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Heard a legend that when USSR planned the manned Moon program, one of ideas for how to bring a humongous rocket to Baikonur was manufacture it in Moscow, then move by rivers to Caspian Sea and then move over land east, to the launch pads. For that purpose USSR started to construct a pretty big off-road vehicle - rather similar to what's pictured here, but dropped the project, as N-1 was decided to be built on Baikonur itself. Remnants of the vehicle surfaced somewhere on the Web...

Wonder if somebody could confirm or disprove this :) .



Yes, the diesel-electric ZiL-135Sh. [1][2] 120t payload, zero-turn radius. The prototype looks deceptively small, those are motorized Il-18 landing gears, and the payload was supposed to go on top of them. The full-scale vehicle was being tested but there are no photos left, apparently.

[1] http://www.gruzovikpress.ru/article/6377-zil-135sh-transport... (in Russian)

[2] https://truck-auto.info/zil/304-135sh.html (less info, some more photos of the prototype with the wheels turned 90)


So, in my industry, moving 10,000 tonne loads is routine(-ish).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wp41alE8Mg


Yeah, it was supposed to look similar but obviously non-modular and with less wheels. It was USSR in 1967, nothing like that was available, so they had to improvise. More like a wheeled version of NASA crawler-transporter designed to cover fairly long distances across Kazakh Steppes.



Thank you! Glad to read details :) .




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