Everyone gets a Planeteer Geo-Cruiser(RAR)

[FaxModem1]

Another useful feature, the Geo-cruiser can lift cargo, but I'm unsure on its lift capacity:

Lifting barrels

[Jub]

Another useful feature, the Geo-cruiser can lift cargo, but I'm unsure on its lift capacity:

Lifting barrels

Whoever loaded that pallet should be fired. None of those barrels would be left over after lift off, let alone through flight.

[FaxModem1]

Another useful feature, the Geo-cruiser can lift cargo, but I'm unsure on its lift capacity:

Lifting barrels

Whoever loaded that pallet should be fired. None of those barrels would be left over after lift off, let alone through flight.

No one ever said that the Planeteers were smart.

Also, it shows that the wings do retract into the Geo-cruiser during flight, and can do so for parking as well.

[Me2005]

Mmm... so roughly, it's a triangle, call it maybe 12 feet long by roughly twice that wide?

Yeah, that's going to be a bitch to find enough space to park. If the wings fold up (a reasonable adaption) that helps, but still.

Probably closer to maxi-van size of ~20' long by 10' wide; unfolded maybe 30'. 12' is a pretty tiny vehicle, a smart is ~9'. Still though, consider that roads are usually 12' per lane, plus 5' or so of shoulder each side, plus 5-10' of sidewalk/grass + sidewalk. And the roads in my neighborhood are all parking lanes + lane, so ~50' of width times whatever the length in front of each house is. A small lot is usually around 50' frontage, so you're talking a 25x50' area in front of each house basically, not including driveways and garages. If the wings fold up (looks like they do), you could probably fit 5 such vehicles in front of each house just on the street.

Houses with alleys and smaller roads would probably have more problems, and really high density areas would obviously have problems, but then at some point there are also usually huge parking lots. New York would be the worst-case, but around here, I can't imagine it'd get worse than parking these things on the arterial or in a parking lot.

Fundamentally, we have ~2 cars per household in the US, and there are ~4 people per household. So we're only talking doubling (tripling, if the existing cars remain) the number of cars on the roads, and the roads themselves are largely empty space 99% of the time.

[Broomstick]

"Heavy Traffic" in the air shouldn't mean nearly as much as "heavy traffic" on the ground. Cars get into traffic jams because of flow problems - there is only so much sanctioned space for the cars to drive through. In the air, just using the air above roads gets you 30-100,000' of height to use. Airports have traffic problems because regular airplanes can't all use the runway at the same time. These things can VTOL. The whole volume of the atmosphere should not have serious trouble with this many flying things long term; though having collision avoidance and central planning would be important short-term until people figure out that the E-W fast lane is at 24,000' and the W-E fast lane at 26,000' (or whatever).

[nitpick] The rules are traveling west to east you travel at odd-thousands (21,000; 23,000; etc.) and east to west even thousands (20,000;22,000; etc.)

And unless these things are pressurized (are they?) very few people are likely to be spending much if any time above 12,000 feet anyhow.

Actually, in heavily urban areas the airspace is already heavily sectioned and divided, it's not as wide-open as you might think until you get to far rural and wilderness areas.

[bilateralrope]

How much energy would its batteries contain ?

How likely is all that energy to be suddenly, explosively, released in the event of a crash ?

[Solauren]

Sane people park them somewhere safe until the chaos dies down.

Ironically, that ends up covering up plant life, blocking life giving sunlight, causing those plants to wither and die.

Gaia feels horrible as a result.

[FaxModem1]

How much energy would its batteries contain ?

How likely is all that energy to be suddenly, explosively, released in the event of a crash ?

That would depend on the crash, as the Planeteers have crashed it before and made it out fine, only having to repair it later.

[Simon_Jester]

Whoever designed the Geo-Cruiser was, fairly clearly, a good engineer with high safety-consciousness. Otherwise, a bunch of teenagers wouldn't be able to operate and maintain it at all. So it's safe to bet that under almost any probable conditions, the battery pack is fail-safe rather than fail-deadly.

