[Duke Leto]

The reason it’s being ignored, breakable, is that it won’t work unless you also have fully automated piloting software to fly these things. Otherwise instead of having a single roadfull of aggressive idiots in charge of 1 ton machines, you’ll have a skyfull of such morons.

It’ll take exactly one in sky collision where the participants crash on a house or school to outlaw the things.

[Duke Leto]

1. The assumption is that inter metro traffic would be handled by maglevs going in evacuated tunnels where there is no wind resistance, thus having a cruising speed in the 1000s of mph. Thus New England and Metro NY would each have their own regional commuter networks and somebody interested in living in Portland, Maine but working in Wilmington would in theory be able to do so by piggybacking from the super-MTA to the super-AMTRAK via Boston and then leaving super-AMTRAK to pick up super-SEPTA in Philly.

Realizing Eric’s vision of an inter-city supersonic network means buying AMTRAK and partnering with Union Pacific and the other freight carriers, not that that would be a big expenditure to the FF patentholder or a major headache for congress, which I think would be happy to rid itself of the current AMTRAK.

2. Remember that deceleration is handled by the same magnetic impulse motors that do acceleration on a MagLev train, so the decelerating force is equal to and opposite of the accelerating force and spread out over the same time period. (Slightly less if you have air resistance.) You’d probably start braking a bit after the midpoint of the 2.5 mile journey.

Let’s imagine this metricly and make 5 km do the work of 2.5 miles. Let’s say that our train has a constant accelerating force of .25 G acting on it during its acceleration period. MagLevs by definition have no wheel friction so it is only a question air resistance, and we’ll factor that out for the sake of argument. The entire train thus accelerates 2.5 m/s every second. This means that after 30 seconds, it is going at 75 m/s, which is 170 mph for those keeping track at home. Unless I’m really losing my Physics/Calc teeth after all these years, The integral over 0 to 30 of 2.5x is going to be 1.25x^2 or 1125 m, or a bit more than a fifth of the journey. Cut the accelerating force to .10 G and it goes all the way out to a 70 second acceleration period of 75 seconds and a distance of 2812 m, which is about when you’d want to start applying the equal and opposite decelerating force.

So the question is whether a quarter or a tenth of a G is going to be enough to knock people off their feet.

[Duke Leto]

Alright, here’s a set of IFs for you:

IF FF reduces the cost of energy by an order of magnitude or so, then MagLev trains become noticibly cheaper to build and run. Even without the air evacuated tubes proposed elsewhere on the site, commuter rail lines for intra city travel could see a big increase in transit speed to up to 250 mph with pretty high acceleration and deceleration rates.

Now I live in the NW Philly Supurbs in a house I share with my brother, whose main office is in Cherry Hill NJ. He has to spend 90 minutes or more of every working day when he is not traveling to other company sites going between these two locations. There is no rail service from our local SEPTA station to Cherry Hill. Now if FF MagLevs were in place and there were a large regional rail network on a Japanese or European model, I suspect that my brother would be able to commute from our house to Cherry Hill in less than 25 minutes per day.

This is assuming you lay out a kind of “Spiderweb Grid” over the Philly area, with radial lines going out from the city center in all directions and encircling loops at about every 5 miles or so. If you added radial spokes at every circle, I think it would be feasible to have a grid that covers the whole of Southeastern PA, Northern DE and Southern Jersey with no point more than half a mile from a train stop. Employers or commercial real estate holders might find it economical to sponsor shuttle buses for the small gaps remaining. You could speed up line operation by having each train stop at only one in every 4 or 5 non-hub statios on its line, like this:

A-B-C-D-E-Hub-A-B-C-D-E-Hub-A-B-C-D-E

Where train A goes by at 8:05 and stops only at stations marked A and Hubs, train B goes by at 8:10 and stops at Bs and Hubs, and so on. The assumption being that nobody is going to want to go from Point A1 to point B1 by train, and if they want to go from A1 to B3 it is easier for them to change trains at Hub1 or Hub2 then for them to wait while the train stops at all points on the line.

At any rate, the point is my brother, and many many more employees in Philly, would probably pay to ride the rail lines in that circumstance since it is giving them a free hour of business or personal time every day, a $30 value in my brother’s case. Paying $5 a day for train fare is the economicly sensible option in that scenario, since the speed of travel is so much improved. That’s not all, because if you can get local freight onto these lines too, you have another revenue stream and the multiplier effect for clearing up traffic congestion gets even higher, since you can get more freight around the city faster with fewer operators. Plus there’s the postal and express package delivery business. You might even be able to make a buck by carrying cars with people in them.

Speed kills in business, EVEN with Bulk freight. If I can haul 500 containers from point A to point B at 150 mph rather than 25 then it means that I can do it in 6 trips with one engine and one engineer, reusing the same rolling stock 6 times. (Floating stock technically.)

I’ve done some napkin calculations, and I’m pretty sure that if you have can build a two story sealed tunnel with 4 freight lanes below and 5 express lanes above for less than $20 million a suburban mile, (the middle line is for emergency transit vehicles, police ambulances, repair crews and so on) then you have a self-supporting business in the post FF world.

It might cost $30 Billion to build that Super SEPTA network I described above, but if you have 3 million customers doing as little as $1000 of gross profitable business every year, and remember they are all buying groceries that Super SEPTA is delivering almost to the doorsteps of their supermarkets in addition to $5 fares every business day (260 per year), then you make your investment back in 10 years.

