Constructing A Road For Trains Around The Entire Moon
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- Опубликовано: 7 фев 2025
- Why Trains On Roads Beat Trains On Rails On The Moon... or something. Idk.
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Written, Produced & Narrated by Ian Long
Music Credits:
Dreamstate Logic - Etheric Echoes
Dreamstate Logic - Ad Astra
Borderlands 3 main menu theme
Sources:
2024 Sintered Regolith!!! doi.org/10.101...
2017 porous sinter doi.org/10.101...
Regolith Casting / Sintering: DOI:10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2021.123627
Solar Radiative Furnace: doi.org/10.106...)
I love when my pillow is 1050 °C on a cold side and 1060 °C on hot side
😂 ikr
1,050C?! That's a lot lower than I thought it would be. That's about cone 04. which is what you need to fire "low fire" clay. Bricks usually take more heat to make than that!
It is cool to know RUclipsrs I like watch each others channels even if one isn’t very large
I wonder if it's because it was done in a vacuum.
From the paper: " In addition, the vacuum environment is conducive to the development of sintering, which can not only make the particles combine at a lower temperature but also improve the strength of the sintered sample." I believe this paper is creative commons btw doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmst.2024.06.004
@@Anthrofuturism can you do a video on the idea of making modular mass-produced spaceship parts about the size of a rail car that can be repurposed for everything from storage tanks to air-tight space basses to trucks, train cars shuttles to very large conglomerate space freighters It is an idea I've had for years now basically every launch from the earth for anything from satellites to fuel would give you more mass in space for orbital habitats freighters factories and lunar basses
@燧發槍 Given this channel's dramatically increased rate of production, I'd probably put it as my #1 or #2 "Buy" for channels about to explode in popularity. It's incredibly well done, imo... right down to the imagery matching the audio better than just about anywhere that doesn't create their own animations... and even some that do. 😅
I HATE that you only have 14 videos. I would watch 140.
Absolutely agree. I'll be here for all of them this is top tier content
he used to have more tbh
@@redcoat4348 I was wondering about that. The channel's been around since 2016, but it only has 16 videos, 14 of which were made in the past 2 years, seemed kinda odd. Whatever his perogative, if he continues with this quality of scripts and corresponding imagery, I'd be a firm believer in a sudden "run" of popularity... most likely due in part to having more videos for people to click through.
Yes, let this be my "hate" comment, too (as he requested in the last 15 seconds of the video). 🤫😆
@ I subscribed to him about a year ago, he didn't have many videos on his channel and his earliest one IIRC was uploaded two years ago and about nuclear triso fuel reactors on the moon. I subscribed when he was at roughly 1500 subs. Some of the videos I notice are now deleted were combined together to make the 30+ minute videos. You're not really missing out much in terms of content, he probably removed those videos because they were redundant or weren't up to his standards of quality anymore.
A train that mines regolith and builds its own road ahead of itself seems like a better idea than constantly going back and forth to a central hub hundreds of kilometers away. It can unpack during dawn, process materials during the day, pack up at dusk, then pave the way and move up at night.
So how does the train get enough regolith and how does it dispose of unwanted material?
You make no allowance for different sizes of the process and how it gets it energy etc
Economics of scale and not wanting to moss out on the processing if something wents wrong along the way is a concern too
But yeah it sounds good on the first thought, like many bad ideas
Not a single train per se but like a moving base. I know some dude in Factorio made a train with bot swarms that can build its own tracks. It's not a leap in logic that a more advanced version that can plan its own route on Luna is doable
@@TheGahta unwanted materials are wanted for something else, so deliver then back.
Dirt is from side of road, so not big deal.
Intensity of process(one can have GWs pouring in casting sintering regolith in a hub, and making this energy source mobile is a bit more work) and more complicated(aka for repair and as design) droids those are disadvantage, but not impossible, just eh no reason much in that, it not oil well, energy won't run out.
@Molb0rg so a train is running between the tracklaying allin one machine and back? Defeating the whole "lets do it all on the fly" part of the idea? And drones?
If you want to say "we can invent some funny way of doing it after we don't need it anymore" you are right
If you want to pretend you are having useful ideas for that first step, you aren't
I'd like to point out that much of the equipment to prepare the surface of the roaild (rail/road) is going to be moving along with construction and shifting considerable volumes of regoluth too. Effectively you're duplicating the regolith movement and equipment movement while also not using the most efficient methods to do said motion. Instead, if you incorporate it into one machine (possibly laying parallel tracks because you almost never see single track when it can be helped when people are actually trying to build something useful) you make the same equipment pull double duty. Chain buckets ahead and to the sides eliminate mist of the need for excavators and bulldozers. If properly designed they can be mounted on the rail itself (possibly on a work platform that spans the two?), and it's not like moving the planet itself will be that expensive especially compared to the movement of all the dozers and shovels you would have been using to prep the surface.
This seems much more sensible than the ludicrous broad gauge track you suggested last video. Now for locomotive designs. Maybe a Atomic Stirling Locomotive with Reciprocating parts!
