Track Telemetry

Though the track will move gigawatts of rotor power to the vehicle sled, with some zero-crossing switching, the power will move at sub-megahertz frequencies with little switching noise. Very little of the power will be in the millimeter-wave bands.

This means that the track and sled can robustly exchange milliwatts of near-field >10GHz communication power and move Gbps data while doing so, perhaps 20 channels per sled-length. If a communication zone is 25 cm long, the sled moves at 10 km/s, and active transmission occurs while the sled moves 10 cm, A 10 microsecond burst at 10 Gbps moves 100 kbits. 40,000 bursts per second over 20 channels is 10 gigabytes per second, - per sled! This is WAY more information than the loop needs for characterization and calibration. If a sled spends 500 seconds on the track end to end, it can collect 5 terabytes of data in a few grams of flash memory.

The loop track will also have multiple longitudinal optical fibers, as well as bidirectional communication and micrometer-accurate radar ranging to multiple server sky arrays orbiting 7000 km overhead.

All that communication won't enable the physically impossible, but it will enable information-rich global control schemes that measure and calculate positions with micrometer/nanosecond accuracy. Will it be robustly stable and failure-tolerant? Still struggling with the math.