james_davis_nicoll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2014-07-19 01:07 am
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2014-07-19 01:07 am
The World of the Future: Transportation
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.
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.
no subject
no subject
And hovercraft are sorta inherently stuck with not being fast enough to be aircraft or quiet enough to be cars.
One the other hand, the current world sail speed record is just over 65 knots, and the lunatics who set it did it by coming up with a new design for a hydrofoil, when hydrofoil design was supposed to be mined-out known art with a century of effort behind it. So maybe someone will have an implausibly bright idea about air cushions.
no subject
The proposed replacement vehicle looks like something out of 1960s SF to me, the UHAC: of the Ultra Heavy-Lift Amphibious Connector, which is kind of like an amphibious assault vehicle crossed with a paddleboat and dreamed up by Games Workshop. The thing seriously looks nuts: http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/article/20140318/NEWS04/303180049/Marine-Corps-Warfighting-Lab-assesses-potential-landing-craft-replacement
http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/16/tech/innovation/marines-amphibious-vehicle/
The advantage is because it actually floats, it has cargo capacity like traditional landing craft (LCU: Landing Craft Utility), but it can go ashore, and with the treads it can cross terrain impassible to the hovercraft, like breakwaters.