I would think of an RTG, because Stirling engines require a medium like gases or liquids to function
@@ritterrunkel6779RTGs have very low efficiency, and carrying a little fluid is no big deal. the weight of a very large RTG would be way more of a problem.
The main question is, what does he want to haul in the first place?
I dont see any reasons to have trains in the first place
@@jonasstahl9826 anything people on the moon want to mobe around
@@jonasstahl9826 Regolith, he has suggested using land trains for it before.
“Oh great! A sidewalk to make my moonwalk much easier. I guess the locals use it as a ‘nature’ trail.” -final words of lunar tourist before getting punted several hundred meters by a train. ( they lived )
Thanks!
@@hallahgray3190 wow, thank you!!
When you mentioned Maglev, I was thinking: "You could build a maglev on Regulith roads!" The Japanese Maglev technology is literally just a concrete cast with magnetized plates at the side and the Maglev is in lower speeds using the concrete cast with normal wheels - and then when it gets faster, the inducted magnetic field lifts up the maglev. So you could literally build a regulith road with maglev capacity.
I guess a concern that comes to mind is, what would be the effect of Lunar dust/regolith getting on the road? Is this an increased wear hazard? Would the road occasionally need to be cleaned of it? How fast would it build up also due to how lunar dust levitation from the photoelectric effect under sunlight? Maybe some kind of magnetic or electrostatic system could be used to repel such dust?
Admittedly these are just long term use questions for such a road, but this would presumably influence the overall cost of making and using such roads.
Why not bring the production site with you; it'll be expensive to make, but a large vehicle that flattens the surface as it rolls along, scooping up the displaced regolith/collects from either side, it can use the regolith it collects to melt down for the foundation and radiatively sinter regolith using that heat. Placing the sintered blocks behind itself as it goes.
Then the only great difficulty becomes bridging/carefully descending into craters.
It may be easier to have a couple of separate vehicles doing each job individually as it goes - leveling/creating piles of regolith - casting the foundations - sintering the tiles - and probably a quality control one with sensors to check the quality of the work as it gets done, if the sintering is imperfect then rip those tiles up and get new ones, the failed ones can be melted down for casting the foundation further along.
Mobile stuff comes with some sort of design restrictions, complexities and compromises. On its own it is not a huge problem, but if you account that flexible workforce(aka humans) is expensive on the moon, you would like to lift restriction in a way to maximize serviceability of production setups, like and use more space and be less cramped to use remote operated droids to fix things.
And it beneficial to have simplier and easier to replace units which make actual road thing.
What for spare the energy, it not the gas you save, it not the CO2 you care not releasing, moons the only reliable energy source is green as cucumber, as some would dream to have it here on earth, and it won't run out.
And this GWh's in road is not much energy spend compared to all other things.
Make you production facilities clonable and place then each 10-100km - you will have similar savings and more of resulting production capacities.
There have been investigations into a rover that can just trundle along microwaving the ground beneath it to make simple roads. For this more complex road you could probably do a lot of the leveling and the melted foundation with beefed up versions of that idea, but the sintered ceramic like top layer requires really precise temperature control so that might have to be done in a more carefully controlled furnace.
anthroautsim ep2 "i like trains"
It's funny how hippies think we're spreading our destructive ways to space while in reality we also want to preserve Earth by having everything destructive outside our home. I fully 100% support the industrialization of Luna as our stepping stone into the asteroid belt and beyond.
We must preserve the dust on the moon for all future generations!
How would you feel if someone came to your house and removed all the dust?
its like a grand cosmic script in the humanity evolution to do all this... cards are on our side bigtime
you just officially outed as Space Hippie
You have a bug up your ass at hippies in 2025? Did your father do a direct brain copy into your skull?
[LOVE COMMENT]
[SUPPORTIVE AND FRIENDLY RESPONSE]
[SLIGHTLY PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE COMMENT]
[RAGEBAIT]
[RESPECTIVE LIGHT CRITICISM]
[SOMETHING ABOUT THE MOON BEING FLAT]
AF, you don't take into account that heat energy can be used as a renewable resource to an extent. Especially when we have control of the apparatus used to collect and apply it to our regolith. In the same way that our other regolith processing units could use the outgoing high temperature gases to heat incoming material, we can use the newly-sintered and hot pavers as a source of heat for raw material coming into the mould. This would actually speed up the process as direct contact between hot paver and cold regolith would create better cooling for the paver than the exothermic infrared method of just vacuum. This would bring down the energy cost of making each paver significantly. What do you think to this idea?
I'll take my Nobel prize once we have the first Brainchildian Slab Cooler running on Luna, thank you 😊
Loving your work, please keep going.
@@Brainchild110 yeah cooling is actually a big issue so this would be useful for sure!
There's a RUclipsr who is developing microwave gasification of waste plastic to produce an alternative to diesel. The ISS has to deorbit their waste plastics on a regular basis, having recently had a problem where someone's house was damaged by a piece of the palate. Microwave gasification could be used to process plastic packaging on space stations and on the moon to recover a source of carbon that could be used for a number of different purposes. So each supply mission to the Moon with supply at least some increase in carbon by simply processing all the plastic.
