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?
Yeah, mass drivers and such have been a staple if scifi since forever. Big electric coil-gun at one end and a catcher-station at the end. Usually not train-shaped, but no reason they couldn't be.
Pusher stations in the middle are more complicated, because of the recoil issues. You could probably get around it by getting clever/cute and putting the midway-stations in orbit around a body with a magnetic field. Boost the train and re-circularize your orbit magnetically by pushing off the parent body. A lot of rotovators and other hypothetical tether-launch systems work on the same idea.