It doesn't happen often, but I always enjoy when I spot oversize equipment making its way across the roads. Enormous construction equipment; wind turbine blades; partial buildings. The kind of stuff that requires multiple lanes, careful route planning, and lead & follow cars. Gives a little glimpse of the immense effort we put in to building, improving, and maintaining our society.
During covid shutdown a massive piece of industrial machinery was transported down our rural highway. It had like 10 lead and chase cars and a dozen state police. The actual item had 4 semis with 2 pushing and 2 pulling.
I still have no idea what it was, but it added some excitement to a very mundane April that year. I have to imagine it was a very opportunistic move, since most traffic was stopped for covid already.
If it wasn't obviously a wind turbine blade (or a rocket!), maybe it was a petroleum distillation column? Those are a common extra-oversized highway load.
So, the chains broke when doing an emergency braking and the load crushed the pick-up? I clearly see that the driver was at fault, but aren't loads also not supposed to easily escape their tie-downs?
Some loads like this one are so heavy that you just can't defeat their inertia, hence why you go slowly and have a large escort. It couldn't be stopped that quickly just due to the nature of the load.
At some point if you're getting behind the wheel of a vehicle on the road, you have some responsibility yourself. If you're not looking where you're going at all and drive into the path of a heavily-escorted million-plus-pound load and it ends up crushing you because of the sheer physics of the situation, that's on you. There's a hundred other more likely ways to kill yourself on the road if you're not looking where you're going, that don't involve such unusual cargo.
And also, from looking at the photos of the scene, it looks like the driver may have turned quickly to attempt to avoid the crash, and the load continued on of its own inertia and overturned the entire rig, which is an issue caused by top-heavy torque that doesn't care how tightly the load is tied down at all.
Careful with that website. I am trying to access it from EU.
"We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact webadmin@tdtnews.com or call 254-778-4444."
GDPR is just a pain in the ass to implement properly, for some US websites it's just much easier to ban people from the EU from accessing it then risk the potentially massive fines
You also have to have a European GDPR representative, plus legal review to make sure you’re in compliance. It’s not hard, and not necessarily a large cost, but I can see it being judged “not worth it” for a small concern.
Exactly this. I've seen many EU folk assume if a site doesn't bother with GDPR it must be malicious. When really it's just easier to avoid the EU since they decided they think their laws can apply worldwide.
> What happens btw if an American company just ignores GDPR but still welcomes European visitors? Why would they care about EU law?
EU claims EU law applies to US sites if a EU citizen visits it. This has yet to be tested in court though. I'm incredibly skeptical that it can be enforced.
There's not really too much need for caution; they are just saying the GDPR doesn't apply to them and they would rather not deal with any issues. I do the same thing with many sites I manage, it's significantly less potential hassle.
This happens semi-regularly with links posted on HN. I always read it only as US websites who don't give a crap about the only domain where the EU is leading: countless regulation.
They just don't want to bother with the PITA that the GDPR is and just give that failing continent that my EU is the middle finger.
not sure about the distillation column but wind turbine blades and rockets are relatively light and don't need multiple vehicles pushing and pulling to move them.
Prince Edward Island is connected to the mainland with a two-lane 13.6 km bridge. There are designated times over the course of the day when the bridge is closed to traffic and oversized loads are transferred across.
Several deliveries are usually staged one after the other, so you get to see a variety of loads if you are unlucky enough to have to wait for 30-40 minutes. Most of the time, it’s pre-fab buildings and nothing too exciting.
There is redundancy in the form of a 90 minute Ro-Ro ferry route to the east, as well as mothballed docks near the bridge in case of an incident that closes the bridge completely. I’m not sure about the capacity for oversized loads on the ferry, but it’s often used by trucks to carry gravel and aggregate for construction.
more of a cost vs benefit tradeoff than a failure. It could also be just a SPOF for over-sized loads, whereas people have multiple routes on/off island.
My wife didn’t realize it at the time, but she got to see the Space Shuttles SRBs on the freeway as they were coming into LA for the Shuttle exhibit there.
Searching for when they moved Endeavor from LAX to the museum years ago is worthwhile. That was a tight fit on LA streets.
The original display at the California Science Center, the one they are currently replacing, had the shuttle in a large room, and about 9-10 feet off the ground. You might have been able to touch it if you jumped up.
It was a very intimate encounter with the shuttle. It's big enough to be amazing, small enough to be comprehensible in human scale. I was really quite awestruck being in its presence.
(Did you know all of the heat tiles has serial numbers? In hindsight, "of course the did", they were probably all unique in their shape. But it was one of those things you discover when your nose is 4 feet away from the bottom of the craft.)
