What if you took the principle of magnetic acceleration, created a bunch of acceleration gateways in space, and then shot space trains through it? Have catching gates on the opposite end for the deceleration part.
What's the maximum speed that magnetic acceleration can accelerate an object to in a vacuum before the object is travelling so fast that the magnetic effect can no longer impact upon it as it passes the gates?
I wanna build some fucking space trains. What can I read that's explored this?
I know that electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces along with gravity, weak nuclear force (fission), and strong nuclear force (fusion). Gravity is the weakest force, but has infinite range. If you had two sugar cubes on the opposite ends of an empty universe, the smaller one will be drawn to the bigger one.
I think if you take out friction with the vacuum of space, I'd say the biggest complications would come from parts degrading and gravity skewing things in currently imperceptible ways.
Technically they both act each other, it's not just more massive body acting on the less massive one. A planet's action on its host star is one way to locate exoplanets.
Oh shit. I thought that was the case, but second-guessed myself. Thanks!
If it helps, it's best not to think of one object "pulling" on another. The easiest way to conceptualize gravity is to picture a sheet of fabric stretched out. If you place a bowling ball and a tennis ball on the fabric both objects will cause the shape of the fabric to change. The bowling ball, being the more massive object, causes more perturbation, but the effect of the tennis ball still exists.
all the four forces act across the universe, they just drop off in strength at different rates, and gravity drops off with distance the slowest so thats what tends to dominate at planetary scales. and the larger object is not solely pulling the smaller object, the small object will pull on the large one as well
Gravity and Electromagnetism drop off with at the same rate (they're both inverse square laws), but distributions of electric charge tend to even out (opposing charges attract and form a net-zero charge) at interstellar scales whereas mass is only additive and can't cancel out.
that makes sense but how do the strong and weak nuclear force fit into this? because on an atomic scale they dominate the interactions to the point gravity and magnetism are irrelevant and protons can be shoved together despite being positive, yet at larger scales they are absolutely irrelevant.