If you like the cruiser look up the karkovchanka, they’re dedicated expedition vehicles from 20 years later (which helped a lot technologically and thus they were significantly more successful).
Fwiw the best exploration of them (especially as it covered the second generation) was a (series of?) youtube video, the english wiki article is sadly extremely poor.
Guys, if you omit a letter, omit the "K". Because Harkov or Harkovchanka are close enough to the original pronounciation (Kharkov, Kharkovchanka), while Karkov or Karkovchanka do not even ring a bell.
I've recently discovered that my entire country mispronounces "sheikh", so for now it's my pet peeve of sorts.
In the case of Russian, the transliteration kh is used because it was developed for rendering Russian words in French, which has no H sound.
For sheikh, I assume, like Achmed, that having the sound in a syllable-final position didn't work for whatever the target language was. It might have been English; we can't do /x/ or syllable-final /h/.
> I've recently discovered that my entire country mispronounces "sheikh", so for now it's my pet peeve of sorts.
If you expect everyone in your country to accurately produce a sound they've never heard, you're in for some disappointment.
> If you expect everyone in your country to accurately produce a sound they've never heard, you're in for some disappointment.
It's Polish and we have all sorts of sounds, this and much worse. The atrocious story is that we even have an earlier Persian-sourced word "szach" which we pronounce sensibly as <<shakh>>. But at some point we've got a duplicate via English, pronounced <<sheik>> (written "szejk"). Ouch...
That transliteration is poor but it’s also poor going into Russian with for example gamburger [гамбургер]. But it’s also no big deal and doesn’t matter because people understand these transliterations.
Pretty funny. More than anything else this reminds me of Atlas Survival Shelters on wheels, and it seems like it actually worked pretty well as a survival shelter; it was just the "wheels" part that failed.
I wonder why he didn't use tracks? In the US, Holt (the corporate ancestor of Caterpillar) was building tracked farm tractors to improve traction in farm mud from 01904 (getting a patent in 01907), and surely it wasn't news to anybody in Massachusetts that snow was soft and hard to keep traction in, like mud; and tracked vehicles were also being developed in England, and both France and England had deployed Holt tractors in World War I, and deployed tracked tanks by 01916, while Germany had built their own tracked tank by 01918. Muscott built his snowmobile with rear tracks and front skis in 01915. And apparently tracked vehicles were being used in Antarctica from 01911:
> In a memorandum of 1908, Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott presented his view that man-hauling to the South Pole was impossible and that motor traction was needed.[29] Snow vehicles did not yet exist however, and so his engineer Reginald Skelton developed the idea of a caterpillar track for snow surfaces.[30] These tracked motors were built by the Wolseley Tool and Motor Car Company in Birmingham, tested in Switzerland and Norway, and can be seen in action in Herbert Ponting's 1911 documentary film of Scott's Antarctic Terra Nova Expedition.[31]
You'd think they would have done some testing of prototypes in more conveniently located frozen tundras before asking Congress for funding to built the full-scale vehicle and ship it halfway around the planet. Then again, maybe the goal was getting the funding, not delivering a working vehicle.
What if you wanted to attack the problem for real? Maybe instead of a single gigantic vehicle (the medieval units used in the article translate to 17 m by 5.2 m in modern units) you could use 2-4 smaller vehicles so that a single steering-system failure, uncontrolled fire, or carbon monoxide leak in the middle of Antarctica wouldn't consign the whole expedition to death. Maybe you could build a relatively lightweight dome that could be rapidly erected when you were parked, or perhaps even suspended on springs around the moving flotilla of vehicles.
> In a manner somewhat similar to the Holocene calendar, the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem[1] (e.g., by writing the current year "02021" rather than "2021").
This seems to imply that writing "02021" in a textual forum post does anything more than just make it significantly more difficult for another human to parse. I don't buy that argument - writing "1999" instead of "99" in BBS/IRC messages before the turn of the century would have done nothing to fix the critical systems that were storing years as a pair of bytes.
The point of it, like the point of many Long Now projects, is to get people to think about longer spans of time, and be more aware of how little we normally do that. As they say, "The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." -- https://longnow.org/about/
So the fact we're talking about these issues here is a success.
Another example of their efforts is something I wrote the code for, a bet/prediction registry: https://longbets.org/bets/
Unlike the sort of prediction markets that are now relatively common, where the goal is to serve as a functional business, the goal for Long Bets is to get people thinking and talking about the long term. My favorite bet is the one between Warren Buffet and a hedge fund guy: https://longbets.org/362/
Buffett was already making much larger bets than this in the marketplace, so in some sense this was pointless. He also could have made it a private bet and saved the hassle. But the public nature of it drove an enormous amount of media coverage and discussion.
