No One Ever Saw the Snow Cruiser Again (2019)
orangebeanindiana.com
orangebeanindiana.com
I've recently discovered that my entire country mispronounces "sheikh", so for now it's my pet peeve of sorts.
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.
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...
edit: link
edit: the video in question is almost certainly https://youtu.be/f6R-h06IsJw
Though they were short lived as they quickly got replaced by freight helos.
As a few intrepid would-be conquerors have learned, if you want to figure out how to work in cold, the Russians are a good bet.
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]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_track#Snow_vehicles>
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.
Makes me think of Johnny Two Hats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8K1fTZaR7w who later comes back with four hats.
> 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").
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.
I suspect the heating was less congenial though.
https://collection.canterburymuseum.com/objects/9331/tractor...
I have some:
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.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakutian_horse
[2]: http://www.mikaelstrandberg.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/1...
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.
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.
Except for the whole part about non-treaded tires. That should have been obvious to anyone who gave it even a half second's thought.
He also made a video on the Kharkovchanka: https://youtu.be/f6R-h06IsJw
I don’t think that’s how you thread rubber, it’d essentially be like introducing cracks in the material which would weaken it significantly.
I guess it's the waterfall method in extreme.
That’s a good (and fairly accurate) observation.
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.
"We don't have the budget to test it!"
I guess hope _is_ a strategy!
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.
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.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Snow+Cruiser&y...
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.
The source for this is the article 'The Long Journey Home' from the magazine 'Navigation News'. But I didn't find the article itself online. I found only a blog that talks about it: https://www.naturalnavigator.com/news/2014/11/navigation-on-...
A movie so bad, that recalling it triggers PTSD.
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.