• Kowowow@lemmy.ca
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    19 days ago

    With how bad semis rut the road I’ve been wanting to see them with retractable train wheels on the back

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      19 days ago

      the last time I gave factorio a serious run was waaaay back in its beta, before it was even finished and had an end game.

      its just gotten so complicated since then that I get overwhelmed, especially when you start to scale up and realize you fucked something up and have to undo an entire day of shit to move something 2 tiles or something.

        • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          19 days ago

          I tried about 6 months ago after falling deep into DoshDoshington’s various Factorio Mod and Challenge series.

          I got about 15 hours in before I was just overwhelmed with what I was doing. I miss being young and eager.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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        19 days ago

        Bots can do that shit. Ctrl+X, select, move the two tiles, place. Realize that’s still a tile off on the Y axis, and repeat. The bots don’t complain.

        I will hand make the hundred or so blue science I need to make construction bots if I have to.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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      19 days ago

      Shit you may have nerd sniped me.

      Could a blimp be sailed like a boat? I don’t think so, it’s a different physics problem. A sailboat is both hydrodynamic and aerodynamic, it’s touching water and air, a blimp is only touching air. A sailboat can sail into a quartering headwind by turning the yards so they form an airfoil creating lift like an airplane wing in a mostrly forward direction, and it keeps from sliding sideways by the mass of the water interacting with the hull. A blimp with masts wouldn’t do that, the wind will act on the envelope to just push it downwind, the sails might be able to drive it slightly forward so it goes slightly off to the side of downwind?

      Also, to keep it from being blown over you’d have to hang the masts below the airship rather than above like a boat. Bouyancy is much more precious on an airship than a boat because air is a much bigger pain in the ass to be lighter than, so a deep keel full of lead like a sailboat ain’t gonna cut it. Putting the masts on top would be too easy to blow over, if you hung them from below crosswinds might cause a rolling moment but it wouldn’t roll all the way over.

      Damn I wish they were still making Mythbusters. “Could an airship with sails sail into a quartering headwind? Or in any direction but downwind?”

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        19 days ago

        I mean, the whole problem with airships is that they’re just big inflatable sails, and to be barely economical they have just enough propulsive power to move about in normal weather conditions. Once they hit bad weather they’re fucked, which is why nearly every airship built before WWII ended up crashing in a storm. They’re only marginally viable today because of weather prediction that grounds them before they hit the shit. Adding sails isn’t going to help anything.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          19 days ago

          Yeah it’s a terrible idea, airships barely work as camera platforms cum billboards. But sails aren’t just windbags, they can function as airfoils to provide power in directions the wind isn’t blowing. I’m exactly one episode of Mythbusters curious about it. I remember going to a hockey game and the stadium had a remote controlled blimp the shape of a Coke bottle that would fly around the arena, I’d like to attach rigging to one of those and contrive a 5-6 mph wind scenario to see if it can do anything other than go downwind under sail.

          • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            18 days ago

            remote controlled blimp

            I always wanted to get one of these and program it to follow me around the disc golf course with my bag slung underneath it.

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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    19 days ago

    Train cars are crabs. They’ve got an exoskeleton, they’re squat bodied, many legged, and have pincers on either side. All they have to do is start moving that body plan around some and they will be crabs.

    • jawsua@lemmy.one
      0·
      19 days ago

      Checks out: while they CAN move forward, they highly prefer to move side to side

  • Halosheep@lemm.ee
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    19 days ago

    Why does Lemmy and reddit love trains so much? They could solve some travel problems in some but are we expecting tracks to run literally everywhere and into every suburb? What about rural places?

  • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    “we heavily biased the network against trains and now it’s just saying the optimal car consists of several metal struts connecting just two thinned out wheels that the driver sits on top of and propels themselves using pedals. It was busy redesigning intersections to have clear safe lanes for these bi-cycle ‘cars’ with plenty of trees / room for pedestrians when we pulled the plug…”

    • 257m@sh.itjust.works
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      20 days ago

      Even in bike racing the optimal form ends being to become a train. A peloton is just a train made up of bikes.

      • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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        19 days ago

        And then imagine if instead of wheels a bicycle was on a track with even greater reduced rolling resistance than skinny overinflated tires and didn’t require lumbar strength for balance.

  • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    20 days ago

    Ha! I was thinking along these lines reading science fiction the other day. In every novel where stuff has to get moved overland, it’s always a train. No matter their tech level, trains are the simplest, most efficient solution.