But if you start in 2021, well, 02021, to write it 02021, by 08850 it will be in everybody's mind (including AI's) and developers - or AIs - by 09330 will write programs that will laat 700 years and will not have the Y10K bug.
If we're using 5 digits, add 10K years: we're in year 12021 of this Holocene calendar. (Happy palindrome year!) 0 is pre-history, some of the very first permanent construction. An 8min video by Kurzgesagt on it: https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs
On the other hand, I've always found the Scott Expedition very... illuminating. They had 2 proto-snowmobiles. One fell into the ocean when they were unloading it. The other one had a mechanical failure shortly after the final team departed the last camp, and Scott didn't bring the engineer with him because an officer of higher rank threw a pissy fit that the engineer was going but not him. Only one of a rather long list of poor decisions.
1. Clothing was inadequate. Scottish wool and leather riding boots. Looks like Scott realized that the crew was losings fingers too fast, and they made fur mittens and boots at sometime afterwards.
2. Horses instead of dogs. Scott was a Great Humanist, so forbid to eat those horses. Horses taste Good, better than reindeers, imho. -- Dogs eat themselves, solving part of the fodder problem.
3. All kinds of craziness with thoses tractors, as mentioned.
The Terra Nova expedition had dogs as well as ponies and who knows, if they'd been purchased by someone who knew horses, they might've done a lot better.
Scott sent his dog handler Meares to purchase the ponies (and I can't really nail down the breed here, they're either described as Manchurian or Siberian, but they look like Yakut horses[1] in photos), and Scott insisted, for some reason, on white ponies, because he either thought that they did better in cold environments, or were stronger.
And apparently the only white ones available when Meares was purchasing, were old and apparently underfed. Of course, if Captain Oates, an experienced calvary man had accompanied Meares as Scott requested, he could've chosen good ones. It also didn't help that the horses had their summer coats when they arrived in Antarctica.
Also, they did eventually shoot the ponies to store as meat in caches when they had lost condition.
Many other polar explorers, both Arctic and Antarctic, used ponies successfully. When fed correctly. Meet Ernest Shackleton's meat eating pony, Socks, part of an expedition in 1907. [2]
Shackleton fed his horses "Maujee pemmican", which, according to him "consists of dried beef, carrots, milk, currants and sugar, and it provides a large amount of nourishment with comparatively little weight."
Scott, however, while replicating Shackleton's use of ponies, didn't feed them the same rations, preferring compressed wheat.
The Jackson-Harmsworth expedition to Franz Josef Land in the Arctic (the one that found Fridtjof Nansen) used ponies.
Wilhem Filchner used ponies successfully in Antarctica around the same time as Scott was dying, to the extent that he was able to release them on South Georgia Island after the expedition.
There were 3 motor sledges, one was lost, and none were planned to travel on the final journey: The motors and animals would be used to haul loads only across the Barrier, enabling the men to preserve their strength for the later Glacier and Plateau stages. In practice, the motor sledges proved only briefly useful, and the ponies' performance was affected by their age and poor condition.
Scott brought dogs and ponies, which were both proven on other expeditions and were both useful on this one.
That wikipedia page is a gem, reads like a novel. It sounds like with a little more luck (or more optimal choices), they would have survived. Sure there were mistakes, but nothing reads as gross negligence.
At least I was right about them clothes. They are just abysmal. Woolen caps and no wind protection.
There has been only -32°C in Helsinki and remember how scary it was. Exposed fingers become numb in seconds. I had good parka with wolf tail trimmings, but could not bicycle against the wind.
I think this is a good lesson to test often and test in private. Those failures are all very reasonable, it's just a shame it had to be during public fanfare.
Yes that part is surprising. I wonder if it had to do with manufacturing limitations at the time? Even still, some off the vehicle tests probably could have saved them some pain.
That was a justified design decision, they needed the body protruding flat in front and back of the wheels to be able to cross crevasses. And the terrain in antártica is very flat, so that was not a problem (unlike the lack of traction, which was a very big problem).
was it a failure? we're all assuming the purpose of the snow cruiser was to cruise snow, if the purpose was to get goodyear sponsorship perhaps it was a success?
There's a Scottish guy named Calum on youtube who has made some really nice videos on strange vehicles, like the snow cruiser: https://youtu.be/zR0M7KjnJTE
Though I knew the story of the Snow Cruiser in general terms, I didn't know the information in the last few paragraphs nor the final image. Thanks for posting.
