How much obsolete tech does the WW2 infantry have, is the question - e.g. if it’s US troops then they’ll have Garands, which are only obsolescent, and they only need to stall until the modern air force can come help.

…actually, no. The modern air force could split up, put 10%ish of its forces into ROFLstomping the WW2 air force and the other 90% into supporting the WW2 infantry. So the WW2 infantry will always have air support from the moment the war starts. If the air force can obliterate a few platoons of modern infantry, then the WW2 infantry can scavenge some of their equipment and level the playing field a bit.

What exactly does “take a city” mean? If you’re not too squeamish then you’ll find you don’t need infantry, just a few MIRVs.

Aren’t those planes brought up to the air by actual planes? If modern planes have air dominance, then those plywood planes had better have a functioning plywood engine because there won’t be anything else to get them skybound.

Drones are army, they’re just a fancy grenade/pair of binoculars, when you think about it. Or maybe a missile.

If the modern air force can take out some modern ground troops, the ww2 ground troops could loot their corpses to be somewhat modern-ish ground troops. The modern air force could use radio to explain how to use the equipment, if they have access to wikipedia.

WW2 forces will get obliterated at nighttime, no night vision. Assuming modern ground forces are still alive by nighttime, that is.

The rail area gets vibrated by the wheels (which would shorten the solar panel lifetimes directly), any dust that the vibrations kick up would settle on the panel and reduce its efficiency, and anything dangling underneath the train would absolutely destroy the panels.

Besides, if you have the solar panels on the train track then it still needs to be wired to the train, which means you need an overhead wire and you might as well just put the panels next to the train track, where it’s quieter and less vibrated.

The onboard electrolysis isn’t as useful as you’d think - electrolysis is energy-intensive, you need water, acquiring water is energy a intensive, and water is heavy. Like, 8/9 of the weight of water is oxygen.

With current tech it doesn’t make sense, but in a more sci-fi sense I think it does - the sky is full of dense patches of gaseous water, commonly known as “clouds”, and if going through a cloud wasn’t incredibly dangerous for airships then they could just do that, catch handfuls of cloud, then condense it and electrolyze it. That way the airship doesn’t need to lift huge amounts of oxygen from lakes then dump it.

And if we’re speaking sci-fi, making airships stormproof is basically mandatory, they can’t outrun storms and due to their long flight-times (due to low speed), they’re more likely to encounter them mid-flight.

Airships face three main problems, AIUI:

1. They’re slow (100km/h to airllanes’ 600km/h), which means their flights are ~6x as long and thus their staffing costs are 6x as much.
2. Airships still have trouble adjusting their buoyancy - if they pick up/drop off cargo, they become heavier/lighter and start to drop/lift up. That causes a bunch of problems.
3. Weather screws them - as you can imagine, they catch a lot of wind with their sideward profile. And by definition they’re lighter than air, which means they get knocked off course. Water ships don’t have this problem because they’re heavy as hell and literally made of steel, and of course because jet streams don’t reach sea-level. The end result is that airships tend to fair-weather flights by necessity.

#2 can be mitigated and in the future might be solved, and #1 might become irrelevant if fuel costs get high and a niche for airships appears. #3 is a killer for reliability and safety both, though - you preemptively avoid storms by just delaying the flight until the weather prediction turns in your favour, which might take weeks. It just can’t handle a schedule, because putting an airship into a storm is too risky. And if time isn’t important then you can just put stuff on the cargo ship and then a train.

The “hot air” part was nonsense. Most aircraft are painted white (to reduce radiative heating IIRC) so it’s not surprising that an airship would be white too.

You can combine a traditional city with a train system, to get the best of both worlds. It’s not either/or.

The European and Japanese cities featured in this article as exemplars evolved they way they did under severe feudal land restrictions

Ok, how about the city of Pompeii (which was entombed by the volcano in ~50BC), or Tenochitlan/Mexico city (which was built before European contact, or the city of Cusco (ditto), or the city of Petra (which had plenty of spare desert)? Or Venice, or Mateba, or pick-a-town-any-town.

What “severe feudal land restrictions” do you mean? Can you elaborate?

Here on slrpnk.net I see quite a few “new urbanists” endorsing solarpunk visions with wide streets. I posted this partially in response to that.

I could link a newer article, but this one works just fine. Articles don’t have an expiry date, if you have an actually valid criticism then say it.

