The speed-up / slow-down phases would happen in a giant circle similar to a roller coaster turn but at particle accelerator speeds. Electro-Mag-Lev trains would speed up in a green circle then switch tracks to the Launch rail on the roof. Conversely, the ReEntry rail would have to catch incoming vehicles and slow them down on the red circle on the lower level.
Noticed an area near Columbus, Ohio that had about 5 airports close together. Saved 2 views in Google maps, overhead and perspective. I hi-lighted airports on the flat map w/ a pink dot. Drew the circular Foundation that linked the existing airports and the runways terminating at the larger city airfields. Copied it onto the perspective view. Changed the flat map close to the right perspective. The painstaking part was warping the Foundation map so each pink dot lined up with the airport location on the perspective view and the circle looked right on the terrain.
That was just for the foundation. I built 43 layers on top of that.
I put my civil & mechanical engineers hat on and thought out a lot of meaningless details: Safety has to be super strong to go to space. The railgun shuttles are similar in size to 2 standard rail cars. They carry pods, like a small space shipping container. Pods can be boarded at a normal train station {by maybe 20 people?} and are carried inside a tube train. The pods are self-contained emergency escape spacecraft. Each pod has life support, a re-entry shield and parachute. Pods would be transferred > from trains, pre-loaded with payload > into the launch shuttles. That will boost efficiency and add a double-hull safety barrier. The people inside a pod should be able to survive an explosion of the shuttle and the fall from high orbit. Like an egg inside a can filled with popcorn. The front car holds a crew pod and a passenger pod. The 2nd passenger / cargo pod is in the trailer.
I was thinking there would be room for the Cold-Fusion power plant in the 2 mile high SkyGlass tower. There's so much extra power that the lighthouse laser shines day and night.
you could just build a rocket that has something like giant solar sails at the bottom and lasers just shoot at the sails and push towards space and at that point traditional rockets take over.
Pshaaw... Rockets are so 20th Century. I did not invent the concept of Space Launch by Railgun. What I did was coil the railgun into a circle. By doing this there is now 25 miles of track in a 14x4 mile area. I'm a mechanical engineer and was watching a NatGeo space doc. The Shuttle weighs 250,000 tons and needs 4,000,000 tons in fuel, 16 x it's weight. Most of the fuel is used at the start of the trip. I used to know how to do the physics ;). By using electricity to get to orbit some other propulsion can take over in space. Preferably microwaves but rockets will do.
My thought was that the mini-monorail-space-shuttles would be aimed at a Space Station. Only navigation thrusters would be required. It is only a means to get people and cargo upp to orbit cheap. At the station one would transfer to a Starship.
You gave me a good idea! If the shuttle had sails that could unfold once the ship was above the atmosphere... . and there was a giant laser on the end of each rail... .. the shuttle could be pushed faster by the laser pressure on the solar sails.
yeah you get lots of track for a small space, but the laser thruster was from a physicist, i think michio kaku talked about it in a video. It will be cool to see you incorporate the lasers into the spaceport.
Would it not be better or more efficient to use a straight rail such as on a hill/valley set up and seen in the movie "When Worlds Collide". As soon as you turn the rocket ship or have a circle momentum happening much energy is being lost.
Also this design would probably be quite bad for people due to the forces involved in the continuous turns?
This is kinda too small, but rocket assisted catapult with magnetic rails would be pretty cool. You would need shock dampeners in all crew/passenger seats however!
You can see, in the movie the track is just a ramp, it is not long enough. A real track would have to be very long to get up to 18,000 MPH escape velocity. By making the spaceport in a circle essentially your track is infinitely long. The only problem I found in the math is that Max speed is limited by Ring Diameter. So the RailGun Railroad would just get the shuttle off the ground and rockets or lasers would have to accelerate the rest of the way to orbital velocity.
A = V^2 / R
Acceleration = 5G un-comfort level max = 160 feet/second^squared Velocity (speed needed to escape) = 18,000 mph = 26400 fps Radius of ring = 2 miles = 10560 feet
G-Max = vM^2 / R' >> vM = Square Root (G x R) vMax at 5G Launch = SQR(160*10560)
1300 feet per second = 885 mph = 5 G's Max 1162 feet per second = 792 mph = 4 G's 1007 feet per second = 686 mph = 3 G's Recommended 822 feet per second = 560 mph = 2 G's
Escape velocity is not possible in a 4 mile ring. 18,000 mph in a 4 mile circle = 2,063 G's
Location is critical when choosing a launch site, Columbus Ohio might not be the best place if your purely looking at escape velocity. Try to chose a location that has a larger distance between centers of mass. A constant force deriving from the train wouldn't require you to reach 18,000 mph. There are variety of issues that would need to be over come with the rail structure and "train". I'll do some back of the envelope calculations and model to see what I get. I'll be using S.I. units I tend to stay away from English units when doing motion calculation because the conversion and mass confusion (slug or lb-m). Even NASA has had issues with unit conversion. http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/
I know a location close to the equator is better. I live in Columbus and noticed I could draw a 4 mile circle connecting 5 little airstrips.
Based on a 4 mile ring and keeping G-force below 4G, max acceleration ring speed would be about 600-800 MPH. Once the shuttle is on the straight ramp a rocket could fire to send the ship into orbit. During acceleration one would feel the G-force going down (head to toe). Once on the ramp one would feel the G-force at your back.
