Chapter 9: Faster pull-bands

The NovelWay Prototype Shop licensed out the pull-cable and Pull-Band commute technology for only a token fee, figuring the faster the system could get Los Angeles up and in business again, so equally would their regular business get going again.

Their reputation grew as creative experts on moving things around by distributing energy via high spoeed moving cables and bands. Their innovation extended into technologies for coupling that high velocity movement to move along much slower objects and vehicles. As the Pull-band commute system expanded, increasing the number of users, the need to deliver much higher energy to the overall system at first involved stronger cables and bands, then high speed became necessary, the kinetic energy stored in the moving bands increased as the square of the velocity, so the same band at three times the volocity could deliver nine times the amount of energy to the movement of people and goods.

Next, magnets attached to the moving bands enabled electrodynamic drag to pull vehicles along without mechanical roller contact with the "graspers."

Permanent magnetic levitation bearings next allowed the magnetic bands to slide along without mechanical contact to anything, enabling higher velocities and efficiencies; the bands were broken up into short segments and the number of them launched down a pathway was in proportion to the system energy demand ongoing, especially useful along hundred-mile straightaways.

The curves of the structure soon required strengthening due to the high centrifugal forces of the high velocity band segment aggragate mass changing direction; then that property was utilized deliberately in the vertical plane to arch the structure over obstacles and canyons.

With mechanical contact elliminated, wear dropped, and reliability was stressed in R&D for awhile, eventually the pathway of the segmented "bands" was enclosed in a hard vacuum, enabling electromagnetic energy coupling through the non-conducting tubing through which they traveled at ever higher velocities, energy losses now less than equivalent long distance electric power transmission wires.