[gurps] Heinlein Battlesuits

[David Scheidt]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Craig Paskett <ckpaskett at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Also the switch from horse to motorized transport used the same basic infrastructure.

Nonsense!  Utter bollocks, in fact.  You ever try to drive a car on a
horse path in the rain?  You'd wait a long time for it try out...  The
state of roads in most of the world was pretty well non-existent prior
to the automobile (and to a lesser extent, the bicycle, which also
requires better roads than a horse cart).  Yes, there a handfull of
good coaching roads in some densely populated places, and roman relics
in parts of Europe.  Beyond that, there wasn't much.  There certainly
wasn't an actual *network* of connected roads until well into the 20th
century.  And in densely populated areas, look at pre-auto city
centers compared to post-auto ones.  No car parks in pre-auto centers,
nor too many 12 lane expressways, either.

 The various automobile associations (AAA in the US, RAC and AA in the
UK, etc) were founded largely to agitate for decent all-weather roads.
 The first cross-USA trip in a car wasn't done until 1903.  It took
two months.  You could do it in a train in a week; probably less if
you picked the times right.  Today, you can do it in a month, on a
bike, if you're lazy.



> Most proposed new transport tech involves a major investment in sometimes radically different >infrastructure.  It will be a long time before we see anything new taking the place of wheeled, >powered vehicles on a large scale.

Depends.  Current ground (road, not rail so much) transportation
infrastructure is amazingly inefficient, and ignores all sorts of
costs as "external" to make it appear to make sense.  If you add in
those costs, you get some truely shocking numbers -- like the real
cost of shipping a semi-load of goods from NY to CA is 100 times what
the trucking companies charge you.  That's adding in things like the
amazing subsidies trucks are given, costs of traffic congestion, and
other, fairly straight-forward to calculate costs, but not some fairly
substantial but-difficult-to-value costs, like the cost of increased
air pollution, and the contribution to global warming.  Make people
directly bear those costs, and suddenly spending a few trillion
building mag-lev trains seems cheap.


--
David Scheidt
dmscheidt at gmail.com