That said, I can hardly wait for the new display, with the shuttle in launch form, mounted on the external tank with the SRBs. Seeing the designs they have, you'll actually still have a "close encounter" with this craft, despite its size. The rear of the shuttle will be quite close to the ground. It's going to be, I think, a very exciting exhibit.
I agree - they've recently repositioned it vertically (as it would be launched). I was at the museum a few weeks ago and it is definitely smaller than you'd think.
One time when I was flying out of DC, I got to see a space shuttle on the airport tarmac. (I can't remember if it was mounted on a 747 or not.) A very cool surprise.
This was probably in the 2009-2013 timeframe, IIRC.
The California Science Center has a little projector room showing a timelapse of the Endeavor being delivered to its final resting spot, right before you get to the big room with the shuttle.
For anyone interested in simulating such a drive, American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator both have DLC ("Special Transport") with trucks pulling massive payloads. Lead & follow vehicles. Plus a police escort. Mostly fun and a little frustrating. The latter due to not-always-great AI on the lead vehicles / police escorts
driving the follow car seems like an interesting job. they have to predict drivers and strategically position themself to redirect the herd. a diesel sheepdog.
Most jobs are probably super interesting for a month or three. Even the simplest of jobs assume you won't be productive immediately, which implies there's probably something fun to learn.
I used to do a number of those odd tasks (jackhammering down bank safes in preparation for the new tenants, ordinary pizza delivery, engineering a track for people to ramp/jump their mid-90s shit-mobiles, ...). I'm in tech as an ML engineer or something now, but one of these years I think it'd be a ton of fun to sit down and intentionally experience a hundred or so jobs and get a feel for what other people do for their livelihoods -- ideally in many distinct locales (e.g., where I grew up it was common for people to rent/(buy-with-intent-to-resell) a gas-powered bandsaw mill and produce most of the raw materials for their house, partly because land was cheap, partly because wages were piss-poor, and partly because there was a strong "make-do" attitude where people were willing to work hard to make a nice life with whatever hand they were given -- the sorts of jobs you'll have access to there are very different than those even a few hours away, much less a few states or countries).
That was a bit of a minor rant. I'm in strong agreement though; that sounds like a super interesting job.
I remember one wind turbine blade transport in small country roads in Finland, first car was basically driving on oncoming traffic side and forced me to go as close to ditch as possible, but it was good because the truck and trailer barely fit past my car.
* there are oversized load spotters like those folks with a hobby of keeping track of aircraft or trains?
* there is economic intelligence value in extracting and surfacing data from oversize load permits?
I'd guess that there's not a lot of stock trading value in tracking oversize load permits. I think most publicly traded companies announce large capital investments like new factories long before trucks hit the road.
Maybe so. I'm aware of satellites used to measure oil tank utilization [0], so sometimes odd information is informative for a specific trading strategy even if it is not useful in general.
For the 2nd, perhaps in identifying critical routes which may be worth an extra bit of infrastructure funding for upkeep to allow such important loads to continue to transit without issue.
Then again, the need for permitting should mean that state DOT's are already aware.
I do hope Radia gets their WindRunner plane off the ground. It's designed for onshore wind renewable energy, to be a plane with colossal internal volume. But it's also designed to work on landing strips that are much shorter & crucially primitive iirc or at least much more basic, to radically expand access to where we might setup wind power.
I have high confidence such a plane would most likely end up being used for other tasks too, if created. Maybe it's not as absurdly expensive as I imagine, planning & coordinating these intense logistics routes, but being able to airship things to interesting destinations seems super compelling to me, seems like it could enable a lot of infrastructure development that's simplify infeasible right now.
Marching into fancifulness here, but with something as big as a fab, I could definitely picture an initial construction phase where a sizable fraction of the land is dedicated as runway to start, isn't developed, while big items are flown in. Sounds wild, but could be possible! The model Radia has is off-site construction, and it's not too too hard to imagine perhaps more than wind turbines might benefit from this model: maybe not just coolers and fabs, but perhaps even prefab building walls could benefit from this.
> Intel's 916,000-pound shipment is a "cold box," a self-standing air-processor structure that facilitates the cryogenic technology needed to fabricate semiconductors. The box is 23 feet tall, 20 feet wide, and 280 feet long...
The weight gives Tom a big number for his headline - but 99% of the problem with this load is the dimensions - which are too big for normal railroads. (Yes, the weight is also large enough to rule out using a heavy-lift helicopter.)
Vs. a single 1940's-era steam locomotive+tender could weigh over 1,200,000 lbs. Modern locomotives - where electronic control makes it very easy, flexible, and wage-saving to operate 'em in sets - generally weigh a bit over 400,000 lbs. per.