[Me2005]

[nitpick] The rules are traveling west to east you travel at odd-thousands (21,000; 23,000; etc.) and east to west even thousands (20,000;22,000; etc.)

Floating in the back of my head somewhere was something along those lines, but I was really just tossing out numbers and expressing the need for a well-defined ruleset.

Actually, in heavily urban areas the airspace is already heavily sectioned and divided, it's not as wide-open as you might think until you get to far rural and wilderness areas.

It won't need to be any more, who needs a jumbo jet or designated airports when every living person has a private VTOL jet that holds ~6 passengers and cargo (Other than the military and cargo planes, ofc.)? 1/6th of the things could be destroyed/requisitioned/whatever, we'd still have enough vehicle capacity for every person on earth to be in the air at the same time.

And since there's plenty of land for all those people, even if it's unpressurized by definition there's plenty of airspace for those people. Especially since 70% of the earth's surface where they are living already isn't land.

You know what though, these things really set up nicely for Frank Lloyd Wright's city plans. I'm interpreting it two ways based on what I remember learning and what the wiki is saying, but both work. It's either:
A ) Large high density buildings surrounded by miles of nothing, where you might commute between city-buildings and your work (now easy with the private aircraft), work in the building, or work remotely (with the internet he did not envision).

Or B ) Each family gets a 1-acre plot to build on, and commutes wherever they need to go. Again, easy-peasy with private aircraft, and now suddenly not only very reasonable but also largely necessary because spreading people out would ensure greater safety.

Sane people park them somewhere safe until the chaos dies down.

Ironically, that ends up covering up plant life, blocking life giving sunlight, causing those plants to wither and die.

In the US at least, there is a *ton* of pavement already laid down. Add that to gravel and dirt lots and other hardscaped areas and I *really* doubt you'd have much issue with covering up sunlight. Google tells me that in the US, we've got 16 million hectares of just road pavement. 107,639 s.f/hectare gives us 1.7 trillion s.f. of pavement. There are 8 billion of these aircraft, and if we accept that they take up about 200 s.f. each, that's 1.6 trillion s.f. So every single one of these aircraft on Earth could park on the streets in the US, and from what I can gather quickly, that number does not include driveways, parkinglots, sidewalks, gravel lots, etc. etc. that are also unplanted currently.

Really, what'll happen is *eventually* each family will get a little parking strip (for either permanent or Uber'd vehicles) and the roads will be let go fallow and decay, except in really built-up places where walking and biking makes more sense than a flight or where the aircraft can't land because it's too constricted. All that space will go back to the earth, so it should be a tremendous net gain.

[Elheru Aran]

You're forgetting bulk transportation. That still has to happen. Either they'll have to lay a lot more rail, or semis are still going to be used. So, at least, the interstate highways and surrounding access roads will still exist.

[Me2005]

You're forgetting bulk transportation. That still has to happen. Either they'll have to lay a lot more rail, or semis are still going to be used. So, at least, the interstate highways and surrounding access roads will still exist.

That's true, but it's also more reasonable to have the bulk-delivery stations and the distribution in the same place. It's much less of a big deal for me to fly my flying car-plane over to the nearest port to get groceries than it was to drive there, and we already have rail to basically all major cities. Even without rail in a city, it's plausible that the citizens could fly quite far to get supplies and not end up spending any more time traveling. It's even likely, this *is* a super-hero vehicle after all, it's probably quite fast.

[Elheru Aran]

Granted, but people are still going to be thinking in terms of convenience. It's less convenient to drive 30 minutes than it is 5, whether you're flying or rolling. So you're still going to see a lot of distribution.

If you could cobble together some of these flying cars into a semi equivalent, that's one way to get around that, I suppose. Probably a decent use for excess vehicles, and let's face it, there are going to be a lot of those if you consider that children and senior citizens are far less likely to drive themselves.

Rail to basically all major cities... sort of. A lot of cities can only be gotten to via fairly circuitous routes. You can't take rail directly from Atlanta to Chicago, for example-- you have to take a train to DC and transfer there. It's something like 20+ hours. By road, it's 11. That's a major time savings. Even more so considering that almost all personal vehicles have been taken out of the equation.

