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?
The rings would have to be attached to something, or else they'd go flying in the opposite direction.
There have been a few proposals to use electromagnets to launch things into space, including a maglev train called the StarTram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram
What if we built a large hadron collider but instead of a single particle being accelerated around the circle we instead accelerated an entire fucking train? Build the circle around the entire planet or even bigger if you have to. Loop it until you can't anymore and then blast it off out there.
Build one on the receiving end too and physically catch the train in it to decelerate. Use loops like LHC does for particle acceleration.
EDIT: If you built them as rings could you not convert the launching energy into spinning energy instead and offset the fact it's not physically attached to a planet? @Bobson_Dugnutt
You're basically describing a mass driver . It doesn't need to go around the whole planet and it still needs rockets at the end to get into orbit or to other planets. It does remove the need for a first stage which is the biggest stage in terms of mass and fuel consumption. Rocket engines that can be used in space are much more efficient than ones that can be used on Earth or other planets with thick atmospheres.
I think you might be interested in an Aldrin Cycler . It's a big space station that would go close to both earth and mars using natural orbital mechanics so it doesn't need to use any fuel. The idea is that all the big heavy long-term life support equipment would go on the Aldrin Cycler while the people going between Earth and Mars would just need a small spacecraft with just enough life support and fuel to get to the Aldrin Cycler. It's also like a train in that we can put a bunch of them on similar orbital "tracks" so if you miss one you can catch the next one.
So the path would be as follows: wait for the Aldrin Cycler to be in the correct position, mass driver sends you from Earth to space, high-efficiency rocket propulsion to orbit, another rocket burn to the Aldrin Cycler, stay in the Aldrin Cycler until it gets to Mars, get out of the Aldrin Cycler and back into your small spacecraft and then do a rocket burn to Mars (or one of Mars' moons).
you could do a ring a little bit bigger or smaller than earth’s orbit. at that radius the centrifugal force from orbiting near c would be pretty mild. sunlight takes ~8 min to reach earth, so one trip around the ring at near-c would be like 25 min. getting a human up to that speed would take a long time though. at one gee of acceleration you’d need around a year to approach lightspeed unless i fucked up the math.
now you have a really fast spinny thing and good luck timing your approach with the start of the catching tube
the loop itself doesn't need to spin. also, i think you could have the loop not care where on the loop a projectile enters or exits from, or at least have lots of potential spots.
the loop would end up spinning, equal and opposite reaction
accelerate something else the other way round *the ring
yes that may work, but if its something built in like a reaction wheel it will accumulate angular momentum until whatever bearing its rotating on gives out, it would also have to be launch in an equal and opposite direction, perhaps launching one payload towards the outer solar system and another towards the inner solar system, since one needs to lose velocity and the other needs to gain it (relative to their path around the sun)
perhaps another way would to do the catching at the same time as the throwing, so for each payload sent another of similar mass must arrive, this is less feasible for as long as earth is the center of human space capability because thingd outbound from earth will outnumber those arriving.
maybe one launch accelerates a countermass (*around the ring) and the next launch goes round (*the ring) the other way and decelerates the countermass back to rest (*within the ring)
you still gotta account for the linear momentum imparted to the ring when the ship leaves though.
i think the linear momentum is also canceled out by the counterweight launch, but if youre relying on a second station to catch the counterweight youre also relying on another launch to act as counterweight to the counterweight. if shipment is late or theres no shipment available youre either not catching your counterweight and its gone or you have tons of angular or linear velocity now. and if you have means to store angular velocity (eg big reaction wheels) for when the next payload arrives you can do all that with a single station.
oh I didn't mean launch the counterweight, I was imagining that the counterweight does nothing but get pushed around the ring one way or another.
if the ring is centered around the sun, maybe a bit bigger or smaller than earth's orbit, you could control big solar sails on the ring to get rid of unwanted linear momentum.
were thinking on very different scales, i was thinking interplanetary launchers between earth and mars, youre thinking interstellar travel. and yes solar sails on that scale would work to remove momentum
That's fine if it's also the catching station, when it decelerates an incoming shuttle the deceleration will provide the same energy in the opposite direction.
the traffic may not be equal going both ways at all times, especially as spaceflight in the solar system will be centered upon earth for quite a while because thats where all the people and industrial capacity are, outbound flights will exceed incoming flights.
There's a startup working on a centrifuge that would launch rockets, so something like what you described is possible: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43079/space-launch-start-up-just-used-a-giant-centrifuge-to-hurl-a-projectile-into-the-upper-atmosphere
Now this is extremely cool.