Comment by JKCalhoun
6 days ago
Yeah, love that idea of progressive velocities. I ant someone to at least build a short test track like this so we can play with it.
Seem to recall they were called "slidewalks" by some Sci-Fi author—probably Heinlein, eh?
Larry Niven called them slidewalks and I've always been sorry this terminology never caught on.
The things I took away from reading Niven was transfer booths. The world has homogenized because information and people were transmitted instantly one from corner of the globe to another.
Ooohhh boy.
I loved the conservation of momentum "hack" for those teleportation booths. Go on, everyone who hasn't read it, see if you can guess how he dealt with that.
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If you want to see this idea taken to the next level, you should read Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. ;)
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In the UK, Singapore and maybe other countries with British influence, they use the word travelator, which I find quite cool as well.
Just like an escalator, but without the escalation!
so assuming inner sidewalk moving at 100 mph, next outer at 95, and each moving at 5 per less, when big muscular terrorists placed on s-100 carrying a big cardboard box filled with nails and throw it as quickly and hard as possible so that the box of nails open up over s-75 at what velocity are the nails raining down on pedestrians on s-75?
Oddly I’m pretty sure a strong guy throwing a rock really hard at someone without the walkways would do way more damage. Nails at those speeds just aren’t that dangerous because their momentum is so low and they aren’t particularly sharp.
Pedestrians would likely not be hit, because few would want to walk there with a 75mph headwind in the first place.
The headwind wouldn’t be that bad because the people ahead of you are dragging some air with them.
Now I want to learn to use the CFD kit and figure out what it’d be.
Assuming that these terrorists are relatively fast runners, being in good shape, and they decide to exit the walkways on the other side, how far on the other side will they be in relation to the nail rain on s-75 they caused.
Two planes are headed towards new york. The first is descending into the city at 805 miles per hour. The second 846 miles per…
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Compared to doing that from a moving car?
Everybody carries a gun in Heinlein stories, so those terrorists will be quickly dealt with by armed citizens, thus confirming the superiority of Libertarianism.
In 1940 when he wrote this Heinlein was a New Deal Democrat supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. He was an active progressive who had recently worked on Upton Sinclair’s socialist “End Poverty in California” campaign. His libertarian shift was twenty years in the future, in his fifties.
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