Don't forget that a lot of people are still going to be hung up on using cars, buses, RV's and what not. They're going to need roads to get to wherever they want to go.

I expect a distinct subculture will pop up about modding their own Geo-Cruisers in various ways...

[Me2005]

Granted, but people are still going to be thinking in terms of convenience. It's less convenient to drive 30 minutes than it is 5, whether you're flying or rolling. So you're still going to see a lot of distribution.

Depending on the speed of these things, it may not be. 6x faster than a car over short distances isn't unlikely. And it'd surely be less frustrating - there are no stoplights or wanton pedestrians in the sky!

If you could cobble together some of these flying cars into a semi equivalent, that's one way to get around that, I suppose. Probably a decent use for excess vehicles, and let's face it, there are going to be a lot of those if you consider that children and senior citizens are far less likely to drive themselves.

Oh yeah, we have way too many of the things. Even if they're 100% self-driving, kids don't go places without their parents for reasons other than that they have no way of going there.

Rail to basically all major cities... sort of. A lot of cities can only be gotten to via fairly circuitous routes. You can't take rail directly from Atlanta to Chicago, for example-- you have to take a train to DC and transfer there. It's something like 20+ hours. By road, it's 11. That's a major time savings. Even more so considering that almost all personal vehicles have been taken out of the equation.

The stuff delivered by train largely doesn't care, and you could probably rail over some of the roads if you really needed the direct routes. But keep in mind - people aren't what we'll be moving by train. Trains are horrible at moving people around when they don't all want to go to the same places, and we have 100% green independent fast people movers aplenty. Other than being underground/in super-tight spaces, there's no reason for people to take any other powered method of travel.

Don't forget that a lot of people are still going to be hung up on using cars, buses, RV's and what not. They're going to need roads to get to wherever they want to go.

Those people would be basically either nostalgic or morons. I know people talk about those who love driving so much they'd never give it up, but I've yet to really run into someone like that as long as they can still go where they want. Most people are pragmatic about transportation and when you give them a vehicle that can take them (and significant personal cargo) anywhere quickly for free I'm sure they'll let the car - and the roads it rides on - rot. Which would take a long time, so it's not like I'd expect them to stop altogether day 1. Municipalities could just readjust their focus: maybe make landing pads and pediestrian paths, but just let roads die off over decades.

[Elheru Aran]

Rail to basically all major cities... sort of. A lot of cities can only be gotten to via fairly circuitous routes. You can't take rail directly from Atlanta to Chicago, for example-- you have to take a train to DC and transfer there. It's something like 20+ hours. By road, it's 11. That's a major time savings. Even more so considering that almost all personal vehicles have been taken out of the equation.

The stuff delivered by train largely doesn't care, and you could probably rail over some of the roads if you really needed the direct routes. But keep in mind - people aren't what we'll be moving by train. Trains are horrible at moving people around when they don't all want to go to the same places, and we have 100% green independent fast people movers aplenty. Other than being underground/in super-tight spaces, there's no reason for people to take any other powered method of travel.

...Yeah, I'm not talking about human transportation so much. I agree, the vast majority of it would shift quickly to the flying cars.

Bulk goods, commercial freight and other large goods still have to be moved, though. We are talking about things like 10,000-pound semi-loads of cotton bales, 20K pounds' worth of mulch, etc.

This is old (2002), but perhaps helpful:

http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita. ... ntire.html

Trucking moved 64 percent of the value, 58 percent of the tonnage, and 32 percent of the ton-miles of the nation's total commercial freight.

The article doesn't make much distinction between the *type* of goods that's being moved. However it's not difficult to deduct that rail is probably responsible for carrying the heaviest goods (further down it says rail carries a quarter of the 'ton-miles' despite only being responsible for ~4% of shipping), such as gravel, coal, ore, metal, etc.

