That wheel is not smashing through the ground. It is shaving it. A bucket wheel excavator is the largest mobile land machine ever built, and its design philosophy is the opposite of brute force. Rather than taking one enormous bite like a face shovel, it takes hundreds of tiny ones per minute, continuously, so the digging force never spikes. The geometry is elegant once you see it: - The wheel turns slowly, typically 3 to 8 rpm, carrying anywhere from 6 to 20 buckets around its rim - The boom slews sideways, and that slewing motion is the actual feed - Each bucket therefore carves a thin crescent-shaped chip, thickest at the middle, tapering to nothing at both ends - Chip thickness is set purely by the ratio of slew speed to wheel speed, which means the operator controls cutting load with a joystick rather than by leaning on the machine Because material flows off the wheel onto a belt instead of being lifted and dumped, output is continuous. Bagger 288 stands 96 m tall, spans 225 m...