us all
    GB

  21. Bryce
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 10:53 pm

    This person that wrote this is retarded a football field is 100 YARDS! NOT FEET! WOW

  22. anonymous123
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 11:00 pm

    hamburger

  23. Bilal
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 11:08 pm

    Burning of coal is a vital source of emitting green house gases in our environment. Why don’t germen try to find solution of generating electricity with some renewable sources of energy. Making such a huge machines is no doubt, a master piece of engineering, but still, we want to save our planet from coal burning gases.

  24. Alex
    Jan 27th, 2010 at 11:16 pm

    @Bilal – most of the world’s electricity (including in the United States) is generated by burning coal because it’s cheap!

    Nuclear is cheaper, but fear of spent nuclear waste and horror stories like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island kept us from building more nuclear power plants.

  25. Lily Wang 125
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 12:01 am

    hmmm, seems EXTREMELY bad for the environment. they shouldn’t make things like that!!! it totally unbalances the forces of nature and leaves chemical dirt and stuff like that.

  26. spencer
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 12:22 am

    it says at the beging that it can did a hundred foot hole thats as large as a football field but a football field is a hundred YARDS.

  27. I_Am_The_F@#$ING_INFLUENCE
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 12:39 am

    so where can i purchase one of these bad boys in the
    US of A?

  28. ShowMeYourTitsBitch
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 12:40 am

    i think u can get it on ebay

  29. Viruspunk101
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 12:53 am

    Come on…..how many us of us want to see this in the next transformers movie

  30. austin5452
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 1:06 am

    hopefully Michael Bay doesn’t know about this machine otherwise he’ll have himself another transformer

  31. smashyourfaceopenbitch
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 1:08 am

    how do you move something like that to the proper location which requires the digging?

  32. smashyourfaceopenbitch
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 1:10 am

    i’m not sure if people realize what a 100 ft hole the size of a football field really means. take the size of a football field, 100 yards, now dig a hole 100 feet down over the span of 100 yards. thats what they mean. this is why we dont want mexicans in the u.s.

  33. Snipen543
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 1:37 am

    Looks like the machine from Transformers 2… the one that eats the pyramid.

  34. CHECKMATE
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 2:04 am

    like a big brother of the bucket wheel excavator here in the coal mine of the Philippines,

  35. Bilal
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 4:22 am

    @Alex – Although coal and other hydrocarbon products are used to generate electricity worldwide because it is cheap than any renewable source of energy, but one day, it will finish and that day will come soon.
    So, I think, concentration in other forms of energy could be a better idea than making such a giant machinery for coal mine digging.

  36. Joel
    Jan 28th, 2010 at 8:13 pm

    I have been inside of this Big Brutus, in Kansas USA. It (NOW) is the second largest and was built in early 1960′s. Each bucket full of coal will fill THREE TRAIN CARS…WoW! Yes…USA developed this first, and they (maybe) just improved it a bit.

  37. Marko Gross
    Feb 2nd, 2010 at 4:04 am

    I’ve once seen a cool video with a funny song about this machine. Has anyone seen it too and can post a link? I can’t find it anymore.

    Sinerely
    Marko
    http://www.mascus.de/Baumaschinen

  38. madd hatter
    Mar 27th, 2010 at 2:04 pm

    Yea those tree huggers wanna bitch about the environment & “going green”. I say screw the environment. Use all you can now. It won’t be our problem in a hundred years so let the great-grandkids worry about it. If the krauts wanna dig up their country hell let ‘em. They couldn’t win 2 world wars so I don’t think they’re much of a threat to the world or the environment.

  39. oh man
    Apr 28th, 2010 at 12:08 pm

    FFS why so many idiots posting here get confused at a 30m deep hole the size of a football field? take some more ketamine you *ucktards


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