Quote: (07-03-2016 06:29 PM)JayJuanGee Wrote:
Quote: (07-03-2016 05:28 PM)debeguiled Wrote:
Drones are nightmare enough.
The Jetson car was a kind of drone... and so, drones do seem to be a very plausible next step forward, whether they are flying or driving, but certainly I can imagine a world in which fewer people own cars, but instead may own various subscriptions or contracts to cars, and those cars may be held in various warehouses, and maybe at some point some of them may be flying as well, but you will say that you need the car to go run some errands or to buy some furniture, and the car will be dispensed out of the warehouse to get you and take you to various locations... Probably the flying component of the drone, will be further down the road, like 50 years, but would not really be deployed all at once anyhow.. we gotta get to the drone warehousing of cars before we get to the drone flying of cars stage.. but of course, the more wealthy probably are already experimenting with some variations of drone flying apparatuses.. and pilot functions that require fewer and fewer skills from the pilot/passenger.
Still not feasible, even if we all have mini nuclear power plants in our flying drone cars, or fusion reactors. Even if we invent some sort of zero-point energy, that taps a wormhole straight into the center of the sun - effectively unlimited energy - it still won't work for mass transit for one simple reason:
Heat.
Think about how much heat your car's engine puts out; you've basically got an oven under the hood, and that's merely when it's cruising along the highway. Again, take the energy consumption/output when you're accelerating, and maintain that for half an hour straight; now, multiply that by three (or possibly cube it? Hey, I'm a scifi writer, not an engineer). You wind up with a bunch of coke-ovens flying around in close quarters, that would be raising the ambient temperature by 10-30 degrees celsius. It would be like sitting around in a compressor station all day.
Travel is an engineering problem with a variety of factors; but ultimately, your goal is to provide the smoothest ride possible, even if energy is freely available. Got a regular route that's being travelled? Rail is the best bet. It can be traditional rail, maglev, or some sort of compression-based pneumatic tube system.
This is the best mode of transport - period. Now and forever.
Need to get there fast, and price/comfort/safety is no barrier? That's when you fly.
The automobile, meanwhile, provides the best of both worlds; after accelerating, it requires minimal energy to maintain its trajectory, and it has the versatility of going anywhere it wants, without a pre-determined course. Furthermore, the 'infrastructure' at either end of the destination is minimal: nothing but a parking stall. The train needs a station, the airplane needs a massive runway, but all the car needs is a location that's 2.5m/4m square.
Maybe -
maybe - we'll see site-specific flying drones, but they won't generally be used for travelling from home to work. Have you ever been in a helicopter? It's cool and all, but I don't want my neighbours calling one of those noisy birds down on their front lawn twice a day.
The car really is the most elegant solution there is; something like the Jetson's vehicle simply denies physics, and you might as well dream about having a flying carpet - or talk about crossing the street by using a 200 lb jetpack.
I strongly recommend this man's blog, he writes about technological limitations, the value of energy (he's noted that nearly all forms of energy work out to the same kW/h rate), and stall speed:
www.wimminz.wordpress.com
QUICK EDIT: what dark_g said; people are never going to trust automated cars, let alone helicopters that crash and send a blade spinning out at 200+ mph, slicing through your house and decapitating your wife. The only reasons drones are okay is because they only weigh a few pounds.
SECOND EDIT: A lot of this confusion comes from Star Trek, in my opinion. In the show, you always see the shuttles landing on planets using 'impulse engines' that don't emit massive amounts of exhaust, unlike our launch vehicles which create huge clouds of H2O vapour. The thing to remember is that it doesn't matter *how* the thrust is created - it still takes the same amount of energy to get it done.
The space shuttle launching into orbit requires about the same as one of Star Fleet's shuttles lifting off of the planet; and as for the USS Voyager? When that thing lands on a planet it should be glowing bright red from all the heat generated! Even if their engines are 100 percent efficient, all of that thrust creates an equal and opposite reaction that eventually turns into heat; if there isn't an exhaust port spraying out hot steam, then all that heat stays with the ship until it manages to get rid of it.
So all of that white H20 coming out of the vapour? Concentrate all of it into something the size of a minivan, and think about how comfortable that would be.