[gurps] [VEHICLE] of the week 781 - General Products LP18 Grav Plow

[David Scheidt]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 7:50 PM, Evyn MacDude <infojunky at ceecom.net> wrote:

>
> Your giving up butt-loads of mechanical advantage, just for the geewhiz of
> a
> flying appliance. Or a small engine and transmission for much larger
> thrusters. It's a physics and engineering question.
>
>
anti-gravity is cheap and reliable.  You gain the ability to till soil
that's too water logged to drive over.  You can farm on ground that won't
support high ground pressure.  I know people here, in northern Indiana, who
own land that can't be machine cultivated.  It consists of a couple feet of
decent soil, and then a bottomless (well, only a few thousand feet to
bedrock, so not bottomless) muckpit.  You can walk on it.  You can grow
trees on it.  You can work it by hand.  Drive on it, when it's the least bit
wet, and the first time you spin a wheel, you're in the muck, and need a
crane to get out.  They'd buy a flying plow in a heart beat.  There are lots
of places like that on Earth; i'd imagine there are whole planets like that.


Don't forget that one reason that tractors are huge is because the limiting
factor on how hard they can pull is the amount of friction they can
generate.  That's a function of normal force, i.e. their weight.  if your
limit on force you can apply is your engine, you can be a whole lot
smaller.


-- 
David Scheidt
dmscheidt at gmail.com