Composition of Solids After HCl Treatment:
The composition of the solids left after treating lunar regolith with concentrated hydrochloric acid would depend on the initial regolith composition but would generally include:
Silicates: Since silicates (like feldspar, pyroxene, olivine) are less soluble in HCl, they would be more abundant in the residue. These form the bulk of lunar regolith.
Oxides: Magnesium oxide (MgO), aluminum oxide (Al₂O₃), and titanium dioxide (TiO₂) might remain if not completely dissolved or reacted.
Inert or Less Reactive Components: Some fraction of iron might remain in forms like iron oxide (FeO or Fe₂O₃) if not fully leached, along with other minor elements or compounds that do not react significantly with HCl.
Glass: Lunar regolith includes a significant amount of glass from impact melting; this would likely remain, although possibly altered by acid exposure.
The average composition might look something like this (very approximate due to variability in regolith):
Silica (SiO₂): 40-50%
Aluminum Oxide (Al₂O₃): 15-25%
Magnesium Oxide (MgO): 5-15%
Calcium Oxide (CaO): 5-10%
Titanium Dioxide (TiO₂): 1-5%
Iron Oxides (FeO/Fe₂O₃): Variable, depending on dissolution
Other oxides and minor elements: Trace to a few percent
Cast Basalt Resistance to HCl:
Corrosion Resistance: Cast basalt is known for its high resistance to most acids, including hydrochloric acid. This is due to its dense, vitreous structure which does not allow for easy chemical penetration. However, under prolonged or highly concentrated acid exposure, some degradation might occur, especially if there are micro-cracks or if the basalt isn't of high purity. For lunar applications, where exposure might be controlled and not constant, cast basalt could be sufficiently resistant for handling HCl.
Vacuum Conditions on the Moon for Industrial Processes:
Natural Vacuum: The lunar surface offers a natural vacuum, which is indeed a significant advantage for industrial processes that require low-pressure environments. This natural vacuum can be harnessed for:
Condensing Volatiles: Without the need for creating vacuum conditions, gases emitted during high-temperature processing (like sintering or melting basalt) can be easily condensed. This would be particularly useful for collecting water vapor, carbon dioxide, or other volatiles that might be present or produced.
Energy and Cost Efficiency: On Earth, creating and maintaining vacuum conditions is expensive and energy-intensive. On the Moon, this is already provided, reducing both setup costs and ongoing energy requirements for industrial processes.
Third Supply Chain for Volatiles: By condensing and collecting volatiles from processed regolith, you could establish an additional resource stream, which might include water for life support systems, fuel for rockets, or raw materials for industrial chemistry.
In summary, the lunar environment provides unique opportunities for industrial processes like those involving HCl treatment of regolith, particularly in terms of vacuum utilization for volatile capture. The composition of the solid residue would be rich in silicates and oxides, suitable for sintering into construction materials, while cast basalt could be a viable material for equipment in this harsh chemical environment.
@@Astroponicisthe's reinventing the wheel a bit lol. If you want to bring carbon to the moon, you might not want to do it in the form of plastic as that is adding a lot of extra mass in the form of hydrogen and oxygen (depending on plastic type), if you want to have an actual useful amount of carbon brought up to the moon, it should be in a pure carbon form. The amount of plastic trash I imagine will end up there will be miniscule compared to how much will be needed on industrial scales. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but from a practical standpoint, it will be more efficient to either not use plastic packaging or to use a type that can actually be recycled without a lot of degradation (they're working on it).
Sorry but Nobels are for earthlings ONLY. You mooninites have sponged off the Earth long enough! 😉
0:38 clooose, but not *quite* there yet😅
There is a system extremely similar to this called the “PRT System” in use at my university which uses concrete roads and guide wheels. It’s a pretty strange public transport system but it solves a lot of issues with the campus and is a fun to use (when it doesn’t break down)
Big LOL about the fps creation/moon shot...
But also: all these vids, and especially the efforts done, collectively and by you, the calculations, the visualisations, they all add up to create an image of this whole thing becoming more plausible by the episode. You're doing all the heavy lifting, eating the prey so that it can be regurgitated to the likely engineers and designers that will eventually probably will _acfually_ woek in such programs
Yep, at this time barriers about moon development are rather in our heads, and we need to build a new perception of what possible, and update our 70's and disappointing 90's+ perceptions.
@Molb0rg exactly. And seeing that theoretical groundwork being laid isn't just awesome (which on its own it is) it is in a sense basically a guarantee this will be a reality in a decade, or max two.
Although, first we've got to tackle capitalism. Cause even though it has some pro's, the con"s of capitalism are eating us and our planets alive.
I also love that people seem to think that strip-mining the moon would make the mass of the mined material just disappear.
I chuckle when they speculate that ANY mining of the moon might reduce it's gravity.
Lol...I didn't even consider this.
17:52 in reality though, you'd want your construction joints closer to what we do on highways, which is closer to 15-20 ft. I'm not going to go into details about slab thickness and size, there's published methods to figure that out, but i'm certain that your joint spacing is going to be closer to 20 ft than the 4 ft that's common on sidewalks
I do not understand all the maths, but I do like how your videos put into perspective how possible all this is which is really neat to think about.
