Magnetic Levitation

[skipper]

http://www.5min.com/Video/Magnetic-levitation---how-does-it-work-9717

[Lion]

cool, it hovered, was stable, and was bouncy... a fixed distance apart and with no power supply.
if that could be recreated at room temperature then right there is the AG technology from wipeout :)

[Lance]

mmmm.... not really. Magnetic levitation is not gravity control, not reversal of gravity, nor gravity reduction, not AG technology. It's just magnetic levitation and Wipeout doesn't use that. Even in the very first WipEout, the track material didn't have to even be metal, much less magnetic or electromagnetic. Magnetism is a much stronger force than gravity. We can get magnetic levitation far more easily than we can ever get anti-gravity, if a-g is even possible.

[Lion]

on the bright side though, you could use it to build the equivalent of a slotcar set that had the appearance of a wipeout race :P

[andy]

if you were on a maglev train, would your watch and laptop and such all break?

[mdhay]

Chances are the insides are not magnetic, but what about the outside??


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev

It probaly won't work.

[adelheid]

That's a very complicated and expensive way of duplicating what the Bullet Train has done for twenty years.

[Lance]

on the bright side though, you could use it to build the equivalent of a slotcar set that had the appearance of a wipeout race :P

Damned right! And that way you could actually take faster lines through corners and race almost like F1 or GT [unless you have to have the magnetic induction rail for propulsion]. More like GT, actually; no wheels to interlock.

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None of the wheeled trains have ever equalled the 2003 maglev speed record of 581 Kilometres per hour.