Posts tagged transportation
Hello everyone, I am thinking yet again about infrastructure. (my calendar project recently asked about... well, that's outside my expertise, I'll get back to that eventually) And I am thinking of...
A speedometer is a gauge or device used for measuring instantaneous speed of moving vehicle roughly speaking, so for example the reading shown on the speedometer of a car parked at road side displa...
I have seen many science fiction movies that depict traveling in space through wormholes. The appearance though, and the time it takes to cross a wormhole, tends to vary: On one hand, we have the...
I have a maglev train starting in Paris, going through Siberia, bridging over the Bering Strait, and running down the West Coast to San Francisco. There are other major lines splitting from this on...
I want to have air transport as the dominant means of public transportation in my fictional city. But how would such a system operate to handle many commuters with maximum efficiency? Specifically ...
Imagine a species of humanoid beings living on an Earth-like planet somewhere in the universe; they have developed complex spoken and written languages and they can study their own anatomy and the ...
I am looking for as hard science answers as possible, but I am willing to bend some rules for a good answer. Assume they need to move 10 million 100 million people off of a planet what technology...
So, me and the boys have decided to take a trip down to Earth for reasons that matter not be it science, leisure or fleeing persecution. It is no concern how we blend in but our spacecraft poses an...
In my world, there are giant fish, reptiles, and bugs. My question is, how would you be able to put a harness or saddle on a fish? Info: Swamp bio being ridden by humans Fish range in all differ...
Imagine a light spaceship capable of traveling at 0.999c is tasked to tow a radioactive cargo containing millions of tons of polonium and radium, however the container holding the radioactive mater...
Say humanity have the luxury to start anew. Colonizing a planet where speed of colonization is not an issue. Let's assume planet conditions and gravity pull similar to Earth. Technology relatively ...
I was considering this answer I wrote: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/21374/75 It got me to wondering... if we had a flying sailing ship with a twisted-rubber energy storage device that...
On Earth, civilization grew up around river valleys. Rivers are useful as a water source, a food source, and a waste disposal system, but their most important function to a civilization is enabling...
I understand that some non human animals build structures that they innately know how to build, such as how birds innately know how to build nests, and spiders innately know how to make webs, and b...
I have an idea for a futuristic way to travel for my Story. People get into a capsule, and it launches itself extremely fast in the air. What would be needed to make this happen for real and what c...
As a way to travel fast, my Earth-like planet is going to have a special train, circling it (the axis of the 'tracks' is aligned with the planet's axis of rotation). The thing about this train - i...
In my world, law enforcement is dispatched from the capital to places around the island. The reason for them being dispatched in this fashion is due to there being few officers and the capital bei...
On a planet, a species uses magnets (i.e. float in the air) instead of wheels for transportation. Roads are easy enough, just slap some magnets in it, at it works. But I was wondering about the f...
Given a world with similar size and atmospheric composition to Earth that has a commodity export, be it grain or oil etc, that has trade with other planets, what would be best way to orbit massive ...
While similar to other questions they mostly focused on what impacts required in the past to keep airships as a popular air transport method today, this question is about how to make airships the d...
Imagine a single, long, straight stretch of track. On the track there is a train heading in one direction at 100 km/h and a second train heading towards it at 200 km/h. The latter train is a specia...
Assume in the very near future almost all rail transportation would return to steam-powered locomotives. To define it exactly, I mean solid fuel is burned inside the locomotive, which boils water, ...
On my fantasy planet, humanoid peoples are at war and ride different animals into battle, including wolves. People and their wolves are, for all intents and purposes, extremely similar to humans an...
For reference, I'm going with the accepted answer given here: How would technology adoption of Lithium Air battery work?. In my world, it makes sense that governments would be very interested in ge...
I want to have a world when humans got serious about global warming and succeeded in making Lithium Air battery work. Since the lithium air has same potential energy density as gas, and electric en...
