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

[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.

[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.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

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

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

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

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

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

[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").

[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.