Sunday, June 2, 2024

Leaving Eros

Let's talk exports from the permamaglev in vacuum and micrograv. On Earth, the fastest train is the Shanghai which has been tested up to 23 m/s. Normally it doesn't go that fast. I assume it could if the Chinese didn't sweat the air-resistance.

That means the calculator again. If I want 9.8 m/s2, and I have 200m radius: the train must run 44.3 m/s. A 1km radius will run 99 m/s!

If some of those numbers look familiar, that's because I used a similar calculation for a momentum capacitor elsewhere. Which leads to ponder if we could so use the maglev as a momentum-capacitor. Escape-velocity of Deimos is 5.556 m/s. Even given my terminal case of sloth where it comes to, say, v_inf I am fairly confident our maglev can eject pods from any rock up to Eros' size, such that Eros won't see them again.

It may even be among Eros' jobs to make those pods. It's not like anyone needs Eros in that orbit. Deimos, yeah, the Martian merchants probably want to keep.

On the other hand: crashes are that much worse at higher speeds and avoiding such requires that much more lead-in time to screech to a halt. As my readers be witness I was considering safety first (well, repairability first). So I think we'll have only as many cars on the track in the wider ring as on the shorter ring, and space them out more.

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