If it helps, replace “organically” with “incrementally and due to decentralized choices”.

He was originally Australian:

Andrew grew up in Australia and now lives in the Hoboken, New Jersey with his wife. Andrew’s motivation is to create a great place that he and his wife, and one day their children and their future generations will want to call home.

(from the ‘about’ page)

So just to be clear: a cube truck (like in the top picture in that wikipedia link) is 2meters wide. A 6 meter wide road can have 2 cube trucks, passing eachother by, while still having room between both eachother and the walls. Also, you can literally park a cube truck in front of your store to unload it, and there’s room for another cube truck to go around it.

In fact, I’ve been to this one street of warehouses (literally a street of warehouses, in an industrial area) whose road couldn’t have been more than 10m, wall-to-wall, and I didn’t see them having throughput problems. People massively overestimate how important throughtput is, mainly because the throughput they look for is passenger cars.

Also: Deliveries don’t need to be cube trucks. There are other options - vans, cargo bikes and bike-trailers, literally just walking in with a tray of the delivery, whatever. The smaller the street, the smaller the businesses should be, and the less throughput they should need.

I can’t tell what A.A.P.'s (the link guy’s) beliefs on this are, but generally the answer is either 1) it’s fine (see: the cube truck thing), 2) arterial streets every ~5 blocks (that are wide and primarily for cars), or 3) trains. Or some mixture of them all.

with supermarkets, do we build service lanes designed more for delivery trucks

As a quick aside, before I answer that: Honestly, supermarkets suck and mostly make sense when people are carrying their shopping by car. Smaller shops work just fine.

To answer your question: I don’t think so, but don’t quote me on that. Supermarkets receive… one or two trucks per day? And supermarkets are big (partially due to wide aisles to handle the trolleys needed to buy a whole carload of goods, to be fair). So I don’t think they’re that important.

Why? No.

but if games didn’t require expensive (to own and operate) graphics cards

They don’t, if you buy games that came out 5+ years ago. This doesn’t contradict your point, but it can mitigate it somewhat.

The automobile - pronounce it out loud, you’ll say it something like “ow-toe moh-beel”, i.e. in a German accent. Because Germans invented cars.

The assault rifle. They invented the concept, a handful of prototypes without the relevant doctrine (or for the 1890s one, even a detachable magazine) is irrelevant. Fight me, @bluewing.

Okay so statistically speaking, in agrarian/preindustrial societies more than 9/10 of them would be farmers, which means they would (hopefully) have pitchforks. And if you don’t have a pitchfork, then you shouldn’t be at the front because then you’ll be blocking someone with a pitchfork. You can carry a torch or something maybe.

Also, some farmers might have multiple pitchforks (so the wife/kids can pitch in, I’m pretty sure that’s the literal meaning so not a pun BTW), and would know you probably don’t have a pitchfork so would kindly bring along a spare to the angry mobbing.

Point is, the stereotype is at most off by 10%.

“we don’t actually want to penalize people for having more efficient cars”

Yes we do - more efficient cars is not the same as more efficient means of transport, and even electric cars have far higher emissions per person than buses or trains or bikes or walking.

Everyone has this weird mental block where they can’t imagine a solution that’s not cars (mainly because our built environment is mostly roads), but the reality is that electric cars are just a stopgap except for in the boonies, and in those cases using petrol isn’t that big of a deal anyway (it’s ~10% of the population so it’s only a tiny fraction of the car-emissions problem, air pollution is less because there are fewer cars and fewer people nearby, and EVs are more expensive because you can’t just drive a cheap short-range city-car like the Nissan Leaf). So rural transport emissions should be a low priority IMO.

To be clear, I’m all for taxing the shit out of commercial trucks too. Most of that shit should be put on rail (and it would, if we focused on improving rail infrastructure like we currently focus on improving highways), and so should most car drivers.

A port is a slot for ships. Really big ships requires really big slots. The biggest modern ships are over 500 meters long. And dry docks require you to float the ship in, then seal it in and be able to drain the water out - given that those ships are ~50m wide, you’re talking about a huge construction project just to serve one ship at any given time. Turnaround for ships can be hours or days, so you might want multiple bays.

It might well be cheaper, to just have a small ship with a crane or something. Then you don’t need to build a 500mx50m swimming pool. In imperial, that’s 20 olympic swimming pools.