Steels yield strength varies heavily. A typical structural steel would be in the range of 200-400 Mpa, but more specialized steels can even get up to the 1500-1800Mpa range. Railway steels are in the 1000-1300 Mpa range.
Imagine building a particle collider that wrapped around Luna's diameter one or more times.
18:05 just place the tiles when they're at maximum thermal expansion and they'll shrink down to the perfect gap.
Pretty sure this is how continuously welded rail is done too (although it's for pretensioning rather than gap setting)
@TAWithiam saw a veritasium video on this a couple of weeks ago, iirc it's a mixture of very precise temperatures (can't control the weather, so do it at night and use blow torches), angles (if it's out by the tiniest bit the tracks warp) and thermite (the reason for the video in the first place).
german jumpscare!!!!!
20:46 I'm not sure if the assumption that transport would be the dominant energy cost is reasonable. The paper "Sintered or melted regolith for lunar construction: state-of-the-art review and future research directions" says that an extremely optimistic figure for the amount of energy needed to sinter regolith would be around 1.3 kJ per gram, though it would likely be an order of magnitude higher. But even with that low estimate, that would make the energy cost 2.16 Gigawatt Hours per kilometer from those 6000 tons of sintered/melted regolith. That would mostly be cheap sunlight, but melting stuff is energy _intensive_ .
Great comment! This is something I probably should've clarified. Even if it required 100 GWh per gram we don't count that energy as our expense, that's the suns problem we get it for free. We don't count the cost of sunlight to grow corn, we count the cost of fertilizer, water, labor, land and transport. We have to spend the energy required to 'make the thing that harnesses the free energy' i.e. the solar furnace which is mirrors and stuff. The cost to make those is what is amortized across batches. Same with solar panels you don't count the sunlight poured into those as a cost, the cost is what it takes to harness the free sunlight poured into them.
@@Anthrofuturism So when you say energy you're referring to hmm... _processed_ energy? Like electricity and chemical energy in rocket fuel etc?
@@Anthrofuturism oh gawd, don't let the IRS read this...
I just noticed that all your data and clips of white papers are in dark mode. You a king for that fr! 🎉
@@DefaultUser61 I try not to blind everyone watching at night lol
If we're building our infrastructure from scratch anyway, why wouldn't we standardize the axle width of our vehicles? Say we pick three possible sizes and build the road with 4 wheel width "rails", set up so that you can have two of the smallest size vehicle side by side, or one medium sized vehicle with a free rail on one side, or one big one taking the full width of the road. That allows small prospector vehicles to use the same roads as our big trains, while saving us around two thirds of the construction mass. And once the roads are in place, the axle width standard is self-enforcing. No-one is going to want to invest in a vehicle that can't use the road net, so future vehicles will get designed to follow the same standard.
I've read somewhere that our space infrastructure is influenced by the size of a horse. From roman roads, to medeval ones, to horse cars, and finaly highways. The limiting factor for rocket size is the roads onto which it can be transported.
@@bob_412 Not quite. There's a tunnel on the train line between Kennedy Space Center and where the Space Shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters were assembled. The tunnel is sized to fit a train with as little extra space as possible, because digging is expensive. The trains are designed to a standard rail gauge, which throughout the Eastern Seaboard was based on the tooling used for wagons. Those in turn had been originally imported from England, where the width of a cart was designed around the grooves in the roman built road network. The romans, 2,000 years ago didn't have as strong horses as us, so their fastest way to move was a light chariot pulled by a pair of small horses. So their roads were built with grooves for mail transport chariots, which then kept being used by carts and wagons for millennia before the same axle width was used on trains. With the tunnel built to fit a train (which so happened to be the width of two roman horses), the Shuttle SRBs were constrained in how wide they could be, which then formed part of the design restraint on the shuttle program as a whole.
@@gnaskar Thanks for the in-depth info, didn't know the details
i had an interesting throught. essentially cargo retrieving system. a bunch or ion engine tugs that operate LowEarthOrbit to LowMoonOrbit. from the moon orbit we essentially have a crane that catches the payload tug placed on a needed trajectory, or returns the payload to the trajectory.
Absolutely adore this content!
I think this is one of the most logical approaches to construction. The expansion and contraction of buildings, machines, roads, etc will really be a challenge to deal with.
24:45 Once I finally landed on the Mun in KSP, I finally understood how big the moon is even though it's smaller then Earth. Space is big.
KSP rocks, when you does not blows up your mining rigs and stations!))
Thermal expansion is fairly easy to predict though, and we already deal with it a lot on earth so we have many mature techniques for managing it or controlling for it in the design.
The problem I see with any road design is that traction scales with gravity while mass and inertia do not. So on the moon, braking distances will be long and corners need to be wide. Gradients I think are not affected. I think heavy vehicles will need to either move slow or be completely fixed to rails (like a rollercoaster) or there is significant danger of unplanned off-road excursion.
Rocks rolling (unsettled by a quake for example) onto roads can pose a significant hazard if a vehicle is redirected upwards after running onto one (remember: long braking distances and poor cornering performance.) Due to the low gravity the resulting "jump" will be much longer and less likely to land back on the road. Either roads need to be patrolled frequently or protective fences need to be set up where terrain slopes toward the road.
