DailyDirt: Getting From Point A To B... Really Really Quickly
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Transportation has evolved from simply walking to riding to flying to sailing and orbiting and all kinds of modes of travel. We've grown accustomed to speeds of 100-600 mph or so, but it's possible to go a lot faster. A Concorde jet could go over 1,000 mph, but those planes aren't in service anymore. Traveling to space might not appeal to that many people, but getting from NYC to LA in an hour might. Check out a few concept vehicles that could accomplish supersonic (or hypersonic) travel.- Elon Musk's Hyperloop project isn't totally crazy. It's still somewhat crazy, but there are some people building a prototype now -- so a working version might exist someday. [url]
- SpaceLiner is a suborbital, hypersonic, winged passenger transport concept that could take people from Europe to the US in about an hour. Flying on what is essentially an intercontinental missile probably has some additional security issues, but there are plenty of other practical problems for this transportation idea. [url]
- Other evacuated tube transport systems (aka vactrains) could travel 5,000 mph all over the globe. That is, if anyone wants to build the tubes across oceans.... And maybe China will do it. (Or maybe not.) [url]
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Filed Under: concept vehicles, concorde, elon musk, evacuated tube transport, hyperloop, hypersonic, spaceliner, supersonic, transportation, travel, vactrain
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"REPORT: Almost None of the 'Women' in ASHLEY MADISON Database Ever Used Site..."
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Meh. I'm verging on entertaining, so that's it, lurbles. Some text copied from Drudge.
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Snowpiercer
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
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China
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Pretty Pictures, No Substance.
Tomorrow's Transportation: New Systems for the Urban Future, U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Metropolitan Development, Urban Transportation Administration, Washington D.C., 1968 (Library of Congress catalog number 68-61300)
Metrotran-2000: A Study of Future Concepts in Metropolitan Transportation for the Year 2000, Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories, Inc., by: Robert A. Wolf, Transportation Research Department, CAL No. 150, October 1967
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Re: Pretty Pictures, No Substance.
Just consider recent history. Betting against Elon Musk and his ideas doesn't tend to work out so well.
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Re: Re: Pretty Pictures, No Substance.
Read about the BNSF Railroad's double-tracking project in Abo Canyon in New Mexico, a matter of eight miles, four of which are "difficult." See Ken Fitzgerald, "Fixing The Weakest Link," Trains Magazine, Nov. 2011. It took three years, and involved 1.8 million cubic yards of earthwork, and I don't know how much dynamite they used. Note the picture of the supremely smug bighorn sheep standing there and watching the trains go by. It's his country, human, and don't you forget it!
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What Musk has actually done is to launch rockets of approximately the type which NASA was launching in 1961. NASA has a particular genius for blowing money on things not related to the main goal. Anyone who doesn't do that can compete with NASA on launching satellites into earth orbit. I understand that Elon Musk complains about the Russians, because they are better at saving money than he is, and they use military surplus rocket equipment. The Soviet Union once had more than a thousand Inter-Continental-Ballistic-Missiles pointing at the United States, plus the usual quantity of spare parts, and that stuff is, in the last analysis, available, like any other military surplus, at scrap-metal prices.
There's this whole cult of personality about Elon Musk. People say that Musk is like Steve Jobs, ergo he must be a genius, and he's going to do all these things. What you forget is that Steve Jobs had Moore's Law running in his favor. Jobs did a lot of dumb things, but he was bailed out by the fact that computers were getting better and cheaper so fast. That is not happening in the underlying materials of aerospace (fuel, structural aluminum, titanium, and magnesium, etc.), or those of large-scale construction. There has been no real improvement on dynamite as a means of blasting rock since the 1860's, the decade of the Civil War. The Ancient Romans knew how to make concrete-- and its limitations. So they used stone blocks to build structures like the Pont Du Gard in France, which could stay up for a couple of thousand years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard
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