The World of the Future: Transportation

[james_davis_nicoll]

This got long



It may be the future but we will still have to get from place to place.




Not only will we not escape the deadly scourge of the bicycle, they will diversify into even more deadly forms.




This is basically a Smart Car, as seen from a decade with ugly fashions.




And this seems largely correct: I remember how futuristic our 1978 Honda seemed...



Hey, remember maglev? It was a thing. Like bell-bottoms. Only very very expensive.



I was *just* reading something with a gratuitous hovercraft. Not Systemic Shock, although as I recall that had all of Israel prepared to flee from Israel in a mighty hovercraft fleet.



With all due respect to a frequent reader of this LJ, I do not expect these to, ah, take off.



Or these.



And I expect airships will continue to be slow, fragile and expensive compared to planes.



The shuttle: doing the job of a dozen rockets at the cost of two dozen rockets!



What happened to Truax, anyway?



This quickly dashed off starship makes me sad.



And because they couldn't go an entire chapter without Woo.

Comments

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, as mentioned in the diagram of the shuttle, the side boosters of the shuttle would splash down and be recovered - which is one of the good things about the program, it did show what the economics of such a scheme are (though the lack of reusable engines on the orbiter meant that it was a small saving in an ocean of over-expensiveness)

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The SSMEs were reused, although they were often (always?) removed from the orbiter for inspection after a flight, IIRC.