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What advantage would hovering have?
by atoav 6mo ago
What advantage would hovering have?
- mastermage 6mo agoNo Street Infrastructure needeed to drive anywhere (kinda).
- atoav 6mo agoOk, and where does the energy to consistently keep a weight in the air come from and is it really worth spending? I know flying cars are some sort of futuristic trope, yet I cringe at it every time I see it. They always assume magical infinite power. In the real the reason we do not have flying cars is the same why you don't use a drone as a coat hanger at home: It is just more practical to use a mechanical solution that holds your coat for infinite time without any energy use or noise/heat emissions and it is much cheaper. Lifting stuff against gravity is not free, but a piece of wood, a brick or a rubber wheel does a pretty good job at it. One way to do it is magnets, but that means you need even more complicated roads. We are living on a warming planet where only the naive and the evil pretend that energy use is something only the poor have to think about. We all have to think about it.
- volemo 6mo agoWhat do you mean “we don’t have flying cars”? What are helicopters then?
- atoav 6mo agoDeathmachines that in their mechanical hubris angered the gods?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- shiroiuma 6mo ago>I know flying cars are some sort of futuristic trope, yet I cringe at it every time I see it. They always assume magical infinite power. No, they assume magical anti-gravity technology. "magical infinite power" implies they're basically a hovercraft, forcing air downwards to hover. Without a shroud, even with infinite energy available, this means constantly blasting high-speed air all around the vehicle, which has some really obvious practical problems. It works for drones because they're small and lightweight and not near the ground and not even that close to each other. >Lifting stuff against gravity is not free It's close to free when you have magical anti-gravity technology. Similarly, traveling to other star systems hundreds of lightyears away in a couple days isn't so hard when you have magical FTL propulsion technology that somehow warps spacetime.
- mastermage 6mo agoMy entire answer exists in the context of a hpyothetical we were not discussing the realism of it. It was in the context of if someone would invent this technology. To which then the question was what advantage does this have. Now going and posing the question wheter this is realistic or feasible is making this argumentation circular.
- ufocia 6mo agoYou're misunderstanding fundamental physics. Things staying in place do not require energy. The reverse is true, things falling give up the energy they already have. The aim is to prevent them from losing energy. We already do this, they're called geostationary satellites. Also, it's not weight, it's mass.
- Keyframe 6mo agosmoother ride, no need for wheels so no road friction and fewer parts that wear, no need for shock absorbers as well, no need for roads clean of snow and ice which would make them both more practical and safer.. if we're talking star trek hovering, not rotor blade / hovercraft noisy shit with rotating parts that waste a ton of energy.
- atoav 6mo agoAha, and which of the fundamental forces in our universe would it work with?
- Keyframe 6mo agoYou asked what advantage would it have over rolling rubber, not how would one do it (you wouldn't with current understanding of physics and energy density/portability). Any at advantage vehicle like that is still in the realm of scifi.
- atoav 6mo agoYes but it collides with our understanding of physics as well. Floating anything with significant weight within an air atmosphere requires constant power, you will at least have to profuce an upwards force that is equivalent to the downwards force. Depending on how efficiently that force is transfered you may need much more. A wheel made of rubber or steel (trains are freakingly efficient!) does give you that much cheaper. Now theoretically one could envision some energy form that is so abundant it doesn't matter anymore that you constantly fight gravity, sure. But what most people seem to imagine is some magical tech that decouples the vehicle from the force of gravity, while still coupling it to the planet (or whatever the next relevant relevant frame of reference is) somehow. This kind of magical tech makes sense in films or scifi books, but if we just collect together what it would need to be, it is hard to envision any actual potential mechanism short of "we live in a Matrix and we lesrn to control the program".
- shiroiuma 6mo agoThat's a good question. When (if) we figure out how to practically travel at FTL speeds with a "warp drive", we might figure out the answer to this question too.