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I also really like that every time I see some dumb idea to “improve vehicles” there a long comment chain improving it even further into a train.
There’s two kinds of ground transportation: off-roading, and should be a train.
That’s not true I likewise “invented” a blimp. With sails so it can really catch the wind.
Shit you may have nerd sniped me.
Could a blimp be sailed like a boat? I don’t think so, it’s a different physics problem. A sailboat is both hydrodynamic and aerodynamic, it’s touching water and air, a blimp is only touching air. A sailboat can sail into a quartering headwind by turning the yards so they form an airfoil creating lift like an airplane wing in a mostrly forward direction, and it keeps from sliding sideways by the mass of the water interacting with the hull. A blimp with masts wouldn’t do that, the wind will act on the envelope to just push it downwind, the sails might be able to drive it slightly forward so it goes slightly off to the side of downwind?
Also, to keep it from being blown over you’d have to hang the masts below the airship rather than above like a boat. Bouyancy is much more precious on an airship than a boat because air is a much bigger pain in the ass to be lighter than, so a deep keel full of lead like a sailboat ain’t gonna cut it. Putting the masts on top would be too easy to blow over, if you hung them from below crosswinds might cause a rolling moment but it wouldn’t roll all the way over.
Damn I wish they were still making Mythbusters. “Could an airship with sails sail into a quartering headwind? Or in any direction but downwind?”
I mean, the whole problem with airships is that they’re just big inflatable sails, and to be barely economical they have just enough propulsive power to move about in normal weather conditions. Once they hit bad weather they’re fucked, which is why nearly every airship built before WWII ended up crashing in a storm. They’re only marginally viable today because of weather prediction that grounds them before they hit the shit. Adding sails isn’t going to help anything.
Yeah it’s a terrible idea, airships barely work as camera platforms cum billboards. But sails aren’t just windbags, they can function as airfoils to provide power in directions the wind isn’t blowing. I’m exactly one episode of Mythbusters curious about it. I remember going to a hockey game and the stadium had a remote controlled blimp the shape of a Coke bottle that would fly around the arena, I’d like to attach rigging to one of those and contrive a 5-6 mph wind scenario to see if it can do anything other than go downwind under sail.
remote controlled blimp
I always wanted to get one of these and program it to follow me around the disc golf course with my bag slung underneath it.
If trains were optimal, they’d have pincers.
They do though?
Look how sweet, they’re holding
handspincers
Okay, now solve for local transportation and create a single network that’s highly optimized for both long distance, medium distance, and last mile solutions. Bet you it looks like cargo trucks, buses, and road infrastructure.
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Optimizing for anything but speed removes the primary factor humans will focus on for happiness in a transit situation.
I don’t believe you
Tram is 2/3 the time as car in rush hour in my city. You just need a decent tram system with fast offstreet lines outside the city centre.
It looks like trains, bikes, and walking
And trams. Which admittedly look a lot like trains but run to a high frequency rather than a timetable.
Okay, now solve for local transportation and create a single network that’s highly optimized for both long distance, medium distance, and last mile solutions.
Why does it need to be a single network? A shipping container can go on ship, train, and truck pretty seamlessly, and that combined multi-modal network can connect sources and destinations that no one method is sufficient for.
And once you design an optimized network under your parameters, it starts to look like a hub and spoke model, with high volume arterial routes connecting the hubs, pretty close to how parcel delivery tends to work. And once you have that, you can optimize specific segments, including using hubs connected by air for time sensitive stuff (same day, next day, 2-day service), waterways or rail for really heavy or bulky stuff, and all sorts of intermediate methods or a variety of last mile delivery needs for the specific needs of any given package.
Looks like fast frequent all neighbourhoods city tram system with tap on, tap off, coherent pricing, decent buses and free park and ride at tram stops.
Highly optimized for traffic jams.
Wouldn’t it be neat if companies weren’t flocking to a few neighborhoods in a few cities, creating not only traffic jams but driving up housing prices as well? Isn’t it silly how local governments are competing on who can throw the most money at private enterprise to get the new widget factory or tech campus built there?
I just hate the whole concept of housing as an investment vehicle. You get all these old ass shit houses worth a million dollars for no damn reason.
Even the slime mould knows it: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/slime-mould-attacks-simulates-tokyo-rail-network
Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.
least funny meme of 2017
So what you’re saying is the optimal form is some kind of crab train?
As a tf2 player. A crab train is majestic.
Trains only move forward and back. Crabs only move side to side. It only makes sense.
Hey there 👋, I know you mean well by that comment, like I get it, I do. ☺️ But I just wanted to let you know:
THERE HAVE BEEN ZERO STUDIES DONE ON THE SAFETY OF CRAB TRAINS.
ZERO.
But despite that, they are gaining widespread support, and now even people like yourself are calling them “optimal.”
Listen: Someone I know lost an arm in the pincer mechanism of one of these trains. More work needs to be done before we can consider them safe, nevermind “optimal”. Don’t buy into the techbro BS.
Friends don’t let friends crab train.
Hey, when the train needs blood the train gets blood
Choo choo Charlie intensifies
This is just the AI bias showing through: It’s all that training.
Nice pun, I think you railed it
They were certainly on the right track
People who are biased against trains have a real loco motive.
They’re all intent on just derailing the conversation!
BTC at $101k
Well if every vehicle becomes autonomous then isn’t that just a large scaled high speed train?
Yes. That is the point. Trains are optimal.
A less efficient train, because it has a bunch of small engines and batteries instead of one big one
But you don’t have to smell unshowered people. I’m willing to sacrifice earth climate for my nose good.
Inter-vehicle cooperation and autonomy makes highways act like trains, yes, with a bunch of unnecessary steps
the last time I gave factorio a serious run was waaaay back in its beta, before it was even finished and had an end game.
its just gotten so complicated since then that I get overwhelmed, especially when you start to scale up and realize you fucked something up and have to undo an entire day of shit to move something 2 tiles or something.
This was me but I tried it a year ago 😂
I tried about 6 months ago after falling deep into DoshDoshington’s various Factorio Mod and Challenge series.
I got about 15 hours in before I was just overwhelmed with what I was doing. I miss being young and eager.
Bots can do that shit. Ctrl+X, select, move the two tiles, place. Realize that’s still a tile off on the Y axis, and repeat. The bots don’t complain.
I will hand make the hundred or so blue science I need to make construction bots if I have to.
Yes… if you are far enough in the game for them, perhaps.
Which I wasnt.
Since space age came out, it’s way easier to rush bots and rockets. Just red green and blue science.
embrace the spaghetti 🍝
ELEVATED RAILS my BELOVED ❤️
“we heavily biased the network against trains and now it’s just saying the optimal car consists of several metal struts connecting just two thinned out wheels that the driver sits on top of and propels themselves using pedals. It was busy redesigning intersections to have clear safe lanes for these bi-cycle ‘cars’ with plenty of trees / room for pedestrians when we pulled the plug…”
Even in bike racing the optimal form ends being to become a train. A peloton is just a train made up of bikes.
And then imagine if instead of wheels a bicycle was on a track with even greater reduced rolling resistance than skinny overinflated tires and didn’t require lumbar strength for balance.
Damn now I want pedal powered train
Ha! I was thinking along these lines reading science fiction the other day. In every novel where stuff has to get moved overland, it’s always a train. No matter their tech level, trains are the simplest, most efficient solution.