I'm guessing that is an air separation unit. An ASU takes ambient air from the atmosphere and separates it into its constituent components like O2, N2, argon, etc. Once the box arrived to site, it will be lifted and set so that the length is the height.
Given the height and width (23' and 20'), I suspect the length doesn't matter much. Customizing a Schnabel car is plausible. Raising overpasses, widening tunnels, etc...not so plausible.
Huh. I usually push against the use of american-style weirdo units to describe things, but I guess one benefit is that if you specify multiple different units, you get automatic protection against typos!
Extending a little understanding helps. Many people would think of this more in terms of the field of play which is 100yds (300ft). By that measurement it would be nearly a field length.
Tangential, but what's the state of semiconductor fabs in the US? Looking at this Wikipedia article [0], there are quite a lot. That said, all but three (assuming I counted correctly) are pre-2020. Is the push for fabs in the US specifically to have modern, sophisticated fabs?
My initial understanding of needing more fabs in the US was mainly for embedded stuff like for military, automobiles, and that kind of thing. Is this push actually more so for higher end fabrication for modern non-embedded use?
Whatever the case is, having some more domestic production (especially for something as valuable as microprocessors) seems like a big win for any nation. I'm looking forward to seeing how the US does with chip fabrication. I don't expect them (us?) to become the dominant player, but I am bullish on US chip production.
Being able to produce state of the art semiconductors is arguably the most important manufacturing ability for a country to have. The US does not want to be dependent on Taiwan or South Korea to build what is nowadays a cornerstone economic driver (compute) and cornerstone defense tool (compute).
So to put it simply; the US wants to be sure it can still make H100's even if the rest of the world goes to shit.
> Being able to produce state of the art semiconductors is arguably the most important manufacturing ability for a country to have.
I don't think that is quite right. It is a very important ability. I don't think it is the "most important" ability. If you have semiconductor fabs but not dry docks to build capital ships you will be in for a world of hurt. If you have semiconductor fabs but not agriculture to feed your people you will be in a world of hurt. If you have semiconductor fabs but not the ability to cast solid-fuelled rocket engines for your missiles you will be in a world of hurt.
It is one of the many important abilities. The reason we are talking about it is not because it is the "most important", but because it is at danger of being lost. We don't talk about the other equally very important abilities (like dry docks for giant ships, agriculture to feed the nation, or solid fuel casting, or a myriad of other things) because nobody worries about those going away.
I am not sure capital ships are as critical now. With drones/hypersonics it seems they are too vulnerable for use in any peer conflict. Pretty sure if China/US were to wage war in 5 years then all the capital ships from both sides in the conflict zone will be scrap within 24 hours. Send 100 hypersonics per ship and one will hit.
The parents point is more that for a functioning state, you need all of those things. If one of those things is at risk externally, bringing that one internal first makes sense.
Carriers are still very important to US force projection and hypersonic missiles are really overblown. We also seem to be readily able to take out existing hypersonic ballistics.
Also a 5 year war with the US and China that starts with a multiple thousands of missles? That’s just going to be a nuclear exchange and last not very long at all if one sides detects any launch like that.
We'll see how the SinkEx on the ex-USS Tawara goes at RimPac 2024.
I'd be surprised if they don't use some ASBMs.
But larger ships are built to take an incredible amount of punishment. It typically takes a heavyweight torpedo to crack them (hence why ASW is a primary skill set for navies). The physics of getting a 1/4 ton+ non-nuclear warhead (torpedo class) highly maneuvering are rough.
And there's a reason the Navy developed and deployed SM-6, and is now adding SEWIP Block III...
Are you asking if the underfunded Russian military made mistakes in manning a ship, building a ship, designing a ship? Surely, it was meant to be rhetorical
Technically, the Russian military didn’t make any mistakes in designing or building that ship since it was inherited from the Soviet Union. Although make the mistake was having it still in operation…
Sure, subs also have a place. I’m just saying that conventional warfare with high tech weapons favors resource decentralization. Right now things are easier to blow up than defend.
> If you have semiconductor fabs but not agriculture to feed your people you will be in a world of hurt.
The US certainly has that capability - should food supply ever become critical, slaughter cattle, pigs and sheep and redirect the grains used to feed them to the population. The amount of grains would feed 800 million people [1].
Tha vast majority of military chip requirements can be met with old processes. You don't need a 5nm chip with a 13 billion transistors in a F-35 or for the guidance module in a cruise missile.
