Tag: transportation

Now you can buy your own submarine

It’s amazing how stories like this leap out at me since I wrote a novel set on an ocean world: The world’s first personal submarines have been launched with a price tag of £65,000. Dutch designers claim the subs will make owners feel like they are “flying through the water”. The one-seater version is 9ft …

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Who needs a helicopter…

…when you could have a boat like this? Another cool surface vessel I shoulda put in my new ocean-world SF story.

Here’s something I wish I had put in the new book:

The Proteus “spider-like go-fast boat.”

Driver distractions

With summer officially here and school officially out, the roads will soon be full of people driving to and from the beach, the cottage and/or grandma’s house. Just in time, new research has appeared that sheds new light on how drivers can best keep their minds–and, as a result, their cars–on the road. First, some …

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Rise of the aircar

It’s almost summer, that time of year when millions of vacationers develop whole new vocabularies as they curse the slow-moving RVs behind which they’re stuck. What they need is a car that can fly, a.k.a. an aircar, a staple of science fiction stories since at least the 1930s, but something that hasn’t gotten off the …

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Trains

  Trains have been on my mind lately, partly because I just completed a two-day trip from San Francisco by train, but also because trains have been in the news lately: Montreal’s Bombardier was in hot water over cracks in the suspensions of Amtrak’s high-speed Acela trains, McLean’s magazine recently ran a front-page story on …

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Challenge Bibendum

Will we be driving gasoline-powered cars 10 or 20 years from now? Judging by the 2001 Michelin Challenge Bibendum, some of us will, but many won’t. The Challenge Bibendum (Bibendum is the real name of the made-of-tires Michelin Man) offers manufacturers an opportunity to demonstrate alternative-fuel vehicles in real-world conditions. This year’s challenge drew 27 …

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Bicycles II

It’s summertime in Saskatchewan, and that means the roads are full of joggers, walkers–and bicyclists. The first bicycle was the “celerifere,” or wooden horse, invented in France in the 1790s. It had a fixed front wheel, so it couldn’t be steered, and the rider propelled it by pushing his feet along the ground, like Fred …

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Hypersonic flight

Less than a hundred years ago, the Wright Brothers made the first powered airplane flight. Next month, NASA will fly a whole new type of airplane, faster than anything that has flown to date: not just supersonic (faster than the speed of sound) but hypersonic (MUCH faster than the speed of sound). Of course, NASA …

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Submarines

  Submarines have been much in the news lately. Not only has world attention has been riveted on the tragic sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk, but Canada is in the process of getting new submarines and, in the U.S., the Civil War submarine that was the first to sink another ship has just been …

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The Moller Skycar

  One of the many striking scenes in the Star Wars: The Phantom Menace takes place on the planet Coruscant, a completely urbanized planet whose skies are filled with vehicles, moving in orderly lines just as cars move along our city streets. It’s one of the quintessential science fictional visions of the 20th century, found …

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Airships (1999)

It’s one of the most familiar newsclips of the 20th century: the giant airship Hindenburg approaching the mooring mast in New Jersey, the sudden rush of fire, the announcer choking out “the humanity, the humanity!” as the Hindenburg settles to the ground in flames. Many people think giant, passenger-carrying airships died forever with that crash. …

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