Do you think landspeeder like in Star Wars may one day be possible? Is there any one working on vehicles like landspeeder like in Star Wars?
I guess under the vehicle of the landspeeder will be propeller or jet engine or combo of both.
In the Star Wars movie there does seem to be lot of dust and dirt moving by the landspeeder and loud noise so it does not look like it is anti gravity in movie making it impossible to make today.
Star Wars landspeeder
But it would be awesome if one day we had Star Wars like landspeeder to drive around in the city.
In Star Wars they have number of vehicles called landspeeders that just float 4 to 6 feet of the ground and travel around. Do you think such vehicles would one day be possible?
Air cushion vehicles (“ACV”) are commonplace now. They’re useful for traversing rather flat terrain that is not a smooth road. Or water or swamp or mudflat or all of the above. And are horribly loud and inefficient compared to a wheeled vehicle on a road or a boat on water. So useful for some specialized niches or the military and that’s about it.
The other choices for lift within our current comprehension of physics is either direct thrust lift like a VTOL jet or helicopter, or anti-gravity. The former is even more noisy and less efficient than an ACV. The latter is pure fantasy and under current theory impossible even in principle; all we know about that stuff is the word we’ve coined to describe this fantasy: “anti-gravity”.
If some day we learn a lot more about physics there might be some other as yet inconceivable way to push back against the universe not involving anti-gravity. But we have zero inkling of what that might be.
My vote is on wheeled vehicles on roads, tracked vehicles on soft flat or rough terrain, and boats on water for the next umpteen centuries. With ACVs a perennial niche curiosity.
So no landspeeders better than the ones we have in 2023. Of course if we can get our powerplant density and efficiency up enough we might be able to build ACVs with better operating economics. But those same improvements can also be applied to the other transport machines too, keeping them ahead of ACVs.
Aside from lots of fast-moving air, the most plausible idea would be something based on magnets. And in fact, magnetically-levitated vehicles do exist, but they need special magnetized tracks to run on (which are so expensive that they’re completely impractical). It’s conceivable that something could be made that pushes against the Earth’s magnetic field, or against some sort of common natural ground material, but you’d probably need ludicrous amounts of power to make that work.
We have walkers, too. Just, again, highly impractical.
Star Wars landspeeders definitely use anti-gravity technology.
Within the Star Wars universe, speeder is a generic term for any “repulsorcraft” or vehicle which uses anti-gravity repulsorlift technology to hover and fly above a planet’s surface.
*Wave hands** mumble science-y words* presto.
As others have said, floating land vehicles have been tried multiple ways using a variety of technologies. If the world were a perfectly smooth marble we would have them in common use by now. The vast number of uneven surfaces make them unstable on any but prepared stretches and even those are limited because of the power demands.
Personally, I’d wait until we have anti-gravity before I got my hopes up.
The thing about hovercraft (besides their tendency to accumulate eels) is that driving one is like driving on ice with bald tires, only even less precise to steer. You won’t see them in lanes on roads. (SOME friction is your friend.)
I see no such thing. I see somebody being paid to test the machine who’s operating it gingerly for the first time. That’s intense concentration, not fear.
I don’t think the US or Europe have magnetically-levitated trains like they do in Japan and China.
The high population density in Japan and China probably keep cost way down there but if the US, UK or Europe where to do it be too costly for business to build it and operate it and have to be state run.
I mean, people say flying cars are pointless, but they actually have potential advantages such as no traffic (until we get to preposterous numbers of vehicles) and faster speeds.
Meanwhile, for landspeeders, where’s the environment where they are desirable? In the wilderness, you may as well fly. In a city, where the destinations are close together and you want to be able to make stops easily, well, our cities have roads.
OTOH, the OP asks whether it will be possible. I would say “yes”; I expect humans to some day be able to harness such vast energies that the inefficiency and pointlessness of vehicles like this can give way to “rule of cool”.
What problem are we trying to solve? Sure you can make a vehicle “float” if you want to spend enough money and energy doing so. The amount of investment needed to actually make a fleet of vehicles practical for transportation could be used in better ways - everything from public transit, to better all-terrain wheeled vehicles, to making helicopters with professional pilots more accessible for short-range trips.
The other problem is the failure condition. If your wheels-and-tires vehicle runs out of gas or battery it’s immobile (eventually) and can at least coast off the road in neutral (often). If your landspeeder stops supplying full power for even a quarter of a second, it slams into the ground from several feet in the air. Ae you going to build every one to withstand that? How? Just more cost, more weight to lift, etc on top of an already substantial engineering problem in those areas. How high off the ground are these things supposed to be? If it’s 3 or 4 feet like in the movie, what’s the advantage over just driving a car? If it’s high enough that they are leapfrogging each other in traffic, going over buildings, etc then you add even more safety problems.
At some point you’re just building “something with all the drawbacks of a helicopter, but with technology that doesn’t actually exist yet, and handed out to everyone who can get a driver’s license today.” For what purpose?
“ACV” are air cushion vehicles. Also called “hovercraft”. Which term I defined in my very first sentence. They have zero to do with magnetically levitated railroads or monorails (“MagLev”).
One vehicle not mentioned yet is the ekranoplan or ground effect vehicles. They’re like airplanes, but stay in ground effect the entire time of operation. The interaction between the wings, air, and ground occur to provide additional lift that would not be present in an airplane at altitude. This makes them more efficient (if less practical) than airplanes. Those might look the most like Star Wars speeders, because they operate very close to the ground, but don’t have skirts like a hovercraft.
In Star Wars the repulsor technology must be very cheap and efficient. It is used on ground vehicles, carts, pallet jacks, droids, and even chairs. If we had technology that would let a car levitate so cheaply that it could be left floating all the time, then it would be worth solving the issues presented by steering a hovercraft.
Nobody has magnetically-levitated trains, at any practical level. With current technology, they’re just not practical for anything more than a few-hundred-foot run to say “Golly gee, look at the nifty futuristic tech we have!”. That’ll probably change when and if we ever develop room-temperature superconductors, but we haven’t yet.
