In 1968, Hungarians had to engineer something quickly to kill a massive gas fire. Pictured above, the 'Big Wind' is a T34 tank with twin MiG-29 jets pushing out a mixture of 1,585 gallons of steamed water and oxygen-poor air every minute. It's pretty bizarre, but here are ten even weirder machines.
10.) Antonov An-225 Mriya
Leave it to the Ukrainians to build something that can take a Buran space shuttle or anything up to 1,410,958 lb up to the sky.
Take one AN-124, extend the fuselage, extend the wingspan, convert from one tail to two, and give it an extra pair of engines for good measure. Yes, that should be a good start.
I've seen this beast. It was strangely like visiting an Imperial Star Destroyer. Unlike a normal airplane, you could see all the individual panels that comprised it. All that was missing was a Correlian cruiser and some lasers firing to complete the illusion.
Suggested By: EJCRASHED, Photo Credit: Wikimedia
9.) Hughes Mining Barge HMB-1
It's that rusty one on the left. Built by the CIA as a fake deep-sea mining ship to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine (as well as this baby), it was later used as a floating dry-dock in which a secret stealth ship could be built.
After they put her on sale, she got restored by her new owner.
Suggested By: Tyler Rogoway, Photo Credit: Jitze Couperus
8.) Letourneau G175
Where was Captain Planet when these were rolling?
The G175 was designed for land clearing and is the only self-powered tree-crushing machine of its size. Electric powered, it's basically a giant tree steamroller.
Suggested By: Mister_Moon
7.) TIV 2
This is the Tornado Intercept Vehicle 2 built to film tornadoes in IMAX. Most people drive away from tornadoes, but designer Sean Casey uses a 625 horsepower 6.7-liter Cummins turbodiesel modified with propane and water injection to drive into it instead.
Suggested By: Blondude, Photo Credit: James Bastow
6.) Odyssey
The Odyssey worked as an oil rig from 1983 to 1997. Since then, it's done the job of the world's only self-propelled semi-submersible mobile spacecraft launch platform. Proper Hugo Drax stuff.
Suggested By: Pessimippopotamus, Photo Credit: AP Images
5.) MATISA WP93
What you see here is the world's most efficient railway track building machine, working in harmony with a SSP203 ballast regulator followed by the 09-3X tamping machine, both made by Plasser & Theurer in Austria.
This train has been building tracks all over Europe for years now.
Suggested By: chucchinchilla
4.) Letourneau Snow Train
Here's the thing: If I ever need a vehicle against the zombies, I'll trust R. G. LeTourneau's taste.
Suggested By: Demon-Xanth
3.) Lun-class ekranoplan
In Soviet Russia, you could make Ekranoplans work. The Lun-class remained a one-off only because the Soviet Union fell. It stayed in service officially until the late eighties.
Suggested By: JayHova,
2.) Trieste
It could even amaze James Cameron.
Bathyscaphe designed to dive to the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench, which is over 35,000 ft deep.
Completely weird because when you look at it, you think that the entire craft is the habitable area. You'd be wrong. The only place where people go is in the bottom sphere. The rest of the craft is loaded up with gasoline to be the buoyancy fluid since it is lighter than water and incompressible.
Suggested By: JayBe_III, Photo Credit: Wikimedia
1.) R/P Flip
The U.S. Office of Naval Research has a ship that goes out there and does this. Looks like I found my next party boat.
Suggested By: Cadi-Lackadaisical, Photo Credit: Office of Naval Research
Welcome back to Answers of the Day - our daily Jalopnik feature where we take the best ten responses from the previous day's Question of the Day and shine it up to show off. It's by you and for you, the Jalopnik readers. Enjoy!
Top Photo Credit: Magyar Honvédség Légijármű Javítóüzem via tuzoltoautok.hu