On Tue, 30 Dec 2014, Onno Meyer wrote:
And Johannes wrote:
You will need at least a little propulsion in the trailers or
breaking will
be difficult.
Engine units at both ends of the train?
Propably. My gut feeling still does not like it, but at the moment i have
no real argument why.
You could also make something that optically looks much like a grav
train,
but technically would be more a convoy of grav vehicles. The
"locomotive"
would contain the crew station of the driver, the "trailers" are remote
controlled from the "locomotive", there can be "tenders" that contain a
power plant or fuel cells for the rest of the "train". They are
connected,
to allow sharing of energy and to prevent the remote control to be
jammed.
The advantage of such a setup would be that you need fewer drivers,
then if
you have seperate vehicles and you can adjust the endurance by adding or
removing tenders.
If you look at the price of maneuver controls, even with commo and nav gear,
it makes little sense to leave the individual cars without cockpits. Add some
power cells (for backup, if nothing else) and you have a convoy of grav
vehicles with aerial recharging from "power tankers".
The cockpit might be cheap, but the pilots propably are not. You need
people who are reliable (which might range from not obviously drunk, to
passing some psychological tests, that normal people don't, depending on
local regulations) have special skill sets (that might not be locally
available, and you need to hire offworlders, if the local TL is too low,
or the native population is too low) and depending on local geographic
conditions are prepared to stay on the vehicle far away from home for a
long time.
In world with hostile enviroment, additionally to the normal wages for a
driver, you also need to provide living space and life support, not only
for the driver, but also for population that supports the driver (such as
a family of the driver, barkeepers, psychotherapists, priests or hookers
(or whoever the driver vents his problems to), the management resonsible
for the drivers, police to keep the drivers in line, doctors ect.)
In many Traveller worlds thoose problems will be small. But say a large
mining and industrial world, where for some reason lots of goods need to
shipped to and fro (like smelting is best done at the equator and
manufactoring better at the poles or the other way round), and a low
native population, where most people go there to work for a while and when
they have earned enough they move to a nicer place (giving it an oil rig
feeling) you might want to minimize the number of vehicle operators.
For military applications, especially in Traveller such a train setup
could
also be the result of an attempt to minimize the number of troops needed,
without coming into conflict with robot weapon laws. You have a formation
of a dozen grav tanks, and still need just one driver and a few gunners,
who supervise the gunnery programs of all the "trailers".
I envision the military train with a large crew, many individual VRFGG
emplacements on the sides.
Advantages of non tracked trains i can see:
* You need few drivers per amount of vehicle
* You have flexibility in adding and removing part of the vehicle
* damaged parts of the vehilce can easily replaced or dropped
* It's easier to move between wagons, then between individual vehicles of
a convoy
* You can easily share power or other resources
* Your communication is much much harder to jam or eavesdrop, then between
different vehicles.
* Individual trains can easily switch components.
So in short it can be an attempt to have some of the advanteges of both a
large vehicle and a convoy of many small ones.
There might be some very special reasons, why some army lacks drivers but
has plenty of gunners, but i can't come up with anything sensible now.
A troop (i guess most likely a mercenary unit) might attempt to build it's
vehicle piece by piece, buying new wagons, once they have money.
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