h a l f b a k e r yNot so much a thought experiment as a single neuron misfire.
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Imagine bicycle wheel tilted at a 45 degree angle to the ground. Glue spoons to the outside, so they scoop when the wheel turns. Mount this device on the top of a suitably sized vehicle. Now upscale it about a thousand times.
Intended to free boats grounded in canals or other narrow passageways, this
massive machine would have a tilted wheel-shaped excavator. The wheel would have scoops on the rim, and the scoops could drop the dirt on the higher side of the wheel, leaving them free to scoop more dirt on the bottom.
Were a large ship caught in a canal it would dig downward and sideways into the earth, undermining the land the ship is resting on, eventually freeing it.
Moving lots of dirt in a hurry
https://www.google....mobile-gws-wiz-serp
is a well studied problem. [pertinax, Mar 25 2021]
Egypt's Suez Canal blocked by huge container ship
https://www.bbc.com...iddle-east-56505413
[xaviergisz, Mar 25 2021]
How to dredge
https://www.marinei...-maritime-industry/
[pertinax, Mar 25 2021]
Is that ship still stuck?
https://istheshipstillstuck.com/
[Voice, Mar 27 2021]
Airbags launch
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7QXZI9MNMLg
[xenzag, Mar 27 2021]
Voice's link gets honorable mention in AS#143
https://us5.campaig...474e2&id=cf13207312
(evidence Underhill is likely on HB) [Sgt Teacup, Mar 31 2021]
[link]
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I would hear more about the free boats and land I can scoop. |
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You're reinventing the bucket wheel on a reclaimer (see link). |
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Make your Liberator float and it could be employed to
dig through the container ship! Ha! |
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The boat ran aground. Why didn't they simply off-load some
of the conveniently-containerised load with a crane (shirley
a floating or crawling crane wouldn't be too far away...)?
Then it could float to a slightly deeper part for re-loading. |
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//You're reinventing the bucket wheel on a reclaimer // |
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No, I'm picturing something much larger that can dig deeply into the ground at a 45 degree angle. The bucket wheel is swept back and forth for strip mining. That wouldn't help when you want to undermine a hundred meters of shore. |
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The state of the art of removing undersea sand seems to be
represented by the hydraulic dredger (see link). In the same link,
you can see a "spoons-on-a-wheel" approach discussed under
the heading "bucket ladder dredgers", where it is deprecated as
being noisy and, more importantly, slow. |
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//Why didn't they simply off-load some of the
conveniently-containerised load// - Getting a big
enough crane close to this boat is hard. Containers
are usually unloaded with vast purpose-built dockside
cranes and anything else is going to be much, much
slower. Also, if you unload the boat without making
sure it stays evenly loaded, it'll break in half. |
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Solution: Block the canal at the other end and wait
until the water level rises a few more feet with
the
first tide. |
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Second solution: airbags under front of ship -
inflate airbags - pull ship along them like a weight
on logs. See link |
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[hippo], eleven or twelve Kaman K-Max K-1200s could lift each fully-loaded (67,200lbs*) 40-foot container. If we had 22 K-Max helicopters, we could simultaneously lift a container at each end/side, thus maintaining non-break-in-halfage. |
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*assuming the max gross weight does not include undeclared migrants within the walls of the container (info from repeated sad but true Customs incidents) |
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//it'll break in half//
That's the solution! Just split it down the middle (where's an
explosives expert when you need one... :-( ) to let the
backlog through, and deal with the containers as & when
possible. |
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