Ride The Lightning
Part 33: First Day on the Bridge
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Yup…based upon my own personal experience that sounded about right. Good Blog article. Unlike the previous, long gone and NOT lamented, so called “professional” news organizations, the Main Stream Media, today’s bloggers tended to be very careful and thus more accurate. They knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if they got a bad reputation they would be blogging to no one. Reputation Verification, historical data base and hypocrisy checkers was the norm today. If a blogger told a lie, or was even known to be constantly inaccurate, it was widely know very soon.
News read, coffee drank, cigar smoked, I’d get something to eat later. It was time to “light my fire.” Metaphorically speaking I saddled up and we hit the road.
Time to face the day.
Time to climb a very steep get-on ramp and get on the bridge. Time to really start moving…no more of this piddly goat trail stuff.
For reasons that I have never looked into…the first few get-on/get-off ramps, near the ThunderFog, are fricking STEEP. I swear it’s a twelve percent grade or steeper, to the ICE deck. To the lightning deck it appears damn near vertical. It takes a careful hand and attention to engine oil heat, engine coolant heat, differential heat, transmission heat , manifold pressure, and a dozen other details to even get an ICE truck up the ramp. It’s much, much worse if it’s loaded heavy and carrying any weight. Heaven help the fool who tries to shift gears after he starts climbing. Nine times out of ten that’ll snap the drive line. Getting onto the ICE deck this close to the ThunderFog is HARD. Further away the ramps aren’t anywhere near as steep and it’s no where near as difficult.
In fact it’s easy.
In a normal ICE-Truck (internal combustion engine) it’s a long hard pull.
For Trog…not so much. We pulled onto the get-on ramp.
Faster than the eye could track, the crawler tracks were raised, (yes…Lightning Trucks have retractable landing gear), lightning began to snap, crackle and pop between Trog’s hull and the bridge material..and we damn near LAUNCHED. We did launch. We went up that get-on ramp like a rocket on rails. That’s pretty much what we were. Trog’s exciter fields had engaged the drive fields of the linear induction accelerator coils built into the…
Well never mind.
It get’s fairly technical. Let’s just say we accelerated going, what felt like, straight up, and kept going up. We didn’t even slow down as we passed the ICE deck. Then we damn sure WERE going almost straight up. Up and over and down. We hit the lightning deck going over a hundred miles per hour.
We stayed in the far right acceleration lane and continued to …er…accelerate. That why it’s called that… that’s what it’s there for. At about three hundred or so she eased off. We were going about the same speed as one of the old NHRA top-fuel dragsters of my youth. The Fueler could do it once, for a quarter mile, and then it’s engine, oft as not, had to be torn down and rebuilt.
We could maintain this speed for untold thousands of miles.
We had reached cruising speed..…
To Be Continued
The Next Episode is
Part 34: Stop for the night
The Previous episode was
Part 32: First Day on the Bridge…
the first episode was
Part 1 : Winter Storm
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@everittdmickey
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I write
SPECULATIVE FICTION
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Sometimes I also comment on the news
Sometimes it's hard to tell fiction from the news.
Whoa that is one heck of a speed on that thing. I guess till next time to learn where he's heading with it.
Mag-lev can go way fast. Transonic should be no problem, at which time shockwave buffeting so close to the ground might prove problematic.
I suppose a bit of ground effects and some ducted fans might mitigate buffeting, if mere human reflexes weren't involved.
it's mag lev.
magnetic levitation acts MUCH faster than mere aerodynamics.
Well, I dunno enough about it to comment about how it might be used to counter buffeting, but I understand ground effects and ducted fans, in principle.
Seems like maglev could counter buffeting too, unless your concern regarding buffeting was structural integrity, rather than ride quality.
Once an old machinist offered me $1000 for each mph I could reach over 150 in a 1976 dodge van. I thought about it briefly before discussing JDAMs on either side with him.
He pointed out I might earn $150k before I died =p As I had never known him to be wrong about a mechanism, particularly ones on wheels, I lived to never collect.
I think the point i was making was that things get hairy at supersonic speeds. If I recall correctly a great many test pilots died before chuck yeager broke the sound barrier and lived. When rilly, rilly close to the ground the effects are intensified. Craig Breedlove's Green Monster had the POWAH to go faster than sound (world land speed record) except for those pesky transonic effects.
I dunno if they've managed it yet.
Safer to stay subsonic when close to the ground...ya think?
Well, I had kids at the time. Today, I'd prolly do it =p
Seems if they can fly by wire, you should be able to stabilize by wire, too. Doubt there's much call for it, as Lightning Trucks haven't been invented yet!