On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 06:39:04 -0700, "Donald Qualls"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Well, in fact, it should be possible for a pseudo-ballistic surface
>transport to acheive this kind of point to point performance, but that's a
>much more expensive system to create than a rocket
Ya think? :-) The total purse for this phase is only $70,000,000. I
doubt you could even build a full size prototype tube train for that
kind of pin money.
And we were assuming aerospace vehicles of some flavor, right up
front...
>these can significantly exceed orbital speed over continental distances
>without exceeding 3G startup or braking accelerations.
And since if that kind of system ever gets built, it'll be with
government money (the permits {my imagination reels, boggled} wouldn't
apply then), it'll have to be usable by the taxpayers. Keep the
accelerations down to .2 g, and you can be quite comfortable and still
make 3000 km in just over 20 minutes; and anywhere in the world in
under an hour.
Of course, as we discussed here a while back about an open air
supersonic train, if something - anything - goes wrong, you die, and
that section of track shuts down for repair, possibly for weeks.
Whereas if something goes wrong in a rocket, there's nothing up there
to hit. Even if you crash, they don't have to shut the ground down
for repair. So we can make rockets of the required reliability
cheaper and easier than we can make trains of the required
reliability.
-R
-- "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters
will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to
the Internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Wilensky, UC Berkeley
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