Sounds like science fiction from past times

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Are you building a (brave) new world? Cool. When talking about maximum speed, did you have technical considerations in mind or what the human body can withstand? Mabye both. The human body requires that you put a limit to the acceleration (second time-derivative of position) and jerk (third time-derivative of position).

So, you would start out (from rest) by instantly stepping up the jerk to its maximum value, increasing acceleration linearly. When acceleration reaches its maximum value, you keep it there. After a while, you start to decrease acceleration with the same rate as you increased it in the beginning (the same jerk, though negative) so that when you get halfway, you have zero acceleration. This is exactly what is needed to come to a halt at your destination without exceeding the body's limits – you simply mirror the behaviour of the first half of the journey.

This makes for a smooth (limited jerk) trip without any blackouts (limited acceleration). Of course, I have assumed that the limits to acceleration and jerk are the same in all directions, which might not be true. You might have to adjust it with different values for the first and second part of the journey, or perhaps turn the passengers around somewhere in the middle. I would make a graph of the process, but I'm not sure I know how to upload images. —Bromskloss 13:15, 12 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

Uploading images you make is easy, it's finding a place to put them that's hard.
... and umm, any reason you put this in a subpage of my user talk? O o;;~  freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ  13:37, 12 October 2006 (UTC)Reply
Oh, well, I was at User:Freshgavin/Project where you were asking questions and when I thought I'd say something, I clicked "edit this page", ending up here. —Bromskloss 09:58, 13 October 2006 (UTC)Reply
Whoa! I totally forgot that there was a page behind this talk. Thanks for reminding me. Now I understand what's going on. These were actually questions I was collecting that I would eventually ask on RD, and the information was to be used for some sort of CS project. Haha, I had no idea what you were talking about. I was thinking brave new world? What the fuck!
Anyways, it's just a virtual world, a sort of project in urban design project that could be entirely planned by computer, without any real human intervention other than inputting a few variables (I dunno, population? demographic? location? stuff like that). Some of the questions aren't very well thought out, I was just brainstorming one day. The kind of max speeds I should think would be acceptable should be nowhere near maximum sustainable jerk levels, mainly because they're supposed to be public transportation systems and that's not exactly the most comfortable way to go.
A better question might be "What is the maximum acceleration that the majority of humans can withstand without feeling uncomfortable while standing up?", and now that I think about it, the max speed should probably be just under the speed of sound, assuming that exists and everything.
Most of the questions I want to ask need a lot more thought before I can put them into words. Stuff like "As a way to regular collective community excercise, how long or short would be an ideal, feasible, and reasonable walk-to-work (e.g. walk from home to station, station to workplace) have to be?" or "How far away should the nearest museum be?".  freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ  11:38, 13 October 2006 (UTC)Reply