Maybe they didn’t have the tech for good ridging on such massive tyres yet? LeTourneau’s overland trains from 15 years (and a world war) later have pretty simple ridging still.
I feel like you can cut ridges into rubber tires with a hacksaw if the rubber is thick enough. I don't think technological limitations are a plausible explanation; they must have thought slicks were actually the right solution for some reason.
That is how it can be done. You can find videos of south asians manually cutting new grooves on worn down truck tires. It was normal practice in the rest of the world before retreading was invented.
I agree that that's not how treads are normally made, but it would definitely work. Rubber is really, really good at resisting crack propagation, at least above its Tg. I mean, it's not that crack propagation is not a consideration at all, but it's not the overriding concern that it is for ceramics and even, at times, metals.
"Simply put, Poulter didn’t know better because no one knew better." I highly doubt that. Also full winter climes for testing were readily available just hours north.
Yeah, this part is crazy. There's vast parts of North America which are frozen solid for 5 months of the year. The fact they'd ship it all the way to Antarctica without testing on snow is just crazy!
I suspect a lot of the reason for not going north, was for publicity. It sounds like a great deal of hucksterism was involved. Maybe going to Canada would not have generated enough press.
The budget for development was absurdly low, even adjusted for today’s dollars. I suspect funding was always foremost in their minds.
Indeed there were probably truck drivers in the area who were already experienced with winter driving on bald tires. If not, they could have brought it up to Da Frozen Tundra, aka Green Bay.
The issue is moving it is really expensive, slow and there's not the capacity in those areas to make iterations on the design. There may not have been enough money to actually test it.
There is no way that having it fail in Antarctica was any cheaper. "We can't afford to test it" is a great example of output focused thinking when what is needed is an outcome focus.
The intended goal was enabling lots of safe travel through the Antarctic, something they failed at. In modern dollars they paid $50k per mile of successful trip. They could have spent way less money to achieve that goal with other approaches. Heck, they probably could have just turned the money into $1 bills and burned it to keep the explorer warm for such a short trip.
I'm not so sure there was a reasonable place to test it in North America at the time. There wasn't an actual highway to Alaska until after this was abandoned in Antarctica and even today most of the northern bits of Canada are best accessed by plane instead of roads. You could find some snow but it would be a very different snow than they would encounter in Antarctica.
It would still be snow, though, which would have let them discover the issue of the bald tires, and I'd guess the issues that required them to drive the thing backwards. If there weren't enough of it in a convenient spot, people were already making artificial snow by then. Or they could have just bulldozed a lot of it into a test course.
So they could at least have learned something. But if you're right and Antarctica was the closest place to test it, then they should have planned for that. Expecting something novel to work the first time it's tried isn't a plan. It isn't a strategy. It's just a fantasy.
You could probably find snow reasonably close but it wouldn't be the same kind of snow you'd find in Antarctica. The interstate highways didn't exist until after WW2 and the road to Alaska was completed as part of WW2.
In my naïve thinking I would just follow my compass in the south direction to find the magnetic south pole. When the compass flips around at 180° then you crossed the pole. I don't know if they understood the difference between the pole and the magnetic pole at that time.
I learnt in the Fram museum in Oslo that they did a lot of magnetic field measurements, which led to new and important scientific insights. So they navigated by compass (and sextant).
But not only. Amundsen did 'sensor fusion'. He did pace-counting and had meter-wheels fixed to sledges to measure their traveled distance. In addition to that he erected snow beacons every three miles.
I heard a podcast about this some time ago. They used a wheel on one of the sleds to measure distance travelled and navigated using a compass. They did rough calculations using the suns height over the horizon and time of culmination and more precise calculations using a sextant from time to time.
I suspect he had a little gizmo called magnetic compass, though that one would measure the magnetic pole, not the true pole. Difference between those 2 are 17 degrees if my memory serves me correctly. More info here: https://airplaneacademy.com/whats-the-difference-between-tru...
Am I the only one surprised that nuclear-powered snow cruisers weren't used in Antarctic exploration, during the height of the atomic age? Maybe RTGs just don't produce enough power.
They were used by the soviets for unmanned arctic lighthouses, but even the largest RTGs only put out a couple hundred watts of electrical power (a small fraction of what this vehicle would need).
RTGs definitely don't put out enough power for a vehicle. They put out only tens of watts of electrical power. So for the expense and weight they'd be a really complicated battery for the radio.
This is a great example of poor market/customer fit. He was giving what he thought was needed, not what was actually needed.
Small-scale iterations and testing could have discovered these issues. Instead he wanted to make a big splash and have his little research station on wheels all upfront.