As an aside to our Libertarian friends, how come you never EVER bitch about government subsidies to drivers, ie. Roads?

[Duke Leto]

Lerner wrote: Duke, no name-calling is allowed on this forum.

Also, you are wrong. All units of weight–kg, metric tons, pounds, grams, etc. are also used as units of mass. Objects have mass and thus inertia, no matter where they are. An object that weighs one ton on Earth has a mass of one ton wherever it is, including in space.

Well, I’m sorry for being a prick, but it’s pretty justified in this case. Look at the whole of the thread.

I certainly understand that colloquial usage recognizes the mass/weight equivalence at sea level. Aeronaut is arguing, as best as we can understand him, that since you have to multiply Kgs by ~ 10m/s^2 to get the weight (force) in newtons, you have to multiply tons (mass) by 32 ft/s^2 to get the weight in tons (weight). And thus that since you gave the weight of the DPF as “2 tons of mass”, it actually has a “weight” of 64000 lbs. And since this is in total contravention of basic HS Physics and common sense, we’re naturally a bit consternated.

[Duke Leto]

Ugh.

Technically, the terms of the agreement would be me allowing you to be happily ignorant. If Eric was talking about a ton of mass in his slide he was being colloquial. A ton is a measure of weight, never of mass, and a ton is 2000 lbs not 64000 lbs. I cannot make that any clearer and if you persist in asserting that a ton is 64000 lbs, then you are a fool.

[Duke Leto]

Aeronaut, you just aren’t getting this.

A ton is not traditionally a measure of MASS at all, it is a measure of weight. The standard definition of a ton of weight is 2000 Imperial Lbs, which are also a measure of weight or force and not mass. Technically, as a weight measure rather than a mass measure, the weight of a ton of goods as sea level is slightly more than its weight at a higher altitude. The sea level pound is considered to be equivalent to the metric mass measure of about .45 kg. It is also acceptable, although not generally approved of, to consider gravitational force weight in Imperial pounds, again the same number as considered equivalent to 2.2 times the metric mass, as also equivalent to the metric gravitational force measure which will be about 4.5 Newtons to the pound. (Note the linked Wiki article differentiates between the American short ton and the old British long ton of 2240 lbs, but this does not make much of a difference for our purposes.)

But when we are talking about the conversion of Imperial tons to Imperial pounds, the rate is 1:2000, end of story. You seem to be confusing an Imperial measure of Mass, the Slug, with the Imperial pound, if I am reading this thread correctly.

You really need to get straight on this —–.

[Duke Leto]

My own calculations on whether you could strap in a FF generator to a commercial airplane indicate that it is probably not feasible, owing to the amount of thrust that would need to be generated to replace the Jet-A driven engines would be in the department of 50+ FF units for a full sized 747-400. So either they need to be miniaturized or multiple focuses have to share the same shielding. And then there’s still the issue of getting propulsion from the requisite electrical energy. If you have to carry your FF plus some sort of propellant than you really are better off just synthesizing Jet A on the ground.

[Duke Leto]

I again have to query, why in god’s name do you feel the need for air shipping? Rail, truck and sea are just fine.

[Duke Leto]

For once, Brian H and I are in clear agreement.

Neither of us have the slightest idea what Aeronaut is getting at.

[Duke Leto]

Favor 2 tons, Lead is not a light metal.

I assume that the airliner tonnage max was more predicated on the density of the payload than the weight, or that he was talking about using the reactors as power supplys for propellor driven airliners and despaired of doing so.

You’d have to be pretty daft to want to transport a non-active FF reactor by plane though, there’s no benefit to not doing so by rail and sea.

[Duke Leto]

Just so we’re clear on this, my only two interests in starting this discussion were:

1) Could a Gauss cannon (which a friend has since explained to me is what I have in mind instead of a rail gun, all solenoid and no rail) powered by FF screw up the military balance of power by making ICBMs ineffective? The consensus answer is a resounding no.

2) Would such technology invalidate missiles and bombers as weapons systems and ensure at the very least that if the US insists on wasting money to have firepower they can do so with a mush lesser percentage of GDP? (No more Reagan/Bush II military driven deficits.)

[Duke Leto]

I fail to see how a 95% reduction in the production costs of energy would not be considered a “technological lead”.

I’m also surprised that the Anti-Obama peanut galery didn’t chime in after the Reagan attack a few pages up.

[Duke Leto]

Color me surprised.

All this new fangled Web 2.0 stuff with your embedding and streamlined XML data interchange. Back in my day if you wanted something embedded in your website from another website, you used HTML Frames. Yes, and you had to send the Request Object trudging through the snow every day. Dagnabbit…

[Duke Leto]

It would surprise me if they do give out an ActiveX or Java control allowing you to diplay up to the minute trading info on a contract. That’s a bit of a premium function. The display they had put together for Yahoo on the election contracts must have taken some time to code and Yahoo certainly reimbursed them for their trouble…

[Duke Leto]

A simpler bet might be to utilize the Intrade.net system for user created contracts. Intrade.net is just for fun, but it uses the same DB and software as Intrade.com and if there is sufficient interest in the user created Intrade.net contract, it may be picked up by the main site.

Not guaranteed press by any means, but it’s free (I think) and unless you try to bid up the contract yourselves (like McCain’s camp did at the 11th hour during the election) there isn’t much risk involved. (Unlike editing your own Wikipedia article.)

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