this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023

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urbanism

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It was a dream too impossible for this world. (hexbear.net)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 10 months ago (8 children)

Yep, it was a dream too impossible for the world in the late 1800s / early 1900s too.

Turns out making a train or maglev inside of a vaccuum tube is more expensive and has insourmountable technical challenges when compared to making...

You know a train or maglev outside of a vaccuum tube.

For christs sake, Elons original napkin sketch was a train with a giant air intake on the front that would push air downward to make the train float and also propel it forward.

You know.

In a vaccuum tube. Where there is no air.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 10 months ago (1 children)

huh, it's almost like it was only barely designed enough so that it could wreck and steal funding from serious public transport proposals for parties interested in never seeing those happen

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I don't even think this grift stole much funding from public transit. Its funders were overwhelmingly private sector idiots.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago (2 children)

let's take a jet plane, make it even dumber, and then put in an environment where aerodynamics no longer apply my-hero

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago

That image is incredible.

Its the horrifically pretentious headshot drawing style the WSJ uses, but has like the face of one of those horrendously ludicrous confederate statues.

Amazing.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I bet he didn't even consider how to deal with all the rat viscera

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

It also doesnt account for basic American boredom:

Nearly every time a Boeing fuselage is shipped via train halfway across the country, they have to fix all of the bullet holes in it from bored riflemen in flyover states shooting it as it rolls down the tracks.

Basically the reverse of all of the shooting of Buffalo from trains during the westward expansion.

Eventually, someone with a high powered sniper rifle or even anti materiel rifle would take a pot shot at a vaccuum tube, which would then basically rip itself apart if it penetrated.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Nearly every time a Boeing fuselage is shipped via train halfway across the country, they have to fix all of the bullet holes in it from bored riflemen in flyover states shooting it as it rolls down the tracks.

Please gods let this be true

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

As requested by apparently a mod...?

===CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT===

https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=276419

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/paxszc/i_id_never_seen_fuselage_being_transported_like/

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1q1ew6/boeing_737_fuselages_on_train_ride/

While my dad may be an insane QAnon adherent who believes that Tom Hank's son rapes children to death for their adrenochrome, he was at least useful in that he has worked at Boeing his whole life and would tell me something like this every once in a while.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sorry for your QAnon dad.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Thanks, he is dead to me now. Probably I am going to need some therapy to uh... process all that.

But no, really, thank you for the empathy. =)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If it's salvageable, hang in there, not a lot of people get out of the cult, but it's not impossible. One of the regulars at work went from thinking 50% of clouds are contrails to disowning her anti-vax friends since 2017.

Granted this is Australia and her daughter is a nurse and her little sister is immunocompromised and almost died in the pandemic.

But if it's beyond saving, you have my condolences.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

He is far, far, far beyond saving.

After years of myself, a person with a degree in Economics and another one in Poli Sci, spending countless hours attempting to explain to him, whose main education on such topics come from Rush Limbaugh (rest in piss) and even more extreme nutbags, that basically everything he, my father, believes about economics and politics is actually objectively, factually wrong...

After a decade of this, my therapist and psychologist told me that I am Autistic.

I told him this, and he attempted to send me to a long term mental health care facility, gaslighting me extremely badly, claiming I was delusional and making this up. Mind you, at the time I was holding down a remote data analyst job, making more money than him.

Long story but I ended up homeless ultimately due to the actions of him and the rest of my family. My brother decided to start stalking me by enabling parental control on my phone by removing me as an authorized user on the family plan we were both on.

My entire family are unstable delusional idiots, many with serious criminal records, meanwhile I am the only one that went to college and up until they tried to ruin my life, I am also the only one who could solve any of their problems.

I lost everything I ever owned, but honestly, it was worth it to finally realize and be free from how absurdly awful my family is. So much less stress.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Please remove the ableist language and add a CW for the SA reference (or just remove it). Otherwise this is a great comment.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Uh, ok, hold on

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Recommended Viewing/listening wtyp A more fundamental problem is actually making a vacuum tube

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (3 children)

This has me thinking about a ramjet train

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

It's a turbojet but

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

You technically could do that... at least on a relatively short, flat, straight track... but it doesnt make any practical sense.

First, its a ram jet so something has to get it up to speed before the ram jet starts working. Though if we just make it a scramjet, there we go.

Next problem is ... it might actually need downforce winglets on it the way drag cars do. On every car. Hope there is no sudden cross wind on your nearly perfectly straight track in a large flat area. Now you need a computer system to automatically move the winglets to counter cross winds... or you need some kind of... train... pilot...???

Biggest problem is: The speeds capable by a theoretically working scramjet train would mean it could not turn on anything other than VERY wide arcs, and it wouldnt be able to get to the speeds capable of a scramjet... ostensibly the whole point... without skipping tons of stops a slower train could make...

...unless you are going to slow the thing down at each stop with a series of parachutes coming out the back, or some how be able to reverse thrust the scramjet?

As far as I know there are no reverse thrust scramjets, fairly sure thats impossible due to the nature of scramjets.

???

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The project pluto express. Beijing to Brooklyn in, like, 5-6 minutes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

I want to ride on the brain blaster

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Fuck... a bank can figure out how to use air to push an object through a tube and an air hockey table to float a puck, I don't know why these dum-dums couldn't have figured out how to do the same.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 10 months ago

It's easy to see in hindsight that this was a dumb idea meant to steal money and resources from public transit, but it was also easy to see in the middle of it, and at the beginning, and beforehand...

[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago (1 children)

the virgin hyperloop, can't make this shit up

[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Virgin hyperloop vs chad railway.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

more like chad dirt trail because it actually goes somewhere

[–] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Alas, we humans are not yet capable of achieving lofty pursuits such as a train

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

And a train going thru as such treacherous terrain as the flat farmland and gentle hills of the Central Valley of California

[–] [email protected] 31 points 10 months ago

if only there were alternatives to cars that could exist in the real world

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Even the worst, least well-planned, befuddlingly ignorant ideas can't be carried out in this country

pain

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I wouldn’t cal it ignorant. Its sole purpose was to divert public funds from any practicable public transit projects.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

True, but it also proved how many people weren't aware of how difficult digging is

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago

IIRC, the Boring Company's Boring machines were one of the things that actually worked, in that they could dig a tunnel faster than the competition. The problem is how hot the cutting head gets and how frequently you have to replace it - turns out previous generations of boring machines had more or less figured out the optimum ratio of cutting speed to maintenance interval, so going faster is a marketing gimmick.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (2 children)

give me and the boys some pickaxes and a case of beer and we could have done it faster

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (2 children)

pika-pickaxe 🍺🍻🍺

ROCK AND STONE

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

ROCK. AND. STONE.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

TO THE BONE

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

minecraft

The children yearn for the mines

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I always wondered about the engineers who worked there. They had to be either dense enough to not see it as a folly on its face, or else see it and sign up for the paycheck anyway.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago

or else see it and sign up for the paycheck anyway.

I mean it's probably this

Just make some fake reports every month, build whatever model or render you feel like that week. You know it'll never work, but hey, good money

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

but that was my fifth mode of transport.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

More like hyperpoop, gottem

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What's the next anti-railway grift gonna be?

Magnetically accelerated pods in a tube, like a railgun with people inside?

Futurama pneumatic tubes?

Autogyros launched via a comically large crossbow? Is Elon going to discover that single passenger gyroplanes exist, reinvent the ballista, combine them and scam taxpayers to fund this fever dream?