The horizon is also much closer which may make it harder to see small obstacles on straight bits of road ahead though I don't know how much that is offset by not having hot air haze over the road.
Several solutions that immediately come to mind are: bank the road around turns to allow for higher speeds, use confining wheels and grooves to hold the vehicle to the road track, use wear strips on the road and brake pads on the vehicles to allow shorter braking distances.
All solvable problems, made easier to solve by the fact that this "road" is much more rail-like than road-like in architecture.
Also, visibility is a non issue because these vehicles will drive autonomously, and will use satellites as well as ground signals to navigate & track their own positions constantly, so they'll "know" when to speed up slow down etc.
Greetings from Germany! Another great video. I work in the railway industry, but I’m convinced this approach is far better than using super-wide rails. Keep up the great work! I really hope to see this become a reality in the coming years.
Excellent video. 1050 C 🤓👍
I can't wait for game shows and sports streaming live from the moon. Imagine how amazing lunar basketball would look, or even aircycling with only human-powered vehicles. A large pressurized stadium would be very easy for a lunar industry to produce.
Once you have a hub established, and a reasonable amount of road leading away from that hub, you can switch road production over to a train that gathers regolith for it's own furnaces as part of the grading process of setting up the road. These production trains can then aid in the setup of additional hubs when you want to send out orthogonal roads and/or setup a new industrial center. This way, you don't need to move regolith very far from where it is gathered to where it is processed and then to where the products are used.
26:08 For the next video: i know it's not important at all, but you know people on he moon would probably do something like it at some point, AESTETICS. (like making the moon train look "vaguely" like an old locomotive)
Especially with the old-fashioned spoked metal wheels and cable pulleys on the work vehicles
Danke!
Fk, ... Ich werde mal meine Job Entscheidungen überdenken. Bis in die Unendlichkeit und noch viiiel weiter.
Wow, vielen Dank!!
@ Viel Erfolg!
+ a collection of amazing and informative videos. Being a fan of space-based City-planning games, I have a strange impression about the necessary level of technology for the exploration of the moon. Everything turns out to be much simpler, without something unknown technology. It also seems that it will be enough to provide the author of the video with a pair of construction drones and leave them on the moon for several years in order to return to a full-fledged spaceport. Great video!
Excellent work! Lunar resources are getting easier to obtain with each video. I have much thinking to do after this...
a really great video, I'd love to see more ideas like this get used in sci-fi settings
exploring the great lunar highway sounds epic
One benifet to these ceramic tiles is that when (inevitably) a tile becomes damaged, it can be pulled up and used as a non-guided road if it’s not too damaged.
Hey, I saw how they made the airports on Iwo Jima and thought of these roads! They had to make them quickly, durably and easy to repair while also capable of having heavy planes go on them 24/7. This is similar to the land trucks on our roads. What they did is they laid out pierced steel plates on leveled land. Maybe that would work? It is all just steel plates so they could make it out there from readily available iron and anything with plow to level out the ground and a big roller with some sort of automated plate layers could make a lot of very stable road. And that road would allow them to be followed by trucks carrying more plates to hand off to it, speeding it up even more.
Or perhaps aluminum plates, which would be much easier to fabricate given the far higher quantity of Al in regolith and the problems pur host has mentioned with getting usable quantities of iron.
Great video. I would love to see you do one on mechanism and walking machines on the lunar surface. I'm particularly interested in a strandbeest style walker on the moon surface, or some of the permutations created by DIYwalkers.
That actually good idea
I like your ideas!
Can you talk about nuclear power on the moon like you did in a previous unlisted video, and possibly make a playlist of the unlisted videos?
I think you could calculate rolling resistance from first principles based on how much the wheel would deform to support a given weight, and it's elastic modulus. A platonic ideal wheel would touch only at the tangent and support the weight on an infinitesimal area, but a bicycle tire sqeezes out a little at the bottom so it has a finite support area and a steel train wheel does also... and then the rolling resistance comes from the force needed to get up over that hump
Once you have a circumlunar highway all it takes is 10mph to stay ahead of the day-night terminator. You could have something rolling at the right speed and sit at a constant local noon.
Also, like earth roads building utilities adjacent to them is a natural match. Having adjacent utilities makes building/maintaining/using the road easier. Having an adjacent road makes building/maintaining the utilities easier. Having a circumlunar road also makes having a circumlunar power “grid” viable and could potentially power the whole ring from the lit half. For some processes, 50% duty cycle is acceptable. But for any equipment you had to import from earth, 50% duty cycle is going to make it twice as long to “pay off”. Better to keep it busy almost all the time.
Really wouldn't venture these kind of guesses on lunar economics until we do much more comprehensive exploration of the moon's geology so we know what's scarce and what's common. For all we know there might be a crater full of magical adamantium which is stronger than steel and glows blue when aliens are near.
keep them videos coming... as in the following 5 years these kind of clips are the rocketfuel for new gen of young engineering minds who will be probably doing all this in some way
👍👍
Thankyou!!!