In a setting where portals can be opened between one location and another, Suppose you open a portal of area one square meter, with one end at the surface and the other end at the bottom of an oce...
In my world, I have three dimensions, each of which have their own special properties. From each of these three dimensions come a master race of said dimension: From the first, the master race is...
Here's the explanation These are the structural questions about my "Super Dreadnought". How wide would the ship have to be to be stable on the water? Would the Caterpillar treads hold the weight...
In my fantasy universe, there is a disc-shaped world that has a flat surface that has roughly the same atmosphere as Earth (see this); the atmosphere moves along with the world. There is no gravity...
An underwater stone age tribe of merfolk captured 2 baby whales and killed the adult beast for meat. My sea people would like to tame the young whales and use them as transport when the babies rea...
Before we get into the question, I'd just like to say that this isn't specifically for Spider-man, but more of a general "character who moves around a lot and finds themselves upside-down quite oft...
My story takes place on an Earth-like, inhabited world that is far larger than Earth, has roughly 110% of Earth's gravity, and has unusually high (and generally unexplained) EM emissions permeating...
...and while I'm at it: You've another 47 seconds to finish up and get back here before I gotta throw her in reverse... Acting Navvy on the Marube @63kph and ~4km distance from a forthcoming t...
Context On my world, there is a lot of water: sea, oceans, ... There are also firm land and islands, so it's interesting to travel on the water. The problem is that there is NO wind at all, and lo...
I want to write a science fiction book on a planet mostly covered by ocean, but I also want to incorporate trains into my story. However, it seems that with advances in ship and plane technology, t...
Since Tolkien put people riding on giant eagles in his books (or maybe even before that), the imaginarium of riding the winds on the back of magnificent birds has generated a plethora of images and...
In a "futuristic" society (think Ghost in the Shell or Human Revolution), where you have AI driving vehicles that carry goods in a reliable way, is there any reason to have a human traveling with t...
I'm trying to design a realistically looking capitol (with a few milion people) for one human nation on an exoplanet. The technology level is barely better than contemporary. The city is placed ...
This question has similarities to this one but concerns canal travel in more ancient times and is aimed at finding an approximate speed of flow not variables. Background Assume an Earth-like world...
When I was a kid, I conceptualized a post-apocalyptic story entirely starring Barbie dolls. One idea I had about how they would live and get around involved transmission towers, or power towers. Im...
In my World, a perfect storm of catastrophic size strikes earth and black-death levels of mortality ensue, cutting short the Great Space Race. The only problem is that there are over 10,000 people ...
Many fish have specialized organs called buoyancy bladders which allow them to control their buoyancy - effectively rising or sinking in the water. What if humans adapted this to use in the air? I...
I'm picturing an universe where FTL travel was invented as a sort-of-fluke, and artificial gravity technology isn't available. Transit between star-systems takes at least a few days and a star's gr...
In the near future mankind could well permanently settle on the Moon. Whether for research or mining or just good old fashioned novelty is irrelevant. The colony includes: Large domed structu...
The rock is spherical. All arthropods are included. They have no time limit and are "programmed" to cooperate, but lack intelligence. While there is no time limit, the insects do this transportatio...
How would you form an extended stretch of coastline that is effectively useless for overwater trade -- i.e. there are no sheltered areas to serve as ports, or trade routes that can reach all the wa...
Tech level: more or less contemporary, no tech that would put you in awe. I'm trying to make realistic, driverless, mass-transit system. The first idea was that "driverless" implies that in each ...
"Group B" has acquired [Plot-device] and it is able to deliver over time infinite energy of the type needed for the story to work. They decide to place it on the most powerful space engine known t...
Perpetual motion doesn't exist... or does it? In space planets continuously spin around stars for trillions of years due to inertia and gravity balancing each other out. What if a race of brilliant...
Year 2317 C.E. traffic report: heavy traffic expected along upper Curiosity sector H-311 going towards Juno boulevard, there is an accident at Exit C right lane, so vehicle leaving for Europa via t...
