Fibre needs bigger bend radii proportional to the cable size, but they’re still rarely over 15mm diameter cables so you can bend them in like 150mm.

Once you start getting to 11kV MV cables, they do like 2m bend radii.

Yeah, directional thrusting is a thing. It was used a lot when contractors were installing NZ’s new fibre network about a decade ago. I don’t think it’s in as widespread usage for power because power cables tend to have much wider bending radii.

Regular trains don’t run underground. Lots of opencast mines exist .

Basically all mines have an above ground terminal where whatever you mined is unloaded from your underground trains, lifts, haul trucks or whatever else onto storage piles, then loaded onto the actual long distance trains.

If the mine entry is up a mountain, then the trip down from that point will be a net energy producer regardless of anything else.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are electrified railway lines doing the same. Regenerate large amounts of energy into the grid while descending loaded; consume a relatively small amount of energy to haul the empty train back uphill.

If you’re thinking of that CGI crane lifting concrete blocks, it’s unfortunately a really bad idea.

Pumped hydro stores energy by lifting weight uphill, instead. Water is basically the cheapest thing you can get per tonne, and is easy to contain and move.

To store useful amounts of energy using gravity, you need pretty large elevation differences and millions of tonnes of mass to move.

I expect structural life of the tunnels isn’t much longer than the services within them, especially with roads above.

Boring through rock is super slow and expensive, plus now your tunnel needs to be big enough to walk & run machines through, and needs aircon to keep it cool. It is done, but usually only in CBD areas where you need lots of cables and room for future expansion. Google ‘cable tunnel’ and you’ll find lots of examples. Trenching machines go through very expensive consumable digging teeth whereas bucket trucks are just a fancy forklift, burning fuel and needing hydraulic & engine maintenance.

With high voltage cables, the (really thick) insulation gets really expensive, plus you need more conductor (copper/aluminium) because the insulation needs to stay cool. Aerial lines are directly air cooled (better cooling), and can run hotter, because the limit is the metal getting too hot and sagging, not the plastic degrading. Glass insulators are only needed at every tower and can be easily replaced.

Because keeping the conductor small is important, you need to use expensive copper rather than cheap aluminium for cables.

You also need regular joints which are very labour intensive, because they have to be perfect and you can’t make a cable the full length because you can’t ship a drum that big.

If a cable fails, fixing it is much harder than fixing an aerial issue. There was a cable fault in LA in 1989 that took 8 months of round-the-clock work to fix. When a tower falls over (usually because of slope failure or undermining), temporary structures are usually up in a couple of days.

Digging trenches under roads is much more invasive than pulling cables over roads, and rivers are even worse to deal with. It’s very common for underground cables to be converted to overhead when they cross a river before heading back underground.

The Western HVDC Link between Scotland and England was built as an undersea cable because it’s so hard to get planning permission and land rights to do major projects in the UK, as High Speed 2 found out.

Yeah, we have lots of underground services here in NZ. It’s when you start getting to low population densities that you start having trouble doing it.

Plenty of cities have ‘steam tunnels’ used for far more than just steam pipes, and sometimes no steam in there at all. It’s an awesome solution where you have reasonable density, and especially for within a facility/campus.

I don’t think you’re going to see it happen in surburban streets. It’s the tyranny of the car.

I can’t find the exact shot, but I used to have a picture of the 220kV lines parallel to the Desert Road as my desktop background. Something like this:https://johnmathews.smugmug.com/Nov-18-Desert-Road-North-Island/i-CkSm5tK

Underground works well for greenfields construction, where you can map everything out ahead of time and don’t have to deal with existing underground services.

It’s manageable on low-density streets where its really only three waters and maybe some telephone lines.

It’s a nightmare to underground existing infrastructure in dense environments. Underground is already full of three generations of critical comms, corroding gas, water, HV lines that will fail if you look at them wrong, and if you’re really unlucky, steam pipes too.

Still about a 10x cost difference, plus (particularly on transmission lines) there’s issues with extra capacitive loading.

Oh, I mixed up your post. Sorry.

If you’re considering the US federal government (excluding the newly elected carrot…) ‘tyrannical’, what civilisations are you considering not tyrannical? The list has to be very, very small.

None of the definitions of tyranny I see have a restriction on scale. You can be a tyrant ruling a hundred people or a billion. It’s technology (transport, food storage, writing/communication) and geography that limit the size of a tyranny. I’d argue lots of small tribal societies wander into tyranny; it’s just hard to rule over multiple islands when you don’t have writing or metals.

There’s religions in Asia other than Buddhism.

There was rampant cannibalism in Polynesia along with all kinds of infighting. Maori gods have plenty of murder and war in the mythology.

War in Asia goes far wider than just one empire. Imperial Japan were thoroughly tyrannical during WW2, as well as many other conflicts.

Any civilisation that could spare, mobilise, and feed enough people to form an army basically did so, sooner or later. It’s a supply lines and population problem. Small populations can’t raise large armies and send them long distances.

As in coal-powered steam trains? There’s a moderate number in tourist service around the world.

Diesel or electric trains carrying coal are still very common.

Ah, yes. The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train Balrog.

The NASA Vehicle Assembly Building is also a contender.

I’m not sure how many dividing walls there are inside Everett, but the VAB is basically one massive empty skyscraper.

Converting between Kelvin and Celsius is simple addition; converting between Rankine and Fahrenheit is simple addition. Converting between the two groups requires multiplication, and pre calculator, that’s notably harder.

Also, all your kJ/kg/°C or BTU/lb/°F tables and factors are identical when you swap to referencing absolute zero. If you change to the other unit system, all that goes out the window.