__ Small is beautiful in high tech, but progress isn't always measured by shrinkage alone. While we eagerly await the Library-of-Congress-in-a-Timex, an equal but opposite macromovement is afoot in the load-hauling industry. It's not just blimps, but trucks, ships, and planes, too. The gigantic results are borne of an ambitious philosophy that might almost seem passé these days: Bigger is better.
"There's definitely a market for larger and larger machines," says Kenneth Boyer, an economics professor at Michigan State University and the author of Principles of Transportation Economics. "The bigger the vehicle, the cheaper each unit of cargo is to move." And the "cargo" can be anything from coal to sunburned vacationers.
Although creating XXXL conveyances requires advanced construction techniques, the real challenge is in the design: This new wave of giant contraptions rumbling to life must still function within the confines of the existing infrastructure. It's not always just a matter of scaling up.
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Caterpillar 797 As massive as an eight-bedroom, two-story home, Caterpillar's 797 went on sale this year as the world's largest mining truck: its 48- by 30-foot pickup bed can handle a 360-ton payload. The Peoria, Illinois-based company built the $3.2 million leviathan to carry ore and oil sands (petroleum is extracted from the grit) over steep and potholed strip-mine terrain. It has 24 cylinders under the hood and almost 50 percent more hauling capacity than last year's biggest truck. More important, the 797 has a computer-designed steel frame that's cast, not fabricated: Only a few welds are needed to piece it together. The result is a half-million-pound Tonka that's far stronger but tons lighter than if it had been built using traditional methods - so it can carry more.
For maximum efficiency, mining-truck volume must be a multiple of mining-shovel capacity. Cat built the 797 specifically to handle the 90-ton loads carried by the industry's biggest shovels; four scoops and the truck is full. But P&H Mining Equipment of Milwaukee recently debuted a "dipper" capable of snatching ore in 100-ton bites, which creates a problem in filling the 360-ton-capacity pickup. "Now it's one-two-three full scoops and then what?" asks Bristol Voss, the North American editor for World Mining Equipment magazine. A fourth full scoop would overfill the truck. What to do with the last 40 tons? "You don't want to spill the stuff."
While Cat staffers put their hard hats together over ways to expand their suddenly undersized pickup, the competition, Liebherr Mining Equipment, is using the opportunity to start a hauling-space race. This fall, the Swiss company will introduce a mining truck with a 400-ton payload - and even bigger versions are in the works.
Cunard Queen Mary 2 Due for christening in late 2003, Cunard Line Limited's Queen Mary 2 will be the Goliath of floating shuffleboard platforms. Twenty-one stories high and 1,130 feet long, the cruise ship stretches out like the Empire State Building set on its ear.
There are larger ships on the ocean and on drawing boards - a 1,513-foot-long supertanker, the Jahre Viking, built in 1979, currently holds the record for sheer size, and there are dubious plans afoot for a $9 billion fantasy barge called the Freedom Ship, which would permanently house some 40,000 people. But the QM2 will reign as the world's largest cruise ship.
In some ways, the $700 million vessel is a throwback. The QM2 will offer the retrograndiose Titanic experience: Mary will wear the traditional steamer colors of federal gray, white, and red, and feature butler service and a chandeliered ballroom with a 30-foot ceiling. But with a computerized navigation system that employs GPS technology and two omnidirectional propellers, icebergs won't be a problem.
The Panama Canal, however, will be. For decades, cruise ships were built so that they could fit through the canal's 106-foot-wide canal locks. Most cruise ships winter in the Caribbean and then travel the Panamanian shortcut to Alaska during the summer months. Mary's different: Her beam is 131 feet wide, so the canal is off limits. No problem, though. She has the muscle to get to Alaska the old-fashioned way - around Cape Horn. The inch-thick steel on her hull, twice as beefy as smaller cruise ships, is specially designed for the voyage.
Although there's romance to be found in Magellan's wake, QM2's celebrated bulk does present the very mundane hurdle of finding a parking spot. "She'll almost always overhang the end of her berth. Mooring decks will have to be rearranged so that we can tie up the ship," admits Gerry Ellis, who coordinated the QM2 project for Cunard. "We had to convince Sydney to take her."
Airbus A3XX-200 Worldwide air travel is predicted to triple in the next 20 years, and Paris-based Airbus Industrie wants to produce a skybound auditorium to handle the load. The A3XX-200 will be able to hold nearly 656 passengers, compared to the Boeing 747's measly 416. The plane will be the club sandwich of the airways: a triple-decker. The top and middle floors will each have a wide-body's worth of seats, but the "basement" will be built to standing-room dimensions. "On a transatlantic or intercontinental flight, passengers get bored with movies," says Airbus spokesperson Mary Anne Greczyn. "Now the airlines have an option to put in something like a shopping mall or a fitness center."
Even without the barbells, the 1.3-million-pound A3XX-200 will outweigh the 747 by 50 percent. However, the 260-foot plane will be only 10 percent longer - most of the added weight is due to the three-story fuselage, which will make the A3XX-200 look like an obese 747. Anything bigger would bump up against international restrictions and require runways to be reconfigured. (The biggest plane ever to fly is technically Howard Hughes' flying boat, the Spruce Goose. It weighed only 400,000 pounds but had a wingspan of 320 feet. It flew once in 1947, for less than a minute.)
The $250 million A3XX-200 will likely be aloft by 2010, but the real obstacle to its use is on the tarmac. Concerns have been raised over how long it might take a prison-size mob to board and deplane the monstrous aircraft. Several Asian and European airports are already exploring the idea of installing double-decker access. "The last thing anyone wants," says Barbara Beyer, president of Avmark, an aviation consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia, "is for an eight-hour flight to go on for ten."