Even if we built more rail tracks (probably going to happen if shipping companies decide to part out smaller loads to all these flying cars laying around), you still have to have some way of moving raw materials around. Building supplies, concrete, etc.

What could happen is that ground vehicles might be redesigned to be more flexible in what terrain they can cover, and that primary road networks are maintained at a certain level in order to facilitate bulk transportation.

[Me2005]

The article doesn't make much distinction between the *type* of goods that's being moved. However it's not difficult to deduct that rail is probably responsible for carrying the heaviest goods (further down it says rail carries a quarter of the 'ton-miles' despite only being responsible for ~4% of shipping), such as gravel, coal, ore, metal, etc.

Even if we built more rail tracks (probably going to happen if shipping companies decide to part out smaller loads to all these flying cars laying around), you still have to have some way of moving raw materials around. Building supplies, concrete, etc.

What could happen is that ground vehicles might be redesigned to be more flexible in what terrain they can cover, and that primary road networks are maintained at a certain level in order to facilitate bulk transportation.

From the image, I'd imagine the flying car-planes being able to do fairly significant load-lifting themselves. Easily on-par with delivery vans and pickup trucks, which can carry most of what any family would use. I'd see most major goods being ferried via car-plane to the nearest distribution center, which would then rail over to wherever it was headed and car-plane again. It might mean that rail expands for awhile while roads contract, so there'd be some overlap. There would probably be multiple trips for some projects vs. the one you could make with a tractor-trailer, but the environmental impact reduced by demolishing all the roads and having zero emissions all the time easily negates that.

If it is the case that these fliers are only really good at people moving and grocery shopping, then there would need to be bulk movement that trains probably couldn't cover as it stands today and roads would remain necessary.

[Elheru Aran]

Yeah, if the fliers have the cargo capacity of, say, a 'maxi van'-- one of those big Chevy Astros or whatever-- which seems sensible looking at the interior layout and general size, I would expect a lot of small cargo to be moved by a small fleet of these. They would be an absolute boon to UPS, FedEx, DHL, and so forth. Large loads, such as say a hardware store's daily delivery of merchandise, would still require something the size of a semi-truck to move all at once, since coordinating the arrival and offloading of several small vehicles versus one large vehicle would take up too much time and effort to really be efficient.

And efficiency is really what it comes down to. There's always going to be stuff that these flying cars can't move due to size, weight, or simple inconvenience. Take building a house; would you rather do five trips to bring all the lumber, concrete, roofing and building supplies you need, or just have the store's delivery semi-trailer bring it all at once? Then consider that on an industrial scale.

There is absolutely no question that these flying cars would be highly convenient personal vehicles (provided you can find somewhere to park them), but ground transportation, at the very least for cargo if not for people, won't be going away anytime soon. Ditto water. I would expect a distinct cultural shift to "most people don't travel on the ground unless they want to see the sights or they aren't going far". There might be a caveat, "or they live in the Big City(TM)", in which case public transportation might simply be more convenient than having to own and park a flying car, and most daily travel might only be for short distances.

Another change might be a certain expansion of services such as Uber, Lyft, and other types of paid rides, becoming seriously competitive with the airlines which would now go nearly obsolete apart from cargo hauling (that pesky 'big loads' issue again).

An important question comes to mind: Did anybody ever say how fast the Geo-Cruiser is? If it can go ~200 MPH, cool... but that still means it takes a few hours to go from one end to the other of your typical state. Across the United States (using Google Maps as a quick guesstimate, from the NC coast to the California coast between Los Angeles and SF) is ~3,000 miles. A family living on the Carolina beach who wants to visit Grandma and Grandpa in California would be flying ~15 hours (not including rest and meal stops). Transoceanic flights would become somewhat of an issue as there aren't exactly rest stops in the middle of the ocean... though I can visualize some enterprising oil-tanker owner fitting out a few of his suddenly unnecessary ships as mobile rest stops... So aircraft might still be utilized for transoceanic and long-distance flights (say New York to Seoul, or Frankfurt to Chicago) for the simple reason that they've got onboard restrooms and kitchens.

