15
Tramlines
Just run rails next to the roads, or between movement lanes.
Your vehicle clings to the rail, allowing it to zip along at much higher speed than mere surface traction allows.
This could even allow them to crest a "hill" and not fly off into the distance, which would be a very real problem when gravity is low, speeds are high and the ...
10
Basic limits
Your vehicle is limited by the coefficient of friction between the tyres and the road, multiplied by the normal force. Since both the required force to accelerate and the normal force are proportional to the mass of the vehicle, this works out to be "like Earth, but slower due to the lower gravity". However, that only applies to ...
8
My first idea is a bit facetious, but velcro. Now, having said that, let's create something velcroish.
Let's magnetize the roadway. High power magnets are interwoven into the rubber (or whatever material you're using) of the tires. The roads are built with ferrous tracks. Basically we're holding the car onto the road, allowing for greater speed. EDIT: Or, ...
5
Yes, under the assumption that atmospheric density is kept the same, or increased. Planets with thicker atmospheres and weaker gravity than Earth will harbour more living things capable of flight, as these conditions make it so it takes less force for an flying creature to stay airborne. The largest animal capable of flight known to science was the ...
4
If you are going cross country then you'll want something approximating a dune buggy - which unsurprisingly is pretty much what the lunar rover looks like, which the other answers have noted.
I could imagine a suspension system that could point the axle of any wheel in any direction, under software control, which could proactively retract (raise) a wheel ...
3
Given the information you've provided, there's no way to compute the eccentricity of the orbit; with this setup, it's a free parameter that you can set to whatever you want (although of course we need $e<1$ for a bound orbit). It would be possible to determine if we had some additional information, such as the energy of the planet $E$ and its angular ...
2
Wrong kind of wheels and tyres
If you're going any kind of speed, then baby pushchair wheels are not your friend. They're too thin so they'll snap with any kind of side loading, they have next to no contact area, and they don't roll well over anything but an ideally-smooth surface.
You want motorbike tyres. They're designed to roll well in a straight line, ...
2
Vertical walls on curves
Put a vertical wall on the outside of each curve. The rover keeps the middle outside wheel remaining vertically oriented on the ground and raises the forward and rear legs to the horizontal position so the wheels are running along the wall. Key considerations:
This only works for curves, not intersections, unless you want the ...
2
Modelling of the physics of Suspendium
(note: assuming classical physics ie no quantum or relativistic effects)
Modelling Suspendium as a material that has some quantity associated with it (which I'm calling $s$, i'm also thinking that $s$ is linearly dependant on the mass of the Suspendium (for example $1Kg$ of pure Suspendium have $s=1$, $2Kg$ has $s=2$, …...
1
Larger curve radii and larger braking distance
Being able to control a car at 120 km/h isn't easy in the Earth, either, so we need large highways with smooth slopes, long acceleration lanes and large curves. In the Moon that isn't different, but since friction force is about one sixth of that in Earth, for the same design speed curve radii should be about ...
1
Softer rubber, terestrial automobile tires are a fairly hard rubber that grips poorly.
Using a softer rubber with a higher coefficient of friction would cause faster wear, but with the reduced gravity there will be less load on them. Drag racers use soft tires to get more grip.
Banked corners will help too. see "indy500" and "wall of death&...
1
Maglev
Since you are in a vacuum, and in low gravity, a maglev track needs to spend far less energy to keep the train elevated, and does not need to worry about drag. Additionally in the vacuum environment, you may be able to keep the superconductors cold without excessive effort, so long as they are not attached to anything warm, as the vacuum forms an ...
1
You want the moon to be large enough to have geological activity, so a magnetic field is produced, and an atmosphere can be retained. With a maximum of 1.1 g, one thing I'd suggest is to decrease the density of the planet, so let's decrease it to Mars', or 3933 kg/m^3. That's 71.3% of Earth's density. That way, the planet's radius can be up to 1.54 Earth ...
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