Between each of the hoops, they're in freefall. Which means that passing the hoop needs to arrest the fall and impart enough upwards velocity to make it to the next hoop (maybe half a second away?)
The effect on the passengers would be a quickly alternating weightlessness followed by a strong kick in the ass. Imagine driving full speed on a bumpy as fuck dirt road.
Even if this design was practical to construct (it's not) and cheaper to operate (it wouldn't be), nobody would want to ride it.
Would this work better, if the "train" were so long that it would always be in contact with at least 2 rings? Also assuming that the rings are passive and the active components would be entirely on the train itself, similar to the Chūō Shinkansen.
Either way, this is even more unrealistic than building a tube in the sky as a continuous guideway aka Hyperloop
At the current moment, for practical applications, I agree.
But at what point does an idea become worth investigating?
Maybe a Sci-Fi screenwriter wants to have a futuristic but theoretically possible transport system between colonies on a moon with low gravity or sth
I swear to almighty God, I could make a post on X right now, linking this image and saying "I think it's noteworthy that this concept was developed back when white men accounted for 99.98 percent of all engineering graduates. In 2024, only about 60 percent of engineering students are white, and SUDDENLY we're hearing that sky magnet donut trains are 'impractical' and 'ludicrous fantasy nonsense.' Is that really a coincidence?"
Annnnd Elon's ketamine-saturated ass would probably straight-up respond with some shit like "Interesting."
Okay, so apart from all the downsides of building electromagnets this massive anywhere near a population centre:
Would a rail gun train like this actually remotely work or is it going to turn the train and everything inside into plasma due to air resistance before you think about how you slow it down again
Provided they can produce enough additional velocity to put the train on a ballistic arc through the next ring, it wouldn't need to go that fast. I imagine it would bounce slowly as it passed through each ring.
That is until there's a stiff crosswind and you're fired at hundreds of miles an hour into an powerfully electrified ring of solid steel. But that won't be a problem for you for long.