But if it can go supersonic (possible, considering that occasionally the Planeteers were going to the other side of the world, and can't take up too much of a 30-minute episode, son) then that changes the equation and would nix a LOT of airlines.

[Me2005]

Large loads, such as say a hardware store's daily delivery of merchandise, would still require something the size of a semi-truck to move all at once, since coordinating the arrival and offloading of several small vehicles versus one large vehicle would take up too much time and effort to really be efficient.

And efficiency is really what it comes down to. There's always going to be stuff that these flying cars can't move due to size, weight, or simple inconvenience. Take building a house; would you rather do five trips to bring all the lumber, concrete, roofing and building supplies you need, or just have the store's delivery semi-trailer bring it all at once?

Here's the rub though: You have a huge number of these things, they're free to operate, and they require no infrastructure. Yes, building a house would be easier/more efficient having one truck deliver the goods (though even now, one truck usually isn't enough), but does the cost outweigh the efficiency?

I mean, we're talking about a world where oil suddenly becomes basically obsolete except for raw materials like plastics, the military, and bulk transport (ships and trains, maybe air cargo). If these are easily serviced, it *should* be easy to take the parked ones and use them as household power stations, making us suddenly 100% solar/battery instead of the current fired generators.

Roads are obsolete for the average individual, and the paths they *might* be interested in certainly can't efficiently carry today's loaded semi long distances. The vehicles you'd need to design would be more akin to the Army's freight trucks, which aren't going to be as efficient as road-based semis.

As I mentioned earlier, regardless of maximum speed these *will* make distribution centers less frequent. You just need a walmart within a reasonable flight distance of every town, not in every neighborhood of that town. It'd be more like the Ikea model than the starbucks model: One superstore conveniently located (and that's really easy to figure using just straight-up range vs. density calculations since there are no roads to clog up now) to the biggest population for about an 1/2 to 1 hour's travel around, adjacent to shipping/rail.

So now the freight company needs to pay specialty stores to fuel specialty trucks for specialist drivers to drive on privately maintained roads or across the open terrain (or everyone needs to agree freight is important enough still to maintain all the roads indefinitely at tremendous cost, roads they don't use for anything special themselves). Will that *still* be as cheap as it is now? *I* doubt it.

And the nail in the coffin - every person has one of these things. I can take my whole family, each in their own flying truck-car, down to the Probuild and buy all the parts for our house and fly them all back if I have to. The cost is just my time for me to do this, and it's possible it's less than that as this vehicle seems pretty self-sustaining (If it isn't self-flying now, someone might easily build an auto pilot for it).

Another change might be a certain expansion of services such as Uber, Lyft, and other types of paid rides, becoming seriously competitive with the airlines which would now go nearly obsolete apart from cargo hauling (that pesky 'big loads' issue again).

This largely depends on the speed (get to that next) but also how automated these things are. Uber and Lyft work because you don't *need* to own a car to use them. If everyone owns a car, there's little need to use Uber or Lyft unless I just don't want to drive, but if these are autonomous, I don't even need that. I just push a button and off I go. Or off my car goes to pick stuff up for me.

Good gravy, a ton of jobs are going to be lost because of these things. Like, all of the auto manufacturing industry, much of the oil & gas & energy industry, probably a big chunk of the raw material industries, the transportation industry, the airline industry... 10's of millions just in the US there.

An important question comes to mind: Did anybody ever say how fast the Geo-Cruiser is? If it can go ~200 MPH, cool... but that still means it takes a few hours to go from one end to the other of your typical state.

Still, that's 3x the time you'd make doing freeway speeds, and there doesn't need to be much reason to ever not go full-tilt unlike on roads, so pretty good.

But if it can go supersonic (possible, considering that occasionally the Planeteers were going to the other side of the world, and can't take up too much of a 30-minute episode, son) then that changes the equation and would nix a LOT of airlines.

