Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
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trains are silly, we should invest into a strong auto mobile industry with a infrastructure focus nearly solely on the average citizen owning a car!
Space is also silly, so too are electronics. Who needs them when you have analog options available?
But for real HSR over the entirety of USSR is a big ask. Building more airports and commuter planes would cover long distance travel for more easily than having to construct rail. As for space, honestly sometimes I think we look a little too far ahead and are a bit too optimistic about it.
Space is also silly, so too are electronics. Who needs them when you have analog options available?
But for real HSR over the entirety of USSR is a big ask. Building more airports and commuter planes would cover long distance travel for more easily than having to construct rail. As for space, honestly sometimes I think we look a little too far ahead and are a bit too optimistic about it.
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That's what I said, or rather, I inverted it, though with a bit of exaggeration:
"The pragmatic traveler who doesn't have all week..."
There are fairly specific conditions under which taking an overnight train is competitive with taking an airline flight. A lot of people aren't in that situation. Likewise, there are fairly specific conditions where you can rely on the train taking you directly to where you want to go but it's two bus rides to get to the same city by plane. Not uncommon conditions, but high speed rail routes in the USSR won't run through every city in the nation anyway.
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- Italy
yeah, that's basically my point. Glad we agree. very long distance, airplane tends to be better. sometimes a combination of overnight travel meaning you can save on hotel/you can leave in the evening and arrive in the morning/early afternoon of the day after, or the fact you might be able to avoid multiple transfers (or at least you don't need to leave the station to change to a different train) can make it worth it too.
And yeah, there's also the "saving money" argument. Particularly good for low-income people, or students wishing to save a few bucks.
There's also the fact that in the quest we're still early days of commercial air travel, so ticket prices are going to be pretty high. Definitely the best option for politicians and the business category, but probably not worth it for low to mid income civlians and turists.
EDIT: and of course once you go beyond 18-24 hours of travel time on a train, it's nearly certainly not worth it no matter what.
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Well yes, but right now, high speed rail is still something we're barely rolling out. 'Proper' high speed rail across the Soviet Union as a whole is unlikely to be widespread until the 1970s, and on the long distance routes until the 1980s or later. This influences certain calculations.
(For example, in real life it takes about a week for a train passenger to get from Moscow to Vladivostok, because real Russia very much does not have high speed rail in place along the trans-Siberian corridor.
Idk, faster rollout with multigigawatt cores has it's appeal - soviets had RBMKs rated for 1500 MWt built (well, in practice it was downrated to about 1300) by early eighties OTL (so ~same time they got a 1000 MWt VVER deployed), and had plans for 2+ MWt reactors that were feasible to put into use by 1990s.
And then, you can always throw a containment building on your RBMK; It's containment vessels which are not something you do with them.
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- The great frozen north
Is combined cycle coal something we can actually expect any time soon? In OTL it only started being build in the late nineties with rollout still being limited, and it does not have a reputation for reliability. I always figured integrates gasification combined cycle is something our USSR might get if we roll a nat 100 on the coal industry and otherwise never.
That aside, given full replacement of fossil fuels is a pipe dream any time soon anyway I am starting to think a large push on nuclear is not necessary (but I still want to build Atomash eventually). The key I think is similar to rocketry: Maintain a slow but consistant rollout, always be building a few nuclear power plants here and there so we keep a reserve of tooling and skilled personnel. Thus we will hopefully, if/when the SupSov realizes carbon emissions are a problem if this quest even gets that far, have the ingredients for us to slam on the gas and ramp up.
No good building a crapton in the initial "nuclear enthusiasm" stage only to burn out and basically have to rebuild the nuclear building industry from scratch come the century's end.
For Koba's sake man stop talking now if you go any further a flock of bald eagles will show up and start pecking at our bureaucrats!
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Well, the big difference between a nuclear reactor build program and a moon shot is that nuclear reactors produce something concrete that you can point to and say "this is good" about and it's very easy.
If you can keep political pushback from growing unmanageable, rapid nuclear rollout is likely to be easier to sell than moonshot stuff. Not least because it scratches all those heavy industry fetishist reflexes that a lot of the Supreme Soviet still has.