Very modern chips are more suited for intelligence work no weapons systems per se. The physics of flight, artillery and balistic missiles is pretty much well understood, we don't need machine learning for that. Some modern systems use computer vision as a terminal guidance system, but again, you don't need state of art semis for that.
Even from a designing a chip for ordinance perspective, there's a lot of meat on the bone to make chips just that much more accurate and that much less susceptible to interference. And making those more and more reliable, cheaper, and smaller is also a big deal.
Stuff like this wasn't realistic from systems made in the 90s or even 00's.
Apples and oranges. The F35 is probably using 15-20 year old technology based on program start. Some cruse missiles use 1970s era technology at the newest based on program start and publicly available documents (since there were some updates).
Sometimes the fab location might be older but the fab itself might have gone through much retooling throughout the years. I doubt the TI fabs in Sherman and Dallas in 1965/1966 are running all the same equipment as back then.
There are a lot of interesting fabs in the US making some pretty bleeding edge products, but often not digital microprocessor chips. A lot of the more bleeding edge are analog/RF kind of stuff, especially GaN and GaAs stuff.
Intel is costantly modernizing one of its fabs in PDX. From what I have heard from a neighbor working at it, Intel brings most new equipment here, uses it for a certain time, then packages it up and ships to Arizona, so they don't have to pay sales tax on it, since its now used...
Intel gets a sweet break on property taxes too, basically paying a flat fee per year. Otherwise, they could never afford the taxes on $20-40 billion of equipment in a single fab. The state makes up for it by taxing 20,000 well paid employees at a 10% income tax rate.
Something I think I should have better understanding of:
My impression is that automotive and military applications mostly use older, more mature, cheaper modes. Are the fabs for these older nodes mostly re-purposes formerly cutting edge fabs, or do they go around building brand new (higher volume?) fabs for these nodes?
I guess I’m wondering if the capacity to build automotive chips in 10 years will be limited by the ability to build cutting-edge chips nowadays. Or maybe if TI (or whoever) can, like, borrow a couple near-retirement TSMC guys in a couple years and spin up some brand new old-tech fabs.
It depends on the application. Some use an unconventional process because of application requirements e.g. radiation hardening. Special purpose fabs are often subsidized to some extent to keep them running. Also, the US military will upgrade the silicon of existing systems if the situation warrants it e.g. it is cheaper to use more modern silicon than to maintain a fab for the old silicon.
Most weapon systems use old silicon that needs to be robust in all military operational environments. They don't benefit from having more modern silicon. Terminal guidance systems on hypersonic missiles that do kinetic intercept of other hypersonic missiles often use something like a MIPS R3000/4000 class CPU and a DSP of similar vintage.
ISR systems (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) benefit from state-of-the-art silicon because that data is extremely large and analysis is time sensitive. Since pervasive ISR at scale is a cornerstone of modern military operations, having the best silicon and software for this type of computation is strategic. In these cases, it is often the latest commodity silicon.
Intel has older fabs on that list - including one that was built in 2003 - that are capable of 7nm production processes. Some of the older domestic plants have been significantly updated over the years.
Im going between Cincinnati and Columbus several times over the next three weeks and am not looking forward to this even though it seems theyre taking a mostly out of the way route through the SE Ohio farming towns.
I've put together a rough map of the route it's taking here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/MPubWurLDu4XjMQJ7 (unfortunately, the limitations of Google Maps keeps me from properly marking the final bouncing between Mink Rd and 310--it continues east past Mink Rd to go up OH-310, then returns to Mink Rd on US-40 then returns to OH-310 on OH-16 then back to Mink Rd on OH-161. Not sure why it's not sticking to one or the other way the entire last stretch.)
If you're going between Cincinnati and Columbus, you should be absolutely nowhere near this route, as it's going nowhere near I-71.
Upon first look at the map, I thought it had to have loaded wrong to not see it starting at what I expected as a port city. From someone that grew up around rivers that can pretty much run dry during the summers, it's amazing to me that a river runs that wide/deep that far inland to a land locked area to be able to accommodate a ship of this size.
I couldn't find the exact port they're starting at, so I guessed a boat ramp just to put a pin somewhere. The only places near Manchester, OH I could find that looked like they had some kind of port facilities were what appeared to be a power plant, although per Wikipedia, the plant has been decommissioned, so it's possible that part of the site was reused for the offloading facility.
The Ohio River is famously an easily navigable river; there's only one natural falls along the route from Pittsburgh (the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers) to Cairo (where it joins the Mississippi). It provides the plurality of the water to the Mississippi River, a little less than half of the total discharge. I don't know where you grew up, but the river is more comparable (in European terms) to the Rhine, Danube, Dnieper, Don, or Volga than something like the Thames or the Seine rivers.
