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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.