If you can keep political pushback from growing unmanageable, rapid nuclear rollout is likely to be easier to sell than moonshot stuff. Not least because it scratches all those heavy industry fetishist reflexes that a lot of the Supreme Soviet still has.
- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
I would rather focus on reliable technologies made for harsh climates than the latest and shiniest. Make it tough, make it work and then we can export to our allies.
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- Mid-Atlantic
Uh... what are you referring to?
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- Northish
Hopefully with continued development and investment we become the partner of choice when it comes to setting up nuclear plants both in CEMA and friendly nations like India/China. Ideally we will have the largest nuclear manufacturing base and R&D program which means we can offer the most cheap, powerful, and rugged plants to corner the export market. It will not make the program pay for itself but it could really offset the financial and political costs.
The thing is, and I don't know about air travel during the 60s and 70s, but for the last two decades it needs be said that air travel time is not just flight time. There is also 2-3 hours you need to be present in advance, the hour or so (but can be more) that disembarkment process, baggage claim, security control etc. can also bring.
And that is only for direct flight, let alone transit flights.
Furthermore, airports are always distances from city centres, train stations are often in city centres.
There's a reason why in Italy high speed rail has devastated air travel. It is not that longer, but is often cheaper and more comfortable.
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Yes, and I directly addressed that. Twice.
Distances matter. If the train can get you somewhere in only an hour or two slower than the time it would take a plane to fly across the same distance, the train is likely to win the competition. If you're planning to travel 2000 kilometers and the plane can cross that distance in two hours while the train needs eight, that starts to become a significant advantage to the plane, one which grows longer as a function of distance.
Italy isn't an objectively small place, but it's not a large country. That matters sometimes.
...
(Needing to be at the airport two or three hours in advance depends to some extent on the degree to which the planes run on time; I don't think it's a universal law of all times and all places. Some amount of 'there early' is common sense, but again, variability)
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The primary advantage of HSR over air travel is going to be trading time for cost the next few decades, a plane will definitely get you where you want to be faster than our HSR network, especially since the USSR is literally the biggest country on the planet and airport security doesn't exist. But plane tickets are going to be out of the reach of your average worker for anything but very special occasions until like... the 80's/90's at minimum. Air travel was a very high cost luxury the first few decades it was commercially available, it's still not exactly cheap today OTL and that's after decades of trying to make it as cheap and "efficient" (read: cattle car conditions) as possible. Right now and for the forseeable future the main people who will be flying in our USSR are gonna be like politicians, senior bureaucrats and engineers, etc., not random steelworkers trying to take their yearly vacation to the Black Sea or whatever.
The overall impression I'm getting from this entire discussion is, is that so long as sufficient effort is made to upgrade the HSR system over time, then it will probably remain pretty competitive with planes over substantial distances.
Considering the very extensive HSR type system already being setup in the USSR at current as well, I think the system could maybe eventually in the 90s or early 2000s top out around 350 km/h, speeds beyond that are possible, but are increasingly problematic and costly via this kind of tech branch.
To go even faster in a some what efficient way as such you'd really need to go maglev after that, and if one does speeds up to perhaps 600 km/h are perhaps reasonable. Maglev actually can go faster then that, but around that point going through sea level air is becoming increasingly challenging while trying to maintain not to excessive drag and such. Though this tech hasn't been explored that in depth yet, so it's possible there are workarounds and higher yet speeds could be reasonable. In any case that hasn't been demonstrated so far yet, so it clearly would be a long term project.
If one presumes a 600 km/h maglev net in say 2010 is feasible, then it could probably be fairly competitive with planes up to ranges of perhaps 3000 km (train 6 hours vs plane 3h20m), which even in the Soviet Union is pretty darn far, like St Petersburg to Baku type of distances. Overall as such while it's impossible even with this to beat planes on very large distances, it would probably allow keeping quite a bit of the people traveling via rail to many of the most traveled to destinations. Though obviously the cost of building such a network would be very expensive and can economically only really be justified between places that can generate enough traffic on such lines to make it worth the cost. Though I guess West, Central and South USSR would have at least some pretty big cities, especially in this timeline, so that does give reasonable prospects still.
