I'm writing a story, and I'm trying to figure out whether a hovering town would actually be possibleI'm thinking of a group of lightweight buildings (made of materials such as wood, paper, spiderweb and a other light construction materials - 50 tons was the average weight of each building) attached by wooden/rope bridges.What kind of machine could keep 50 tons in the air?
a bridge connects two places together, usually land over water, a switch turns things on and off and a router is a box that connects you to the internet
Strictly speaking, a router is a box that implements internet routing, usually using e.g .BGPIf you have a network with multiple paths, like to the internet, to your branch offices, a redundant path to the internet, you need a router to decide which piece of wire to send the packets down, based on the address prefix e.g192.168 may go to the local network, 10.3 to one branch, 10.4 to another and everything else to the internetVery few people actually need one, as they just have one default route for everything via their ISPA home router is actually a DHCP/NAT box that does address translation and usually only has one routeA switch is a device to connect bits of a local area network togetherIt is different from a hub in that it only passes ethernet frames to ports that request them, rather than to all portsIt operates at a lower level than a routerYou would use multiple switches to build a large local network A bridge is a switch with only 2 ports See products by Cisco, Juniper, Nortel etc.
Ummm - not quite the answer in a networking sense A bridge can be either software or hardwareWhen used in software, the term bridge means to connect two communications ports together - bridge eth0 to eth1 In hardware a bridge connects two parts of a network using a different protocol- a wireless bridge sends/receives data from a base station using WIFI and resends it on to a connected device via Ethernet A switch is used to connect multiple devices to a single networkAll devices plugged into a network swicth share the same subnetA router connects a subnet to a higher level networkYour home LAN is a subnetA router allows that subnet to connect to the ISP's network (aka The Internet)
The real challenge for your floating town is to supply enough energy to it to keep it afloatYou basically need a way to get 50 tons of lift for each building continuously 24 hours a dayYou might need like a whole bunch of power plants to keep it afloatThe other minor challenge you face is strength of your paper and spiderweb buildingsHey its a storyThe machine just contains a cold fusion nuclear reactor that makes enough energy to keep this baby afloat! Sorry, no existing technology.
