this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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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
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.
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.
Yes, I was just describing one of the many myriad issues with this design. It’s clearly not done by an engineer.
It's basically a mag-lev train with extra steps. Extra being really, really dumb and pointless.
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.
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.
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.
It’s like a coil gun, not a rail gun