Meeting notice: 09-15-98; 7:30 pm.

Re: Meeting Place.  I have not been able to drop by
NE-43 to see if the rehab is finished.  Perhaps we
should meet there but be prepared to decamp to the
Royal East (782 Main St. Cambridge; a block down from
Mass Ave., if need be).


Suggested topic:  The effect on NT of changes in
transportation costs.

Sudden changes in transportation costs can have drastic
effects on a society.  For all the changes we have
seen, by and large our age has escaped this particular
destabilizer, the oil embargo of the early 70's aside.
(We see ourselves as being affected more by changes in
cost of communications.)

Nonetheless, there may well be a collapse in
transportation costs over the next few decades as
technologies like VTOL, autonomous navigation, better
materials, and new designs remake the face of aviation.
VTOL will free the industry from the charges, taxes,
and logistical inefficiencies of airports.  Autonomous
navigation will lower the skill barrier and make
possible a suite of much smaller vehicles, with all the
favorable cost implications implied by small sizes.
New materials, such as fullerene and diamond
fiberglasses, will lower the cost of maintenance
dramatically.

All these trends, combined with new designs (such as
large dirigibles), will accelerate the penetration of
aviation into sectors that now make do with surface
transit.  I use the term 'accelerate' because the more
traffic that is moving through the air, the smaller the
user base left to shoulder the costs of maintaining
surface highways (one of the nice things about flight
is that highway maintenance costs tend to be pretty
low); as these costs grow even more transport functions
will take to the air, etc.  I would not be surprised if
the world's stock of usable surface highways were to
shrink steadily during the second half of the 21st
century, until the only highways left were to be found
in recreational theme parks and regions patrolled by
fundamentalist historical societies.

NT is preeminently a system of local manufacture and to
some extent 'competes' with transportation.  It appears
to follow that low transportation costs might retard
the development of NT; on the other hand, it is not
obvious that NT wouldn't benefit from a system in which
it was economical for a single manufacturing center to
supply the world's needs for a given category of
product.

So what are the pros and cons?
                          
Also: I have just returned from a a competitive event
organized around a hobby called 'Remote Controlled Big
Gun Warships'. This is an avocation in which members
pour hundreds of man-hours into building historically
accurate representations of warships laid down in
the first half of the 20th century.  When their models
are complete and functional (down to working guns) they
repair to a nearby lake and try to put each other under
the water.  A nice design gets the accolade 'Pretty
enough to shoot at.'  If there is time and interest I
will tell some war stories.


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