Do you think landspeeder like in Star Wars may one day be possible?

[Chronos]

Maglev trains are usually propelled like coilguns, not railguns. Railguns are not gentle on their projectiles.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from putting magnetic propulsion on a wheeled vehicle, either. Some roller coasters work that way.

[Mijin]

@Chronos

You can build a wheeled train that’s just as fast as a maglev. The wheeled train will have to deal with rolling and bearing friction, which the maglev won’t, and so you’ll need enough power to compensate for that, which does have its costs. But it’s less than the costs associated with a maglev.

I said that it wasn’t cost-effective in the post you’re replying to, and in other posts besides.

But the point is, you said the “only reason” to build one is prestige, and I am disputing that. Another reason might be for a government or enterprise that might need the very fastest speeds while maintaining safety.

[Jackson99]

@Chronos

You can build a wheeled train that’s just as fast as a maglev. The wheeled train will have to deal with rolling and bearing friction, which the maglev won’t, and so you’ll need enough power to compensate for that, which does have its costs. But it’s less than the costs associated with a maglev.

If your goal is just to move people quickly, then you’ll choose the cheapest way to accomplish that goal. Which is wheels. It’s only if your goal is to impress people that you choose the maglev.

That is interesting I had no idea fast trains can go just as fast as maglev.

But it seems all the fast trains and maglev are in China and Japan.

It just in the US and Europe no one is really interest in maglev the buzz word is hyperloop and sense Covid that all they talking about is building hyperloop.

But the hyperloop may be just for cargo not people.

[Jackson99]

@Darren_Garrison

He wants everything to do X.

How so I don’t want any thing. I was just curious what sci fi may be possible today and it looks like star wars landspeeder is not possible with todays technology unless some one comes out with anti gravity device

And maglev are way too costly today with today’s technology be it public sector or private sector.

[Darren_Garrison]

@Jackson99

How so I don’t want any thing.

I wasn’t talking about you, I was referring to Elon Musk wanting everything on Earth and beyond to be named “X”.

[Chronos]

The Hyperloop is a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream. Nobody but Musk thinks it’ll ever amount to anything at all.

And Europe does have high-speed trains. It’s mostly just the US as the outlier, in not having them. In part, that’s because the US is a lot more spread out than Europe or Japan: The cost of a rail line obviously scales with the distance between cities. With air travel, by contrast, you can put one airport at each end, and the cost of those airports is the same no matter how much empty space there is between them. So we Americans with our far-apart cities have invested more into airports and less into trains than Europe has.