Flying cars

[TD_Project]

Re: Flying cars

right now they are working on applying it to cars i dont know about airplanes though

Just seems impossible, but science has proved me wrong before. As you have proved me wrong before as well. :P We will just have to see.

[Cavernio]

Re: Flying cars

"Getting from the top to the bottom would take so much time it wouldnt decrease the time it takes to get around in normal cars."

Only if you're trying to go a short distance and decide to go into the fastest area, which you wouldn't. Most people don't drive on the highway to go 10 blocks away. You could also still have regular roads (or the places they currently occupy) for local traffic, and you would still get a huge benefit from having those cars flying instead of on the road. Again, you'd have different altitudes for different directions, and you'd avoid most of the grid-lock, the thing which causes traffic jams in the first place.

"As far as no fly zones go you could easily just have the hovering (or just really tall) traffic signs with whatever technology you used on the cars and simply just use the road system we have now with a few alterations. Flying over buildings though would have to grant a manual control to deviate from the "air highway" which could be as disastrous as a car going off the road and running into a building."

I realized that not only are tall buildings going to be a problem, but mountains too. (Well, depending on how altitude is measured...if it's measured from the ground which is ever changing, they might not be.) Instead of having people necessarily manually drive around these areas, which I don't think would work well when the system would be so carefully layered, you'd have maps of the highways for, well, pretty much everywhere. Since this car is already so amazing as to detect altitude very precisely (if it weren't precise, this wouldn't be plausible), you'd simply download the map for the region, and let the car follow the path. The maps would simply be designed so that the traffic would flow around the obstacle smoothly. Upper layers and sideways along the same layer need not be affected.

As to actually having a car be able to fly so smoothly, I have no idea how one could do that. The best that I can think of currently would be to have it take off and land similarly to a helicopter (or hovercar), and then maybe switch to using wings. But we still don't have the amount of precise control over airplanes that we'd need in order to maintain altitude so precisely with wings, because as pointed out, wind exists. Current airplanes take into consideration such consistent wind patterns like the jetstream (I, uh, think), but that type of consistency only happens very high in the atmosphere anyways I think. I suppose we could just use helicopters for everything, but the control I think is still not exactly there. Plus, although I'm making an educated guess here, I don't think helicopters are very environmentally friendly. They're certainly very noisy at the very least...imagine 50 helicopters flying over your house at once. Yikes.

What would really suck would be looking up at the sky and always seeing cars.

I guess my point was that it doesn't have to be incredibly and impossibly complicated to make an air-road system. But, of course, what I thought up is all moot because we don't have the technology available that would work with it.

[AquaTeen]

Re: Flying cars

I believe that flying cars would be a good idea if they are solar powered because they would be eco-friendly and it would slow down the effects of global warming.

[~kitty~]

Re: Flying cars

I believe that flying cars would be a good idea if they are solar powered because they would be eco-friendly and it would slow down the effects of global warming.

AquaTeen... you're oversimplifying the idea of Flying cars.

[devonin]

Re: Flying cars

The thread was trying to look more at the ramifications of flying vehicles in terms of safety, efficiency, etc. I'd suspect that a flying car would be about as eco-friendly as a normal car and a light aircraft. Obviously any kind of alternate eco-friendly fuel source would be more eco-friendly no matter what vehicle it was powering. Good point, just kinda missing the general thrust of the thread.