Southern states have temps >100° so the night time work is also just for the survival of the workers. (only a slight exaggeration)
Also, night time is dark. It makes things much more difficult than it needs to be at the convenience of some drivers in a car. Natural daylight is just so much better than having to have portable lights.
Yes. Likely there are multiple points along this route where the vehicle will need to be aligned just so in order to safely make a turn or clear an obstacle. Far easier to do those maneuvers in daylight rather than risk compromising the cargo.
It’s road construction season in Ohio anyway so most drivers are going to face a significant delay along their journey regardless of when this load gets moved.
Given the fact that you can get cm level accuracy with RTK GPS and the load is moving at a glacial pace, I would think navigation during the night should be no problem.
A fun little fact is that the load on a road causes damage roughly proportional to the fourth power of its mass – or at least, proportional to the fourth power of the weight of each axel. The US government publication detailing this is here – https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/sr/sr61g/61g.pdf – in 1962 – and it's become something of a famous approximation ever since.
Or not, because the axle weight of semi trucks are much higher than EVs, and due to the fourth power effect, essentially all road damage is caused by trucks.
Trucks basically do all of the damage. Generally they can have 16,000 lbs per axle. With 5 passengers, a Model X weighs 6000 lbs and has 2 axles. 16000/3000=2.66. 5.33^4=807, plus the truck has 2.5x as many axles, so the semi is doing 2017x as much damage as the car.
Even in residential areas, package delivery trucks are always driving around, and they often have about 15000 lbs/axle, so they're doing about 625x the damage of a Tesla X. Road damage due to passenger vehicles is just not significant, even if they're heavy for a passenger vehicle.
The unit itself if 280 feet long, but by the time it is mounted on wheels and has a truck in front of it, how long is it then? An additional 80' seems long for just the truck, but this doesn't seem like it'll be a normal cab over tractor type truck
Does anyone know why Intel select Ohio over Oregon or Arizona? I tried to Google for it, but the sources are awful and nothing definitive. Intel has been quite tight-lipped about it. I saw this quote, which seems to be hiding something: <<"I want to give a lot of credit to the governor and lieutenant governor. They pursued us very aggressively," he [Intel CEO Gelsinger] said.>> What exactly is meant by "pursued us very aggressively"? I can only guess.
> What exactly is meant by "pursued us very aggressively"?
You can pretty much bet it means "economic development" incentives of some sort, combined with a fair amount of personal glad-handing. Intel probably got all sorts of tax-breaks, credits, grants, and FSM-knows what-else as part of the deal to pick Ohio. And the Governor and others probably took Intel execs to plenty of nice steak-houses, strip-joints, exclusive parties, yadda, yadda, yadda.
You could have a pretty bleak outlook on government-corporate graft and corruption and still recognize how ridiculous the idea of Mike DeWine and Pat Gelsinger in a strip club is.
That's not what I'm worried about at least. I don't care if they go to a strip club, I care that their salaries are like $20m...for WHAT? WHAT? And we're just sitting here, voting stupidly, focussing on pointless race, gender, sexuality, immigration wars when they're taking everything from us.
Sure CEOs have a role to play, but the job they do isn't worth anywhere near as much as they get paid and they have ZERO responsibility to run a company correctly.
still recognize how ridiculous the idea of Mike DeWine and Pat Gelsinger in a strip club is.
I'm not literally claiming that we can state with certainty that Mike DeWine or Pat Gelsinger went to a strip club. That's just an example to illustrate a more general point.
I don't think you really illustrated anything. (but don't get me wrong, the image Mike DeWine and Pat Gelsinger in a strip club is extremely funny) Ohio politicians are rather more expensive than your comment implies.
If one wants to dig into how actual corruption of this sort works in Ohio during its current GOP supermajority era, they ought to start here:
Well Gov. Mike Dewine and the Ohio Republican lawmakers aren't above a little graft:
> The Ohio nuclear bribery scandal (2020) is a political scandal in Ohio involving allegations that electric utility company FirstEnergy paid roughly $60 million to Generation Now, a 501(c)(4) organization purportedly controlled by Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives Larry Householder in exchange for passing a $1.3 billion bailout for the nuclear power operator.
...
> In July 2019, the House passed House Bill 6, which increased electricity rates and provided that money as a $150 million per year subsidy for the Perry and Davis–Besse nuclear plants, subsidized coal-fired power plants, and reduced subsidies for renewable energy and energy efficiency. Governor Mike DeWine signed the bill the day it passed.[0]
"The state government is providing incentives in three chunks: a $600 million reshoring grant that reflects the higher cost of building these factories in America; $691 million in infrastructure improvements; and $650 million over 30 years in state income tax incentives based on the number of workers Intel hires."