2:02 Woo, Red Green Show! Nice pick.
good stuff, vehicle design for these roads might be a good idea for a video, and also possible dimensions of the roads themselves and how that might differ from terrestrial designs. I'd also love to see some thoughts on settlement and habitat design on a more feasible scale. While a circumlunar road is interesting it might be more valuable to think on how this system would work for a set of interconnected settlements, how far apart they'd need to be for this to be required, what kind of freight and passenger traffic might be feasible and the like.
I'm so glad you talked about a circumlunar roads because I had a thought
You could add solar panels between railroad ties to power train and have a continuous non nuclear form of energy using them
Circumlunar road I bring you circumlunar railroad and better used space and energy production
Brazil mentioned 🇧🇷 🇧🇷 🇧🇷 🇧🇷🎉🎉🎉
2.33 minutes in:
My eyes! MY EYES!!!
2:33
At 10:26 it’s a bit misleading. While the rolling resistance IS lower, the total force of friction is increased due to the increased surface area of the wheel.
A big part of calculating friction IS the force N which is in part the mass being accelerated by gravity. That drops to 1/6th instantly on the moon.
With no atmosphere and weather some shades to keep the road-rails from thermal expansion cycles from the sun could be really lightweight and cheap if made from the right material.
In general considering we have plenty of molten stuff - mineral fiber blanket on sticks can be the material
Would it be possible to make stiffer cast regolith by holding it at a high temperature (more like 1200°C) for a long time? Keeping it hot in a relatively wide, shallow vessel to drive off all the volatiles before casting it into the final shape seems like it would allow the production of much less porous cast regolith, which might be the "best of both worlds".
Sintering may have advantages, stresses, crystal structure etc, so it two technologies having their cons and pros, with a good intersection, but it needs to see things in practice and tests to settle on a "right" combo here which may result in one or another or both - tests tests rand rand
awesome video, thank you for giving me hope for a moon colony.
I love this Channellll
The first thing that comes to mind with sintered regolith plates that you didn't touch on is the vehicle going over the joins, the edges will crack and break out fairly quickly even when tight together, which will ruin the road and the wheels running on it. The more you load and the faster you go, the worse this will get. I don't know, doesn't seem feasible.
@@Shrouded_reaper nah, that is just a maintenance issue, like with asphalt roads being damaged by the weather. But unlike asphalt, you can just pull out a paving slab, sweep out debris and put a new one in. Not done down here for roads anymore due to the weather being even less kind to slabs than the alternatives.
As long as the wear is not too extreme it shouldn’t be too hard to just inspect and replace worn out tiles
If the replacement cost is too high for long term use then as lunar infrastructure advances it could become more cost effective to replace the rails with something like chromium steel or carbon steel
Yeah, i agree. Its better to design a road in such a way that it does not need expansion gaps at all.
I’d think that the edges of the plates could have a taper so that the forces are not so much or so sudden, and that the angle of impact is less damaging.
Though the vibrations induced in the material by the train would still result in damage, i figure it would be less.
If you build a circumlunar roadway you can travel at an average of about 15 km/h speed and always face the sun which means you can easily take stops load-unload cargo and pick up speed to keep up with the sun
You make me believe in the future.... I hope they manage it as sensibly as you describe! Perhaps hire you as a consultant or something!
The entire infrastructure to build the road could ride on the newly created road making it always very close essentially eliminating transport costs. Imagine building two roads at once spaced apart to form a single road for a large road production factory that can mine the regolith in front of itself while it forms the road base and get any extra it needs from the side of the road.
but this wouldn't give us power plants and construction material factories to kickstart our other projects, and indeed in order to build such a titan, you'd need those power plants and construction material factories in the first place, not to mention you also need massive quantities of metals to keep a mobile factory from breaking apart. And then, you have to move the damn factory, which gives you new transport costs that are likely within an order of magnitude of just moving the products instead of the whole factory..
Truly amazing channel! Simply excellent.
Great video as always
While the distribution energy of road materials doesn't tell the full story of construction costs, it is still pretty astonishing how affordable this part of building such a huge megaproject would be. I predict that some small human settlements in the moon will exist in the future, but the big human presence will be in low moon orbit where you can spin up gravity.
unfortunately there is no such thing as a stable low moon orbit. Due to the gravity of the earth these orbits are unstable and energy intense
Sounds like it could also be modeled around a rubber-tyred metro stytem like the one in Paris
For low speed high traction roads where maneuverability is more important than energy efficiency cast regolith would be optimal it would also reduce the amount of dust buildup around structures especially if it could be made to passively or actively use electrostatic forces to repel the dust
I love the video. Could you do another one touching on how zoos would benefit the industrialization of the moon?
They would not benefit the industrialization of the Moon.. Sounds like it’ll benefit the commercialization of the moon instead
@@pokepoke1889 labor output of zoo animals should not be underestimated
Jajaja richtig so, im looking forward to beeing industrious with you guys there :)
Be interesting to hear the lore behind your moon. Do keep the supercity as you already made a 3D render, but show how the population then wanted to expand outward in the manner that you suggested in this video.
