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 don't think there is any maximum speed for mass drivers besides the speed of light. If you put a net force on an object it will accelerate regardless of how fast its already going.
Perhaps we could build a time machine train on the moon using a mass driver along its entire circumference. You enter the train, the train accelerates up to near the speed of light and circles the moon about 27.4 times per second, and a few hours later it decelerates and you get off. But due to time dilation that few hours for you was years to the rest of the universe and so you've completed a one way journey into the future.
Edit: thinking about that a little more, the centrifugal force would probably result in you getting smeared all over the roof of the train. This is probably better done in a straight line
It's more the force of acceleration, rather than any centripetal forces, that would get you. You have to accelerate to near c over around 100 hours and decelerate over the same period of time. That's assuming the human body can withstand 6g for four days straight.
Yeah, the time scale I talked about would cause you to become a pancake.
At one g constant acceleration you'd reach near the speed of light after about a year. But I don't think anyone wants to spend a year inside a train-like vehicle
when we start talking about interstellar ships moving at near light speed, i think we can stop worrying about making them resemble trains. the ship is probably the size of mt everest and consists mostly of shielding. also, at this stage in technological development, we'll probably be pretty long-lived and able to mess with our own biology in a sophisticated way, so not only is a long trip between stars a smaller chunk of our lifespan but we can mentally adapt ourselves to the trip, e.g. superhuman memories and imaginations so a century ago feels like yesterday and your relationships with the people you leave behind don't fade in your mind over that timescale
It would take over 1400 hours to reach the speed of light at 6g by my calculations.
i posted this in another comment, but:
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.