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.

[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.

[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...