There is a very sharp distinction between high and low temperatures on the moon. As the sun rises and sets. I think you have to be concerned with whether the slabs will crack as that boundary travels across the slab surface
You know, even if you decide to replace trains, you don't need to replace how they steer, since we're using a brittle material, we should match the rail and wheel geometry better than steel wheels, but if you turn your road into two sloped strips and use more or less tapered wheels (curvatures are needed for everything), the train model of steering works again
We generally want it to be "generic" road accessible for many types of vehicles, but that does seem a good suggestion
Steer where? There is no need to steer if you can just build nearly straight since nothing in-between needs to be avoided 😂
@@TheGahta craters. Even large craters like Tycho which are relatively shallow compared to their diameter, have an average grade of over 10%. That’s far too steep for a train to traverse, especially with substantially less traction than on earth due to lower gravity and rolling resistance. And that’s completely ignoring the fact that building everything in one straight line without branching off is plain stupid; it’d just be Neom’s Line city all over again.
@quakxy_dukx jeez nuance is a thing
Yes craters are to be avoided (or build bridges, or a ramp 🤣)
But we are talking about general lay of the land, and since you need regolith one needs to scoop it up and flatten anyways
There are no hills and stuff in-between that need curves like on earth, which was quite obvious and you going for the "um awchually" shows your willingness to misunderstand on purpose 🤣
@@TheGahta Building over a crater would be insanely expensive, you ignored his point about branching off which is FAR more efficient, bringing up valid problems isn't misunderstanding and suggesting that it is just reveals your own ignorance. Also there ARE hills on the moon mountains even, you can't simply flatten it when you mine the regulith because regulith only goes down 5-10 metres, flattening the hills in the path of your road would be very expensive. To conclude there are many reasons for steering to be necessary even outside of the settlement and you shouldn't be insulting people for disagreeing with you.
Awesome and inspiring video!!!
Gravity on the moon is much less, so the road/rain can be thinner since carrying less weight.
Top tier content. Do you have any plans to actually publish papers about this?
24:45 even if we did strip mine the moon to build railways and settlements, that mass is staying on the moon. Thus theres no change in the gravity between the two bodies
A change in gravity would require many hundreds of thousands of years to do. Google 2 figures, the mass of the moon and the total mass of stuff we harvest from the earth each year. The numbers are interesting.
Do you have a Discord where we can have conversations about these ideas because I like them I would love to discuss more with you about them
17:14 imagine the comically wide sliding cross ties for steel railways on the moon
Imagine if donald trump made it a government mandate to build this road by the end of the next decade. Giving unlimited funding to Nasa SpaceX and other launch providers . I believe a project of this scale is possible to complete before 2040 if we throw everything at it. And while building the equator road you can simultaneously build a polar road and then run roads longitude and latitude across the surface of the moon giving us effective coverage of most regions of the moon by 2040.
As cool as a highway to circumnavigate the moon is I think that would be more of a luxury item to create once the tourism industry is established (so you could sell "I circumnavigated the moon" t-shirts).
All that said it got me thinking of how we'd need to protect our lunar facilities from meteors large and small. Our initial habitats are underground so relatively safe, but our other facilities like the solar focusing forge would have to be outside, as would our roads. Do we need specific protection systems & if so how would they work? Are we laying down wire to power sensors (can we even do that?) all those sorts of questions popped into my head.
This is a finer detail of things but still one we'd need to explore & a pretty good topic for a future video at some point.
This protection thing is called repair and replace, it not that much of the actually destroying metiortes there, there was a paper on distribution of the stuff, and how much per meter and sub micrometer size if fairly common, but it also not that destructive. Over millions of years it will grind down everything in a dust but it over geological times.
Mean RUclips man called me a Dummkopf😔
DUDE, pleaseeeee go into solar furnaces❤ we need to examine if this is an effective way to boil or create certain tools. Compare and contrast conventional industrial ovens for production 😊
*KADUNK KADUNK KADUNK KADUNK KADUNK KADUNK*
"Oh right, I forgot about the seam between the slabs."
I would think you could build a mobile sintering system the width of the road you want and attach an excavating system to it and just send the whole thing autonomously around the Moon. Just have the finished road pieces come out the back as it moves along.
Love this channel, I know we'll never do anything close to this before nuclear armageddon, but it's nice to think otherwise for even just a few minutes :')
50nyears from now, when the people in power finally start to consider industrializing the moon, someone's gonna be like "my grandpa sez this guy on RUclips already did all our math homework, let's go build!"
making a conveyor belt that is constantly moving around the moon would be a good idea. accelaration and deccelaration is the hardest part, so do it once. making various bases along specific latitude lines would mean linear logistics would be desirable
Over that distance the friction would add up no matter how efficient you made it
@@jblob5764 I suppose. perhaps a vibration conveyor instead
OK OK, there's one thing I do want you to talk about at some point. The fact that moondust is very coarse, it's like sandpaper on steroids.
Build the road near the lunar arctic circle, just enough toward the equator to clear shading from hills. Mount solar panels on trucks in a vertical configuration. You just need to drive the panels around the road once per month, which corresponds to a speed of 0.4 km/hr - about the speed that a baby crawls!
