Have you ever wondered what it would look like if God got a Bionicle set and
then lost the instructions? Well, meet Bagger 293: the largest land vehicle
in the world. Given the fact that it’s the size of an aircraft carrier and looks like
it would be used to torture the Iron Giant, just seeing it tends to prompt a number of questions.
Questions like, “what” and “how” and “but like, why?” And that’s why we’re here.
Let’s start out answering “what” by getting some stats out of the way. Bagger 293 weighs 31 million
pounds, approximately the weight of 31 million one-pound weights, or 14,000 tonnes. It’s 722 feet
or 220 meters long, about 0.00152% the length of the Pacific ocean. And in terms of height,
it’s 310 ft, which is 94.5 meters or 437 flergs, which is a unit of measurement I just made up
that’s about eight and a half inches. So, why would anyone ever need to build
something that looks like a Transformer got stuck transitioning between a table saw and an oil rig?
Well, for the same reason the United States killed thousands of Chinese laborers in the 1800s:
mining. Specifically, surface mining, which is like regular mining except that instead of going
through all the effort of digging tunnels under the ground, you cut out the middleman and get rid
of the ground entirely. And that’s where Bagger 293 comes in: it turns the ground into not-ground,
a process some experts refer to as digging. Moving on to “how,” the way it does that digging
all comes down to this: it’s called a bucket wheel, and it’s the whole point of
this monstrosity. In fact, the technical term for Bagger 293 is “bucket wheel excavator.” In German,
that translates to “schaufelradbagger,” while in English, it translates to “bucket wheel
excavator.” Basically, the bucket wheel, which is 71 ft, or 22 meters in diameter,
consists of 18 bucket scoops, each of which can hold about 1,500 gallons or 6,600 liters of stuff.
And it doesn’t take a rocket doctor to figure out how it works: the wheel rotates upward,
and each of the bucket scoops scoops up about a bucket’s worth of overburden or coal.
And, well… there you go: digging. So now you’re probably wondering,
wait a minute, if that wheel does all the work, then what the hell is all of this? Well, the rest
of Bagger 293 can be broken down into three additional components. This, the middle part,
is called the superstructure. It’s the base for the entire thing, and its main feature is this
gigantic ball bearing slewing ring, which allows the entire superstructure to rotate on its axis.
The superstructure sits atop these 12 crawlers, which are able to move it forward at a pace
of just under half a mile an hour, which is actually pretty impressive given its weight,
and is also a huge relief in the event it ever becomes sentient and turns on humankind.
This boom mainly serves as a cantilever for the bucket wheel boom,
basically balancing out the weight so the whole thing doesn’t fall over and excavate the crew
of five that operates it. It also connects to the cutting boom with these cables, which are
able to hoist the bucket wheel up and down, which, in conjunction with the ball bearings,
give the bucket wheel a wide range of motion––up and down and side to side: allowing it to both
dig with precision and do the cha cha slide. And finally, this is the discharge boom. You see,
based on the conservation of mass, we know that even though dirt has been dug out of the ground,
the dirt still exists, and therefore has to go somewhere. So, once the wheel rotates the buckets
upside-down, whatever’s just been excavated is dumped onto a conveyor belt that runs the
length of the cutting boom, and then through another conveyer belt on the discharge boom,
which is attached by rails to yet another conveyer belt, which runs it to loading stations. If it’s
overburden, it refills previously excavated areas of the mine where the coal has already been
removed. And if it’s coal, then it gets put on trains and shipped to three local power stations,
which in addition to fueling much of Germany, also provide the very power that Bagger 293
runs on. And while, yes, coal is bad for the environment, consider this: without the power
that coal provides, how would we power Bagger 293 so it can get us more coal? Checkmate, Greta.
But all this still hasn’t answered the most basic question about Bagger 293: “but like, why?” Why
does it need to be so big? Well, the answer is basically just efficiency. For modern mines,
it’s cheaper and faster to remove the ground than it is to tunnel under it, and thanks to its size,
Bagger 293 can remove ground faster than anything else: it’s able to do the work of 40,000 miners,
24/7, and as an added bonus, it doesn’t know what unionizing is. And while it cost $100 million to
build, the massive German surface mine where Bagger 293 operates produces over $1 billion
worth of brown coal a year. Plus, it’s estimated that the mine still has about 1.7 billion
tons of brown coal remaining, worth around $52 billion, or a half-Bezos. So in the end, a $100
million investment to get access to $52 billion worth of materials just makes economic sense.
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