I always thought putting electromagnetic strips
on the outside of most buildings and on all of the
cars might be pretty convenient. You know, have a
little impact potential reader that would turn the
suckers on when anything started careening towards it.
I could imagine some car bouncing around like crasy,
repulsing off of everything until it's momentum ran
down a bit from air friction... of course, this would
only work well where there were a lot of buildings to
repulse off of.
And everything would still have to be pretty
tough, it's just that with an electromagnet you can
pull effects similar to springs... you know, the car
is strongly repelled and then less strongly repelled a
fraction of a second later so that it doesn't just
crunch... you could have a designation, like all cars
would have north facing sort of inward and south
outward all the way around.
You might even have the building and the cars use
several electromagnets... like the buildings repulse
strongly while the ground attracts or whatnot... not
powerfully attracts, the car and the ground would
compensate... not sure. It'd be fairly complex, I
imagine that it would involve several embedded
computers and gps type systems to track the movements
of all of the vehicles. Expensive... but fun.
Of course, with computer controlled vehicles, any
sort of problem that required such a system might
cause the system itself to go out. You'd need
something almost automatic. Maybe the car could have
a fairly powerfull repulsive electromagnet and an
emergency circuit. When damage approached, the
circuit would complete, powering the magnets and
sending the car skyrocketing upwards to be towed
away... maybe the buildings could act like one way
doors... so that if the car went up, it couldn't come
down while it was out of control, and the shape of the
magnetic field itself might be funnellike so it
couldn't go careening away... ok, so this is massively
expensive. And it would take a ton of power. But,
you have to admit... it *would* be a lot of fun to
watch.
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