Yeah, something tells me this is VERY fast. Maybe not supersonic, but at least as fast as a commercial liner. Nobody takes a Cessna to the other side of the planet, and they apparently use this basically exclusively. If it wasn't as fast as a commercial plane, I'd think they'd have hired one out instead of waiting 30+ hours in flight with no restroom. And it is likely to be supersonic, since they do fly around the world and this thing has no more creature comforts than a typical car.

And if it is only as fast as a commercial liner, you're suddenly talking a reasonable family outing to the store (1/2-1 hr each way) being up to 700 miles. Which, for the US, would basically mean it's not unreasonable to ditch even rail and just have all distribution centers at ports, as people in Nebraska (basically in the center of the US) would have their choice of Chicago and New Orleans to go shopping at. And If they wanted to fly for 2 hours, they could get basically anywhere in the contiguous US.

Which does another thing: I suspect that little touristy towns that are touristy because people from big cities go there instead of somewhere nicer further out die out too. More jobs lost! Oh, and people starving in the 3rd world flood the US and other westernized nations just looking for food. The repercussions of all this are going to be *tremendous*.

[Simon_Jester]

As I mentioned earlier, regardless of maximum speed these *will* make distribution centers less frequent. You just need a walmart within a reasonable flight distance of every town, not in every neighborhood of that town. It'd be more like the Ikea model than the starbucks model: One superstore conveniently located (and that's really easy to figure using just straight-up range vs. density calculations since there are no roads to clog up now) to the biggest population for about an 1/2 to 1 hour's travel around, adjacent to shipping/rail.

It does seem likely that the trend towards bigger, more centralized stores will go another step further down the line. However, you're going to run up against the limitations of crowd control at the store at some point- you cannot afford to have a million people all shopping in the same place simultaneously, unless that place is really big.

So now the freight company needs to pay specialty stores to fuel specialty trucks for specialist drivers to drive on privately maintained roads or across the open terrain (or everyone needs to agree freight is important enough still to maintain all the roads indefinitely at tremendous cost, roads they don't use for anything special themselves). Will that *still* be as cheap as it is now? *I* doubt it.

I don't know; in some ways road use might actually get cheaper. It would be a lot less work to maintain the roads if only trucks drove on them. Traffic jams would be a thing of the past.

Also, note that there is a good argument for keeping bulk cargo in shipping containers you've missed. "Break bulk" shipping in which the large containers are opened up and transferred into smaller vehicles results in very high levels of theft and loss in transport. It's inefficient. Containerized shipping is a boon by comparison, and there's no way the Geo-Cruisers can handle a shipping container, so all the containers have to travel on the land.

An important question comes to mind: Did anybody ever say how fast the Geo-Cruiser is? If it can go ~200 MPH, cool... but that still means it takes a few hours to go from one end to the other of your typical state.

Still, that's 3x the time you'd make doing freeway speeds, and there doesn't need to be much reason to ever not go full-tilt unlike on roads, so pretty good.

But if it can go supersonic (possible, considering that occasionally the Planeteers were going to the other side of the world, and can't take up too much of a 30-minute episode, son) then that changes the equation and would nix a LOT of airlines.

Yeah, something tells me this is VERY fast. Maybe not supersonic, but at least as fast as a commercial liner. Nobody takes a Cessna to the other side of the planet, and they apparently use this basically exclusively. If it wasn't as fast as a commercial plane, I'd think they'd have hired one out instead of waiting 30+ hours in flight with no restroom. And it is likely to be supersonic, since they do fly around the world and this thing has no more creature comforts than a typical car.

And if it is only as fast as a commercial liner, you're suddenly talking a reasonable family outing to the store (1/2-1 hr each way) being up to 700 miles. Which, for the US, would basically mean it's not unreasonable to ditch even rail and just have all distribution centers at ports, as people in Nebraska (basically in the center of the US) would have their choice of Chicago and New Orleans to go shopping at. And If they wanted to fly for 2 hours, they could get basically anywhere in the contiguous US.