Plus 15 congressmen, 2 senators are going to want their part of the Federal rain money.
Intel is also expanding in Arizona and Oregon. The benefit of going to a third state is that you get two more Senators rooting for you and helping out with tax breaks. In addition, there are a lot of course excellent universities in the region to recruit from. Ohio also has water and is seismically stable.
This area of Ohio has been exploding lately, and within a few miles of the Intel site, are AWS, Google and Meta data centers. Microsoft just bought 200 acres within a stones throw of the new Intel campus as well, possibly for an Azure DC. Not sure how all that relates, but it sure is messing with housing prices in the area.
Given that the author makes reference to the overall transport apparatus, the correctness of the length analogy also depends on if they refer to the "field of play" or the "entire field" or if the word "field" was edited from "pitch."
The rectangular field of play used for American football games measures 100 yards (91.44 m) long between the goal lines . . . . The entire field is a rectangle 360 feet (110 m) long. . . [0]
The pitch is rectangular in shape. . . . the longer sides are called the touchlines. . . . The two touchlines are between 100 and 130 yards (91 and 119 metres) long . . . [1]
> Bruning shared that other companies are piggybacking on the super load route plans now that accommodations have already been made
I would’ve thought the ability to do a super load or not determined a lot of your mfg/etc process. Seems surprising a company could switch over to a super load because it’s now available.
Makes sense though if the route is already getting prepped for one load. It's a huge amount of work from logistical and coordinating effort (trains getting re-routed, hazmats cleared, roads shut down, etc) to get the route setup. May as well send any other extremely large shipments along while it's cleared.
Lots of companies have huge pieces of equipment sitting at factory X that they would rather have at factory Y for example.
There are plenty of applications where a single load would be more convenient for one way or another, but it's possible to do it in multiple loads with a final assembly step at the destination.
Nobody is going to spend months of planning and many millions of dollars on alterations to save a few grand on a one-off project. But hey, if someone else has already done the planning and alterations, why not piggyback off of that and save yourself some money?
Either 280ft is longer than whatever type of football field they're thinking of, or it's not. No understanding of football needed for that.
You haven't said what part of it you think is wrong - though I do believe that both American Football and Association Football (aka "soccer", or "real football" :P) do both play on pitches a bit longer than 280ft.
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I remember listening to a German podcast about this kind of transport. It's super interesting how much planning is needed before such a transport. Talk to different police departments, check weight limits of roads, corner radius, plan to disassemble some obstacles. Huge effort.
When this is done internationally, they even have to consider the orientation of the object as it is put onto boat and taken off due to available leverage points on cranes and also how it can fit while swinging.
One of our equipment barely fit through an entryway and required half-inch steel dowels to be put on the ground so it could roll for part of its journey.
With semiconductor manufacturing being overseas (where lower wages are) for much of the past decades, how will Intel/TSMC opening up locations in the US affect prices? I imagine this just means everything will just get more expensive.
semiconductor manufacturing is highly skilled - ie the folks over seas were already well paid. It was a lot more about approvals, permissions, etc, than wages with this manufacturing area. It shouldn't have a huge impact.
Although, in the US semiconductor companies have to compete for technical people against companies doing the apparently really economically productive stuff—coming up with ad algorithms and playing Wallstreet shell games.
Am I way out of line to assume TSMC will be well past the capability of this fab when in finally comes on line? Not when the current schedule says it will be ready but when the first actual production wafer comes out of the factory.
Perhaps, though fab advancements everywhere have slowed to a crawl. TSMC might not be significantly more advanced than what it is today when this fab comes online.
I believe we are rapidly approaching the end of miniaturization. Even now, node sizes are mostly fabricated just to keep advertising smaller numbers.
I agree, there's definitely more percentages to gain and possibly even new fab techniques that can result in more densely packed chips using less power.
However, those will (likely) be exploitable regardless of when the fab was built. The limiting factor isn't likely going to be the fab equipment so much as the techniques used.
That's where I don't know that bigger better fabs is going to be the arms race that it has traditionally been.
> Am I way out of line to assume TSMC will be well past the capability of this fab when in finally comes on line?
Maybe, but Apple will own all of that advanced capacity. Those of us who have not bought into the Apple ecosystem will have to slum it with lesser chip processes, which this fab will help with the demand for.
They've all passed through my town. They coordinated it all with our local sheriff's office and sent out notifications well in advance so people would know to take alternate routes.
