• PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
    25·
    11 months ago

    Imagine riding this vehicle.

    Between each of the hoops, they’re in freefall. Which means that passing the hoop needs to arrest the fall and impart enough upwards velocity to make it to the next hoop (maybe half a second away?)

    The effect on the passengers would be a quickly alternating weightlessness followed by a strong kick in the ass. Imagine driving full speed on a bumpy as fuck dirt road.

    Even if this design was practical to construct (it’s not) and cheaper to operate (it wouldn’t be), nobody would want to ride it.

    • Chill Dude 69@lemmynsfw.com
      9·
      11 months ago

      I swear to almighty God, I could make a post on X right now, linking this image and saying “I think it’s noteworthy that this concept was developed back when white men accounted for 99.98 percent of all engineering graduates. In 2024, only about 60 percent of engineering students are white, and SUDDENLY we’re hearing that sky magnet donut trains are ‘impractical’ and ‘ludicrous fantasy nonsense.’ Is that really a coincidence?”

      Annnnd Elon’s ketamine-saturated ass would probably straight-up respond with some shit like “Interesting.”

    • kautau@lemmy.world
      6·
      11 months ago

      It won’t be ready ever

      But it will probably shut down some big public transportation endeavor, which was the point all along

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
    10·
    11 months ago

    Okay, so apart from all the downsides of building electromagnets this massive anywhere near a population centre:

    Would a rail gun train like this actually remotely work or is it going to turn the train and everything inside into plasma due to air resistance before you think about how you slow it down again

    • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
      10·
      11 months ago

      Provided they can produce enough additional velocity to put the train on a ballistic arc through the next ring, it wouldn’t need to go that fast. I imagine it would bounce slowly as it passed through each ring.

      That is until there’s a stiff crosswind and you’re fired at hundreds of miles an hour into an powerfully electrified ring of solid steel. But that won’t be a problem for you for long.

      • Fermion@mander.xyz
        9·
        11 months ago

        There’s also no fail-safe condition. If there’s a power failure or control system failure, things would go horribly wrong. Having the stations be the only safe resting point is a recipe for disaster regardless of how much redundancy is built into the systems.

    • antidote101@lemmy.world
      6·
      11 months ago

      It’s probably going to kill anyone with a pacemaker or other sensitive medical technology near by, not to mention wreck phones and other electronic equipment.

    • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
      5·
      11 months ago

      I mean, why do you expect this to be going faster than commercial airlines?

      They’d certainly be able to control the speed at which these things get squirted to the next tower. Considering how close together these towers are illustrated to be, the parabolic arc could be pretty flat even at subsonic speeds.

      The question is, what would it be like to ride? Between the towers the vehicle is in free fall, so the passengers would be weightless for like 0.5s and then get a kick in the ass as they pass through a ring, then weightless agains, and so on.

      • Iron Lynx@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 months ago

        You’d need to make the individual carriages long enough and/or place the coils close enough together for the carriage to always be supported by at least two coils. In such a case, it’d likely feel like a pitch oscillation. Like being rocked back and forward, fairly little and very quickly.

  • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
    9·
    11 months ago

    Whatever this is, it can’t possible by cheaper, safer or more accessible than a normal train.

    “Sir, instead of placing down 30k lbs of steel and wood for every 1/8th mile of train travel, we can use 300k lbs of steel, wood and brick to build a 10 story tower every 1/8th mile, and then mount a 500 million dollar specialized magnet larger than the average home to the roof. Then we can yeet a bus-sized bullet filled with victims passengers all the way from 5th street to 11th street. This will surely decrease the number of railroad crossing accidents to zero. However, we can’t promise an errant gust of wind doesn’t obliterate a city block. And, frankly, the birds are simply fucked, Sir.”

      • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 months ago

        Rooftops in city scapes are rarely uniform in height as their neighbors and certainly not for several blocks in a straight line. And buildings would have to be built specifically to hold up the magnets. That thing would weigh many tons. It can’t just be sat on any roof.

  • Pfnic@feddit.ch
    8·
    11 months ago

    Would this work better, if the “train” were so long that it would always be in contact with at least 2 rings? Also assuming that the rings are passive and the active components would be entirely on the train itself, similar to the Chūō Shinkansen. Either way, this is even more unrealistic than building a tube in the sky as a continuous guideway aka Hyperloop

    Edit: typo

      • Pfnic@feddit.ch
        1·
        11 months ago

        At the current moment, for practical applications, I agree. But at what point does an idea become worth investigating? Maybe a Sci-Fi screenwriter wants to have a futuristic but theoretically possible transport system between colonies on a moon with low gravity or sth

  • int_mian@feddit.roOP
    5·
    11 months ago

    I just thought of this as some silly Jetsons magic but you mortals are actually trying to figure out how it would work.