Or you could just build twice as many solar panels placed at different longitudes. That way, you don't have to maintain a vehicle, a road, power connectors to a mobile high energy array, and all the other supports. Oh, and your solar panels will each last about twice as long, since it's the sunlight that wears them down in the first place, so the cost of panels per kW per year is the same, you've just added a massive overhead on top of it.
@@gnaskar You don't need twice as many unless you build system with tracking. More like four times. The power connectors are the same theoretical cost regardless of whether have mobile system or a distributed system. Also, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the time value of an investment, if you think it is winning to have an asset un-utilized for something like three quarters of the time but lasting four times as long. Besides, I think my tracking system is cool and clever!
Love these videos SO much. Only channel I can say I've watched everything through and through and even took freaking notes! XD Your work is a nerdgasm in the extreme.
Ignorant question though, is there any concern of airborn... errr, vacuum born fine particulate clouds (for a lack of educated words) forming from such large excavation operations going on in the moon's low G environment? Any studies on this? Like, how far away will your excavation site have to be from your solar furnace / farm power sites as to not affect power yield to much. Assuming my naive ass is even correct to think it might be an issue. I don't remember a mention of such an issue in the past videos, but perhaps it's time for me to revisit them.
@@tylerreeves8026 it is a potential concern, due to the lower gravity it'll travel further, but due to the lack of atmosphere it won't float on air currents.
Well small dust plunges down at same velocity as a big rock, soo
Different electrostatic effects for small small dust are possible, but in general I would not call it a thing to be concerned too much
@@Molb0rg exactly, my concern isn't the low gravity itself. It's the low gravity combined with regolith's propensity to build up positive charge from incoming solar wind on the day side and electrostatically suspend itself during sunlit hours. The Apollo missions found "horizon glow" which later studies showed to be caused by this electrostatic suspension.
My question is essentially, is it possible that initial mechanical separation of regolith from the surface on parabolic trajectories somehow increases the quantity of regolith that then experiences electrostatic suspension. Assuming that the suspension is a result of the quantity of particles under a certain size exposed to sunlight, I'd imagine mechanical dispersion could increase the quantity of said particles of said size that can then get hit by the solar wind to take on a charge and experience suspension.
Edited: for spelling/paragraph seperation
@@tylerreeves8026 well if it that much of those particles that they stick and obstruct you solar farm, well give them something to stick to instead of that solar farm of yours. Add repelling grid in front of your reflectors or solar panels or whatever. In any shape it not such a huge concern, it not like sand storms stuff and such. That flying particles, they still didn't cover entirely reflectors from Apollo missions, which still are used to measure distance to the moon - so there are particles flying, buut it not much of them naturally.
When you shovel stuff around sure we may expect more of those but - there are solutions or it is not enough problem to bother about - one of two.
not to mention steel wheels on steel track doesn't work in vacuum because cold welding would be common
Honestly, I was thinking it was pointless to talk about the rolling resistance, because Magnetic Levitation Trains won’t touch the rails it will float over the rails with no rolling resistance… We won’t be using roads on the Moon. A maglev train line will be hanging from two towers that make an A frame. ‘Suspension railway?’
The powerful magnets and other equipment necessary for the train's propulsion and guidance are expensive to use on Earth with Earth gravity and atmosphere. I don’t know the cost, but with less gravity and no atmosphere on the Moon the towers don’t need to be as strong. If someone gets the idea of hanging solar panels on the outside of the A frame towers, then we don’t always need to run the train off just batteries.
Maybe someday. But that's 100x the cost and time to build, probably start with something simpler until the need exists to upgrade.
I'm sorry for the offtop, but what do you think about maglev launchpad for rocketless launches?
You mentioned in your former video "railgun will have much less wear, because acceleration is much smaller" but it's not the case - the wear depends on speed and mass of the launched object, not the acceleration
Of course we'll need to deliver a lot of Niobium for superconductors and deliver or make cooling stations, but that seems possible
You need to talk to the devopers of Satisfactory or Civilization. Cause I want to play this essay as a RTS game.
While on earth the rolling resistance of steel is that good, on the moon it'd likely become infinite. Due to the fact that without an oxygen containing atmosphere oxide layers wouldn't form on the steel rails and rolling wheels as they abraded while interacting, this would cause the steel rolling wheels to cold-weld to the rails. The only solution would be to make either the rail or wheels from a material that resist forming compounds and bonds with iron, something a great deal of industrial materials are all to happy to do.
Yep cold welding is an issue, but as you mentioned there are ways to address it.
Excellent content thanks
I’ve always wondered whether some form of ballistic transport would be possible employing magnetic catapult taking advantage of the vacuum
Cheers
Many things are possible, but some things are for fun, some are for to be a work horse.
I feel like not doing the sintering in a hard vacuum is a huge flaw. I'd imagine it would rapidly outgas when it melts
A road that has rails and runs a train down it? Heck yeah, some kind of lunar rail road! :) I reckon you could put the road building facilities on a train itself, and effectively have it build the road as it goes along. Heck depending on how fast it could go, you could have them chasing the daylight and run for more than 2 weeks at a time.