This may seem like a weird question but I wonder how much it is worth? Presumably it's very expensive and precise equipment. I wonder if it's protected from gunfire in transit.
most definitely protected, and very expensive insurance too.
> gunfire in transit
Not just gunfire, they need to protect it from
- Climate Activists, blocking road and sabotaging the instrument, like they destroy old paintings at museums and art galleries to bring awareness via headlines [1]
- Foreign Adversary Intentionally Sabotaging Equipment to prevent America from leading in Semiconductor ( Had happened to India’s SCL silicon lab when they were catching up with market in 1980s ) [2]
> - Climate Activists, blocking road and sabotaging the instrument, like they destroy old paintings at museums and art galleries to bring awareness via headlines [1]
Saying they "destroyed" any paintings is plain wrong, you've either not read past the headline or you're deliberately trying to make climate protesters look bad.
While I'm aware of many art/museum related climate protests, I haven't heard of a single one that damaged any art - all of them, like the example you linked to, the protestors chose targets where they could avoid doing any real harm. In the story you linked they threw paint over a glass case that protects the painting, not over the painting itself.
So it definitely wouldn't surprise me if climate protestors decided to delay the trip by temporarily blocking a road, but it would be extremely surprising if they did anything worse than splashing paint on something that does no harm other than needing a cleaning crew to get it off.
The other comment, from sib, already shows that there is an example I'd missed of a climate protest leading to a piece of art getting damaged - albeit in a minor way (and I think sounds like it was accidental too, that they were again aiming to damage the case not the painting itself - otherwise they would have done more than light scratching / would've picked a painting without that type of strong case).
But your link isn't about climate protestors at all, and it's barely even about art - the painting those people targeted wasn't picked for being a well known and well liked picture, but because of the politics 100 years ago of the person in the painting.
Quite a different situation, and entirely different reason for protest.
I would guess based on their description this is not expensive or precise...at least compared to the cleanroom tooling like an EUV tool. This is probably a gas tower that is used to produce high purity gas on site (like N2). They are large and often transported from where they are built. TSMC AZ had one delivered from Texas a few years ago (or more precisely Linde had it delivered to their site next door to TSMC AZ). You can see the large towers in the pictures linked below.
I don't know that the entire volume is considered "precise". Most of it should be cryogenic equipment (compressors, pipes, etc), packed in some kind of insulation. If anti-material rounds did penetrate the load, on-site repairs might be feasible. Contrast this with something like an EUV tool, which would probably be instant scrap if this kind of attack were successful.
> I wonder if it's protected from gunfire in transit
I would guess that it isn't. My assumption (without any data backing this up) is that making a specific, super rugged transport container would cost more (along with the additional logistics of it) than the insurance on it.
I can totally see someone taking a potshot at it just for a lark. Heck, I can see someone doing it for the purpose of creating content for their TikTok or YouTube channel.
Most of the large petrochemical tanks on the Gulf Coast have bullet dings in them. Folks just like to take potshots at stuff. Luckily the steel of these tanks are already more than thick enough to handle most small-arms fire. They just take the damage into account when they do corrosion monitoring every few years (those impact spots tend to be thinner afterwards, of course).
Something that big in water trying to stop vs something on the ground with lots of friction contact with the ground is two entirely different things.
I'm way less concerned about this thing hitting something moving at 10mph than I am someone else driving their thing into this bigger thing. It would have to be a massive thing to budge it.
Oh sure, I don't mean to imply that this "Super Load" poses a threat to major infrastructure. I was simply pointing out that "under 10 mph" is not necessarily a guarantee of safety, and that very massive objects are tricky to handle in lots of ways, mostly due to inertia and balance.
What? It's self protecting. How is a thief going to fence a million pounds of heavy equipment, and get away from a convoy of dozens of people?
As soon as they turn onto some smaller road they're going to run into power lines. If it's so expensive for Intel/Ohio DOT to move it, it's not gonna be any easier or cheaper for a thief.
This is like, what if someone stole the copper wiring from the white house
The comment you replied to was talking about risk of people damaging it, not running off with it.
And using your white house example, while I'm sure people stealing copper cabling from it isn't considered a high risk, the possibility of people using guns to shoot at the white house certainly is something they take quite seriously!
Who is the awesome driver who gets this job? We celebrate drivers of fast cars in Nascar and formula one, how about celebrating slow drivers? where's the 15 minutes of fame for the person driving this rig? I even just watched a movie starring a truck driver and the movie was named for that truck driver.