So interesting as an idea, though one has to keep in mind that one will have to trade off against other kind of developments to do it. More resources solving problems like that on Earth, is less resources by that time to build out say large scale space infrastructure.
Considering the very extensive HSR type system already being setup in the USSR at current as well, I think the system could maybe eventually in the 90s or early 2000s top out around 350 km/h, speeds beyond that are possible, but are increasingly problematic and costly via this kind of tech branch.
To go even faster in a some what efficient way as such you'd really need to go maglev after that, and if one does speeds up to perhaps 600 km/h are perhaps reasonable. Maglev actually can go faster then that, but around that point going through sea level air is becoming increasingly challenging while trying to maintain not to excessive drag and such. Though this tech hasn't been explored that in depth yet, so it's possible there are workarounds and higher yet speeds could be reasonable. In any case that hasn't been demonstrated so far yet, so it clearly would be a long term project.
If one presumes a 600 km/h maglev net in say 2010 is feasible, then it could probably be fairly competitive with planes up to ranges of perhaps 3000 km (train 6 hours vs plane 3h20m), which even in the Soviet Union is pretty darn far, like St Petersburg to Baku type of distances. Overall as such while it's impossible even with this to beat planes on very large distances, it would probably allow keeping quite a bit of the people traveling via rail to many of the most traveled to destinations. Though obviously the cost of building such a network would be very expensive and can economically only really be justified between places that can generate enough traffic on such lines to make it worth the cost. Though I guess West, Central and South USSR would have at least some pretty big cities, especially in this timeline, so that does give reasonable prospects still.
So interesting as an idea, though one has to keep in mind that one will have to trade off against other kind of developments to do it. More resources solving problems like that on Earth, is less resources by that time to build out say large scale space infrastructure.
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I'm gonna level with y'all, we're never building a maglev HSR network, even modern Shinkansen speeds for the whole country is a bit of a reach. If air travel gets cheap enough to eat HSR's mass travel market (which isn't necessarily guaranteed if we don't subsidize air travel) then the HSR network is probably going to focus more and more of its traffic on high speed commuter lines moving workers to/from satellite cities of the huge metropolises rather than cross-country travel.
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Maglev is extremely not worth it ever considering the distances and densities involved. You need entirely new track, since old one is useless in running it, and its like 40 million dollars per km, so like 4 times as expensive as laying down regular track. I don't see any politician scrapping our whole existing network just to implement it. Maybe we could get one in Ukraine or Leningrad-Moscow, but that would be it, and a hard sell even then.
Fair enough, I guess you at current estimate the gain isn't worth the lost other opportunities then. Which could well be the case, though it can be hard to know such things for sure really, especially for technologies we lack sufficient data on even here in the future.
And as @Vi'Talzin says, one can question the network efficacy. Though It's worth noting that there is actually a solution to this that Japan applied. Which is they started building their maglev line not to replace the current line, but to augment it when it became overloaded. This is actually a reason for a fair few HSR lines being made in Europe in general as well, with the conventional line between two major cities getting overloaded and then if you had to make a new line anyway they opted for the best one to get some added benefits.
In such a case one that just links the train stations together, or even just different platforms and then things aren't really more difficult then before. Still, this would depend on one some of the lines becoming overloaded and two the added gains being considered sufficiently worthwhile versus the costs.
And as I noted myself, there are other things one could be focusing on competing with the project, so I guess it will depend what one finds most important then.
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- Fort Worth, TX
Railroads, nuclear technology, space development.
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- Mid-Atlantic
High speed maglev over long distances is also prodigiously energy-intensive. Forget levitating the train, picking up a fucking train is the easy part. And you know things are getting messy when someone says that.
No, the hard part is driving the train at 200-300-400-more-hundred-wildest-dream-speed kilometers an hour through wind resistance. And wind resistance becomes more of a problem at higher speeds, nonlinearly.
