Maglev vs mesoinfinigearbearings
Suspicion to investigate:
Magnetic bearing may scale less favorably than highly advanced mechanical bearing for really high speeds.
Current tech
With current (2026) technology car wheels and even more so train wheels.
Are already are surprisingly efficient for bearing a speed of 32m/s or more.
(wiki-TODO: Add some math to that.)
Changes with advanced AP tech
By …
– getting the efficiently up even more than train wheels (gemstone metamaterials stiffer than steel)
– adding up speed over several layers to get to overall higher speeds (and perhaps lower speeds per layer)
– adding advanced active cooling
… it may be reasonable to expect that spaceflight relevant speeds in the multi km/s range (hypervelocity range)
may become nondestructively bearable with physical contact bearings rather than magnetic levitation bearings.
Things to be aware of
Note that for AP multi layer bearings from macro down to meso scale
the method of increasing bearing area to decrease friction may not be applicable
due to not yet being in the nanoscale friction regieme where
friction force and power scales with speed and speed squared respectively.
Bearing layer thickness and spacing and geared roller geometry
will likely pose a nontrivial optimization problem.
The bigger the mesoscale layers the more likely conventional wear may become an issue.
There'd still be a need for some initial damage driving it away from atomic precision and/or atomically perfect sealing
this could be initiated by radiation or heat damage, but then it could be self worsening from there.
All still very much unclear.
Maglev in comparison
Despite an interest in mass drivers on the Moon (and other places) and (less so) launch loops,
as of 2026 there is still surprisingly little experimental studies on eddy current losses at really high speeds.
There should be theoretical studies at least. (wiki-TODO: To investigate.)