Yeah, that photo is an older, separate very large load. They're trying to do a bunch of them back-to-back so they only have to figure out the logistics once. The 280' one hasn't left yet (or probably been loaded), but there's a picture of it on ODOT's site: https://www.transportation.ohio.gov/about-us/traffic-advisor...
k-pound? Is that a thing? 458 tons, for someone's definition of a ton. It's important when using imperial lbs to use tons, otherwise we 'muricans can't easily convert it into medium duty trucks in our heads to visualize the mass. ~91 in this case.
Nah. There are far easier targets with far larger economic impacts. This cold box certainly cost a lot of money, but it won't break the bank, just delay the fab construction.
In fact, I could almost imagine that sabotaging this thing would actually have an economic boon as it would allow the roads to operate again (rather than shutting them down for days to move a 10mph mega fridge).
Consider, for example, the economic damage of the camp fire wildfires. That was caused by a single downed power line.
An insurance company spreads losses, it does not make them disappear. From a country’s economic point of view, the destruction of an economically productive thing is just as much of a loss, regardless of whether a single business and group of investors/shareholders experiences it, or if it is spread amongst various insurers, and hence their insureds via increased premiums in the future.
IMHO because it's not something trivial to build so you would also need to build the stuff to build it. To build complex (and huge) machinery you need specialized factories with lots of other big and complex machinery, you cannot just create a factory to build n=1 objects it's not economically viable.
A lot of other big things, like wind turbines, are shipped in smaller pieces and assembled onsite. At least according to a family member of mine who works on them, you even get slightly different designs that are specifically tailored to the local highway transport regulations in different countries.
That said, I think in general you're right that the story is that it's just cheaper to do it this way. I just think that assuming you'd need to build actual factories is a bit drastic. But perhaps even getting the equipment needed for final assembly onsite is prohibitively expensive compared to just transporting the fully-assembled equipment.
Well if they mean assemble instead of build the things change a bit, but anyway even when talking about big and complex things there are big and complex things that can be "easily" split into pieces and assembled at a later time and other things that cannot be split so easily so much more resources are needed to assemble the thing in its final form.
Cost and quality. I worked on a new chemical plant in Singapore. Everything was fabricated as modules in yards all around the world. A lot of work can be done in lower cost countries, like building pipe racks in the Philippines. Ship all the modules to site then everything is bolted and welded together, wired up. The only stuff that's really done at site (besides integration) is the underground utilities, foundation work, and then commissioning.
The short answer is probably that the government is throwing so much money at this, and it’s usually an uncapped direct government expense to do offsite utility work like this for these kinds of major projects. Compare to making it an “onsite expense” which will have a dollar cap.
> Intel will put a 916,000-pound "super load" on the road in Ohio on Wednesday, for a trip that will cover approximately 150 miles in nine days and snarl traffic for over a week...
> Four of these loads, including the one hitting the road now, weigh around 900,000 pounds — that's 400 metric tons, or 76 elephants.
> Intel's 916,000-pound shipment is a "cold box,"...
EDIT: Further information in the ODOT advisory detailing the schedule of this one shipment confirms 916k pounds is not split among multiple loads:
> This is the twelfth of nearly two dozen "super loads"... This load... measures approximately 23’ tall, 20’ wide, 280’ long, and weighs 916,000 pounds.
Thanks for the good comment, but the link you shared has me confused - it's showing a 404, so I assumed it had changed overnight, but looking at IA's Wayback Machine shows that URL as having been saved on a number of previous dates all of which also show a 404.
Presumably it didn't show you a 404 yesterday, as you then wouldn't have shared it.... and I can't work out why it would have been archived multiple times if it's a non-existant page....
Am I being an idiot and missing something? Is there an explanation for why it's 404?
Don't know what to say -- the page returns 200 for me, from a couple different networks and different devices and different browsers, yesterday and today. I definitely agree, though, that the archive services show 404.
If that were the case the story would just be "18 lorries are going to do a boring trip", and there wouldn't need to be any special plans made for road use at all.
Well you can ask them why they thought it was such an interesting story to post. But yes the article discussing the schedule in detail says it is split up across 18 loads
The article is quite clear that there are multiple super loads, not multiple normal loads making up one big "super" load. From the 2nd paragraph for example:
> "around 20 super loads are being ferried across Ohio's roads by the Ohio Department of Transportation after arriving at a port of the Ohio River via barge. Four of these loads, including the one hitting the road now, weigh around 900,000 pounds — that's 400 metric tons, or 76 elephants"
So not all eighteen are quite so huge, but the biggest four are roughly 10x heavier than a typical large lorry(/truck) can handle.
One of the individual loads was at this scale. There are multiple 'super loads'. The article doesn't say that a single 'super load' was split up into 18 parts.