True. Rural retail is likely to become a thing of the past. In any densely populated areas there will be quite a bit of retail regardless of location, if only because of the convenience (you can make a lot of money being the only store within ten minutes' flight time of a hundred thousand people). But if you live fifty miles from the nearest city that is now 5-10 minutes in the air, not over an hour on rural highways.

Which does another thing: I suspect that little touristy towns that are touristy because people from big cities go there instead of somewhere nicer further out die out too. More jobs lost! Oh, and people starving in the 3rd world flood the US and other westernized nations just looking for food. The repercussions of all this are going to be *tremendous*.

I don't know. On the one hand people can now go a thousand miles to find a good vacation rather than a hundred. On the other hand, this change has already happened to a large extent. So many people take vacations on a plane that it simply isn't that unusual now to take your vacation anywhere you want within several hours' flying distance.

On the other hand, that makes the prime destinations even more crowded than they already are. And any place that does a decent job of marketing itself can draw tourists from several hundred miles away easily. They don't need a major airport or easy access to major highways. All they have to do is advertise the relative seclusion and privacy and 'undiscovered' nature of their tourist attractions compared to the big names.

[Elheru Aran]

I totally forgot about containerization, but that's an excellent point-- such an efficient and reasonably theft-proof system isn't going to be discarded anytime soon. Certainly it's not used for local transit, but medium and long range? Absolutely.

I would dispute 'reasonable family outing to the store' being a half hour to one hour. Perhaps if you live in a rural area as it is. I think most people (in the US) are used to being ~15 minutes or so from the grocery store of preference. But that's just a nitpick and matter of opinion; I'm probably spoiled from living in reasonably urban areas.

Regarding vacations, I might almost expect it to go the other way-- it's suddenly a lot easier to go *anywhere*. That includes the dinky little towns that are in just the perfect spot for sight-seeing or catching waves or whatever, that might be otherwise inaccessible because they're either a long way from the closest airport or just in a geographically remote location in general. I would expect tourism to become even more of an industry than it is, across the board, now that everybody can fly for practically free.

Speaking of flying though. As a parent... while the notion of flying halfway across the world at a whim sounds pretty appealing... it's not going to happen. Not without a buttload of rest stops. Fact is, anywhere you're travelling with children, you're going to have to make allowances for pee breaks, buying snacks and meals, and all that fun stuff. Hell, even as an adult, that stuff is nice to have. Planes can go nonstop because they're equipped for it. Flying cars... not so much, unless you want to turn them into flying mini-RV's. Which would probably happen quite a bit, actually, if they're roomy enough for it. Obviously the Planeteers have superhuman pee-holding abilities

[FaxModem1]

Or they descend to a safe altitude, open the cockpit and relieve themselves over the ocean between scenes.

[Darth Tanner]

there's no way the Geo-Cruisers can handle a shipping container

That's not a given, some of the screenshots of Geo-Cruisers have them towing via a grappling arm quite large containers of toxic waste a good 50% the size of the vehicle itself. Even if they lack the power to lift a full sized container then they might be able to lift a half container... and if you can automate them into being able to fly a single container at almost no cost but at significant speed to wherever you need it then that would be an excellent reason to switch to smaller containers.

Instead of a cargo tanker taking a month to get 10,000 containers across the Pacific only to have to load them onto rail/truck you could have 110 Geo-Cruisers doing the same movement of cargo but to the end destination.

[FaxModem1]

Would it be feasible to Daisy chain the Geo-cruisers for extended public and cargo transport?

[Me2005]

Would it be feasible to Daisy chain the Geo-cruisers for extended public and cargo transport?

Maybe, but unless you're picking up something bigger with them than one can carry, why do it? Why not just go from your starting point to your ending point, skipping the public pickup/dropoff points altogether?

[FaxModem1]

Would it be feasible to Daisy chain the Geo-cruisers for extended public and cargo transport?

Maybe, but unless you're picking up something bigger with them than one can carry, why do it? Why not just go from your starting point to your ending point, skipping the public pickup/dropoff points altogether?

I was mostly thinking of cargo runs, and shaping it a bit like freight trains, but that probably wouldn't be the best design for the Geo-cruisers.