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

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Y'know what's really sad? I'm sure that starship illo was taken from a Star Trek: TMP tie-in book that was a 'history' of starship development.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Have you heard the "transportation singularity" theory of twentieth-century SF?

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Truax was ahead of his time and undercapitalized. He died in 2010.

He was a proponent of sea recovery of first stages. When SpaceX tries to splash and recover a first stage, I think of him. Perhaps the recent attempts to recover the Falcon first stage would have been successful, if they had been pressure-fed stages with strong tank walls, like Truax advocated (the most recent stage landed on the water successfully, but the stress of falling over and flopping on the ocean was too much, it seems, and it ruptured.)

I can't say the pressure-fed approach (which Beal also tried) is the right one now, particularly if they plan to recover the stages on land.

On airships: Helium Hokum: Why Airships Will Never Be Part of Our Transportation Infrastructure.

On maglev: Gerard O'Neill was a proponent of these (probably because of the relationship to mass drivers.) Designs since then have changed to use permanent magnets (so-called Halbach arrays) not superconductors.

Elon Musk's Hyperloop proposal can be thought of as the result of hybridizing hovercraft and maglev.

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the picture was in the movie very briefly alongside the space shuttle and the TV series starship in a display of previous ships called Enterprise. It's based off an early design Matt Jeffries considered for the TV show.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

The von Kármán-Gabrielli diagram should be part of the toolkit of every science fiction author who touches on future transportation...

... except for so many of these people, it's about the fantasy.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I am wondering where Hyperloop fits on that diagram. I need to look up the papers.

[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.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Hovercraft have a fairly successful niche some as ferries in a number of areas. We won't however have ship-sized hovercraft that gracefully go from land to ocean.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

"First we assume a limitless energy source..."

[bedii.livejournal.com]

Having gone from the beach at Normandy across the Channel in one in 1976, I respectfully disagree.

[florbigoo.livejournal.com]

How many cross-channel Hoverferries are in service now?

[florbigoo.livejournal.com]

The answer is none. None are in service any longer because the fuel costs are exorbitant.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Well, and they built a Channel Tunnel, which has put pretty much all the ferries of any kind out of service.

CCGS Sipu Muin and CCGS Mamilossa are primarily flood-control icebreakers with a secondary role of getting people and equipment into inaccessible places. Mamilossa was built in 2009, so one must assume the niche is one where the hovercraft is worth it.

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

"Implant spherical cows with He₃ fusion reactors..."

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I was mainly thinking of that one novel where the hovercraft was a device to a) establish it's the future, and b) get our hero to the island with the dolphins. I think it was a Clarke novel maybe?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Dolphin Island: A Story of the People of the Sea by Arthur C. Clarke?

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

This clearly shows the usefulness of high-capacity fusion-powered ferry hovercraft.

[rwpikul.livejournal.com]

I'm not too shocked at the possibility of a cyclist getting a speeding ticket: A friend of my father's earned one, (getting off with a warning), due to a combination of a long downhill, favourable winds and a small town, (where the limit dropped).

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

To be fair, we do have at least one maglev in commercial use.

Recuments: bicycles of the future. Fusion powered recumbent hoverbike... wait.

This chapter reminds me of 1980s 3-2-1 Contact, except the latter didn't have the psychic stuff. But model rockets, superbikes, probably hovercraft and maglevs...

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

Yup, that's the one.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Yup. Odd how I remember the giant intercontinental hovercraft more than the characters.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

Well, this is Clarke we're talking about here.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Hovercraft are successful in a number of niche operations, and the marines love them as landing craft. They just never replaced cars or aircraft.

[florbigoo.livejournal.com]

I *loved* 3-2-1 Contact! Now whenever I see a recumbent bike I get a vibe like the owner is a big fat jerk. This has been tested on multiple occasions with casual greetings and friendly inquiries about their unusual bicycle, and I get responses like I'm tickling their bezoars or something.

In the mid-nineties, I researched electric vehicle modifications for a friend who wanted to convert a an old Toyota pickup to electrical traction, so as to use the 250KW hydro turbine in his basement for more than selling to the grid and running the public radio station up the hill. It's nice to be living in a time when you can buy electric sports cars!

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

So the cows are spherical because they're inflated with He3? It's all beginning to make sense now...

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

They certainly are niche, but I would consider "ferry" pretty niche, too.

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.

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

Yup, that's the secret. It only comes out as methane because it's being fused to carbon in the ⁴₂He afterburner reactor (popularly known as a "rectum").

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Yeah, cross-English-Channel hovercraft lasted over thirty years operating on a commercial basis, which suggests that it wasn't an inherently infeasible technology.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

The Marines think our hovercraft landing craft (LCAC: Landing Craft Air Cushioned) is pretty cool, but they're being replaced, because they have crummy availability, i.e. they're broken all the damn time. It has something to do with having a jet turbine ingesting salt spray all the time, and also something to do with lots of moving parts.

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.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Have you seen those portable speed displays? It's a trailer with a built in radar dish, a large speed display, and a speed limit sign? Their purpose is to warn drivers that, say, they are doing 33 in a 30 mph zone?

Every cyclist I know sees those as a challenge.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

We have electric cars, and electric robot planes, so it can obviously only be a short time until we have electric robot flying cars.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Alas, the fatal flaw of hovercraft, as documented on a well-known BBC program decades ago, was their propensity to become overloaded with eels.

[bedii.livejournal.com]

No. If the fuel costs were exorbitant the channel ferries would have eaten them alive. What actually happened is that the Chunnel, which is rail and cheap, knocked hell out of both conventional ferries and hovercraft which cost more to operate. If I remember the old reports correctly it was the maintainance costs that were the sticking point: ship hulls are more of a sunk cost than regular skirt maintainance and gearbox repair.