Could you make a gyro car? Akin to a locomotive? I don't exactly know how it would work but I was thinking we have locomotives so we don't need to put engines in every car. The thing I'm thinking about is that the gyro is kinda both a measurement device in a way, and also the system that actuates. Could these systems be separated, simplified, and scaled-down? I don't know, I'm not an engineer, just thinking aloud. :)
With the technology of the time I do not believe there is a solution.
Modern technology might be able to turn the car couplings into something that can actively manage their tilt relative to each other, thus allowing them to propagate the balance beyond a single gyro car, but there's a lot of PID-controller-type [1] math that would go into determining if this was even possible with real, physical objects trying to control things the size and mass of train cars in a train track environment. The computations are probably not that difficult in 2024 but trying to actually deliver the correct forces in a timely manner may be difficult if not impossible. There aren't always solutions, or practical solutions, to the PID equations in the real world.
Plus, I'm sitting here imagining the size of the electric motors we're trying to torque the cars against each other with and it's hard not to say that we're better off just having two tracks and putting those motors on the wheel themselves. (Which then collapses to having a locomotive setup like we have now.) In the "power/control/price" triangle we're basically forced to take the max on power and control, so these are going to be ferociously expensive if they can be built at all.
And there's some bad failure cases that I just don't know that you can mitigate. Having 30 minutes after power loss to evacuate passengers is generally going to be enough, but cargo can't be evacuated on that timeline. And that's not the only failure case. A seized gyro is going to be catastrophic and even a single one could take the whole train down, even with that PID control system (which is going to be a stretch even without also having to build in buffers for failed gyros).
The fact that a 2-track-train can just sit there for extended periods of time with no power is one of those advantages you don't even think about until you try to take it away.
Guy was a genius though. It's basically an analog computer that keeps itself upright that you can ride.
The final design is amazing with its judo-esque approach to using physics against itself. But I don't think it can be scaled up much beyond "neat tourist attraction". I'd ride one as a tourist attraction, though.
Can always count on you for a fantastic reply Jeremy. Thank you.
Indeed, the more I think on it the more difficult the edge cases seem, I hadn't even gotten to the power out thing, although from thinking on the spinning cube conversations in this thread[1], I had thought about magnets as a failsafe mechanism, but at that point....
"The fact that a 2-track-train can just sit there for extended periods of time with no power is one of those advantages you don't even think about until you try to take it away." <- This heh.
