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[–] 26 points 7 months ago (2 children)

7.2 g acceleration. You could strap a human on there and they'd survive the acceleration phase.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    For an untrained person this might well be lethal.

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Only 2 seconds of horizontal g? Not unless they weren't securely against the seat and died due to blunt force trauma from being slammed into the seat back.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Well now we need to design the train with all seats facing forward and restraints to keep people in place, and we need to have staff abord to do do a safety check that everyone is seated and strapped in before we can get those 2 seconds of theoretically-survivable acceleration.

    Come on. This is cool from an engineering perspective but will never be used on an actual passenger train.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Lol I was certainly not claiming this was practical, just pointing out it wouldn't be lethal in that sense.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    It’s completely not practical.

    7Gs is, granted, not categorically lethal hut average people will start to pass out around 4Gs if the acceleration is vertical, and 9 is about the upper limit that trained, fit Air Force pilots can experience without losing consciousness.

    So 7 is nothing to sneeze at even under ideal conditions.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Okay, again, I agree this is not in the slightest practical, but also, again, a train accelerating is not vertical g, horizontal g tolerance is much, much higher than vertical g tolerance, especially "eyeballs in" and it increases greatly the less time it is for. Some early experiments showed untrained people could handle around 20g for less than 10 seconds. Also blunt force risks could be mediated almost completely by ramping the acceleration slowly, first reminding people to brace, then gently forcing them back in their seats. Again, ludicrous, nothing designed for comfort of human passengers is ever going to be designed to accelerate anywhere near that quickly and it's completely unnecessary anyways.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah this link says most people can only take 4 to 6 g, but fighter pilots can take up to 9.

    https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/whats-the-maximum-speed-a-human-can-withstand

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago*

    As other commenter pointer out direction of force is important. Horizontal force is much less dangerous as it doesn't drain your brain of blood as much as a vertical one. If I recall correctly humans can survive 20-40 Gs of horizontal force compared to just 5-9 of vertical.

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  • [–] 19 points 7 months ago

    Now we just need those inertial dampeners!

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago

    What a way to spill your cocktail...

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I wouldn't want to travel in that, but it would be a good way to get shit into orbit without using rockets.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    How far did it travel in that 2 seconds?

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago

    If acceleration were constant (and my math is right), it would be 194m. We can assume due to air resistance being proportional to the square of the speed that acceleration will be more initially and less later, so realistically it will be >194m

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Your move hyperloop.

    So what’s the limit of the human body? That’s more than a couple g.

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  • [–] 11 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I don't know but it seems like the simple answer is to just not accelerate that fast. I doubt this was an attempt to imply that we should do this regularly. It's just a test to show what the technology is capable of. There's no real benefit to accelerating to that speed that quickly vs doing it over 30 seconds or longer.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    You can absolutely accelerate this fast if there are no people on board. China probably wants safe autonomous cargo trains at some point.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    What about eggs lol

    Autonomous 500kph cargo trains would be fantastic.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Why would they transport eggs this way...? Fast (expensive) cargo trains would be used for valuable products. For example minerals, metals, computer chips.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    There are non-transportation uses for it. Namely for weapons.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    Is this like those amusement park rides that use magnets to accelerate really fast?

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