• Vampire [any]
    ·
    1 month ago

    I can't wait for the vactrain future.

    Faster than airplanes (which are crazy fast, although we are accustomed to them) and wayyyy lower on energy-use.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.ml
      hexagon
      ·
      1 month ago

      Yeah, this is strictly superior to air travel. Also, just from sheer convenience perspective, these could have stations right in the city, so you don't have to go to the airport, wait to check in, etc. for like an hour before you even get moving. Just hop on and hop off in a different city.

    • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      People have been blinded by a level of understandable Elon hate until China started working on it. The talking point was that it would be a larger evacuated space than the largest vacuum chamber ever built by NASA and therefore impossible, not considering that a very long tube is not comparable to a huge dome. You dunked on me before but I am vindicated!

      • Vampire [any]
        ·
        1 month ago

        People have been blinded by a level of understandable Elon hate until China started working on it.

        Nah it's been kicking around since maybe 1904: https://web.archive.org/web/20140630081422/https://black-cat-studios.com/goddardstory.pdf

        Gerard K. O'Neill really popularised the idea in the 1970s