If carbon footprint and the industrial effort of building enough power plants are going to be a problem for us, then it's going to be a long, long time before we should even be thinking about super-high speed rail or maglev on those scales and across the USSR's entire breadth.
Well, in a lot of areas, there isn't a clear bright division between "newest and shiniest" and "reliable and tough."
What does it mean for our nuclear reactors to be "reliable and tough" as opposed to "new and shiny?" Do you imagine someone intentionally designing unreliable, fragile nuclear reactors? We're definitely trying to avoid that, but not just for export. It's a straightforward desire to avoid Chernobyls.
What does it mean for us to devise "reliable and tough" spacecraft for an export market?
What, exactly, does a "reliable, tough" train not have as a design tradeoff? Are you talking "shave 10 km/h off the top design speed and add more safety features?" Or are you talking "fuckit, keep using diesel engines instead of electric because it's got a more rugged, manly aesthetic?"
I'm not really sure what you're aiming for here.
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- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah. Definitely time to push road expansions after this.
Interestingly enough levitating a maglev train is basically free. Due to a property in superconductors, levitation is a side effect with a zero energy cost where a fixed height over the rail is maintained. This also means the trains levitation height is basically not something that can be modulated all that much either, you get what you get.... but for free. Not only that, but it will just tend to follow the track as well... meaning this process rather then being messy is bizarrely trivial.
There's actually some demonstrations online for this where people put superconductors on a track and give it a shove and you can just watch it going down the track with no problems at all.
In any case due to to this maglev trains eliminate roll resistance and roll slippage for zero energy cost, things which do cost HSR systems, especially slippage gets worse and worse the faster you get.
As such you're removing some energy losses, which you can all throw at going faster instead. Of course if you really push it up to 500-600 km/h, even with pretty aerodynamic shapes air resistance gets pretty high, but the Japanese say their maglev will expend half the energy that a plane does per passenger. So it's also not a wildly out of control energy spending either and instead you're still actually doing okayish on that front. Though obviously going even faster then that will not helpful on that front.
Still, the actual energy spend is thus not nearly that bad.
In any case, this is just a technical reply on this one particular subtopic as you seem unaware of the exact details on it, rather then an argument for maglev, the tech for that won't be really available for a long time to come yet after all.
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It's all doable, but you're maintaining thousands of kilometers of liquid nitrogen cooled track magnets, and while your energy consumption may still be lower than a plane's per passenger, that's because planes use a LOT of energy in the form of jet fuel.
A Boeing 777 consumes 2500 gallons of jet fuel an hour to move about 300-350 people. That's 135000 Btu per gallon and about 1055 J per Btu... The plane is using about 300 kW per passenger.
By extension, the maglev train is using about 150 kW per passenger, which given reasonable ridership figures easily kicks you well up into the double digit megawatts. If ten thousand people are using your maglev rail system at a time (that is, actually sitting on a train that is moving at speed) then you're looking at 1.5 GW right there.
For commercial aviation that energy budget is expressed as a fuel budget. If we're aspiring to be carbon-neutral it has to come out of nuclear reactors or some other such source.
Normal electrified high speed rail runs into some of the same problems but at a vastly lower scale because you're not drawing 150 kW per passenger or anything even remotely on that level to move the train.
A Boeing 777 consumes 2500 gallons of jet fuel an hour to move about 300-350 people. That's 135000 Btu per gallon and about 1055 J per Btu... The plane is using about 300 kW per passenger.
By extension, the maglev train is using about 150 kW per passenger, which given reasonable ridership figures easily kicks you well up into the double digit megawatts. If ten thousand people are using your maglev rail system at a time (that is, actually sitting on a train that is moving at speed) then you're looking at 1.5 GW right there.
For commercial aviation that energy budget is expressed as a fuel budget. If we're aspiring to be carbon-neutral it has to come out of nuclear reactors or some other such source.
Normal electrified high speed rail runs into some of the same problems but at a vastly lower scale because you're not drawing 150 kW per passenger or anything even remotely on that level to move the train.