Rhaedas

A wizard should know better.

Jump all over Boeing when it makes sense, but this sounds like a single aircraft or crew issue if it was noted that lots of the same type of plane had been taking off correctly.

Most or all of it. To be at orbital velocity the projectile would be moving at 30 km/s. Even a small amount of gases would be a like a brick wall.

That was actually the best idea because a long enough length and curve means you can use less acceleration each second. One problem is that to keep it low, like say 3Gs, both the length and curve are huge. Like hundreds of miles. Second is the exit - how high would you have to built it to not open the vacuum tube (it has to be a vacuum to work, i.e. the issues that Hyperloop ran into) and be slamming the projectile with a deceleration effect into the thin air that’s left? The numbers have been crunched before, mass drivers on Earth can’t deliver breakable things.

Also, that curve would be additional Gs and a lot of technical problems to maintain its path.

Successful or not, news of the test is a pretty big deal given that it was just a few months ago that reports emerged about China’s other proposed super-powered rail gun, which is intended to send astronauts on a Boeing 737-size ship into space (NASA had begun building its own astronaut-shooting railgun in the 1990s, but had to abandon it due to lack of dinero.)

I thought EM-powered launching of fragile things like people was thrown out decades ago. How do you fire something up at high Gs without having high Gs? Projectiles and even some cargo may not care, but people might.

The caveat of finding “better” methods is that it excuses continuing or expanding the things we do that are the core problems of rapid growth, consumption, and a throwaway society. And like you said, they have their own issues that might become problematic with growth in that process. Not to say that we shouldn’t try to improve what we can, just a point that being better than the worst way to do things isn’t all that great either.

The word “sustainable” in the title is one of those greenwashing terms to sell a product and keep the status quo of business as usual. As the report shows.

It’s not outdated if it still makes your enemy’s stuff go boom.