From: Michael S. Lorrey (mike@lorrey.com)
Date: Fri May 07 1999 - 08:49:44 MDT
Dwayne wrote:
> Billy Brown wrote:
>
> > Dwayne wrote:
> > > The lower courses of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbeck are, according to
> > the
> > > quotes I have seen, too massive to be moved using currently available
> > > technology. Now, these may be quotes from engineers who have vested
> > > interests, or they might be correct.
> >
> > There is no particular limit to how big an object can be moved with current
> > technology. Once you get bigger than a few hundred tons you'll want to
> > build custom equipment for the job, but that's mostly a matter of
> > convenience - its more efficient than setting up large teams of comercial
> > bulldozers & such. You can scale up to tens of thousands of tons before
> > things even start to get tricky, which is far larger than anything that the
> > ancients ever moved.
>
> Are you sure of this? That we can move single objects over ground weighing
> thousands of tons?
The Space Shuttle, fully assembled, weighs somewhere around 3 or 4 million pounds (with no liquid fuel), which comes out to 2 thousand tons. The assembled shuttle is moved via a large crawler vehicle several miles in 2 days from the assembly building to the launch pad. The assembled shuttle stands over 180 feet tall. I seriously doubt that any blocks moved by the ancients outscale the Space Shuttle.
Mike Lorrey
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:03:41 MST