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?
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.