Transport Expert Insists 'Don't Dismiss Wacky Hyperloop' 385
DavidGilbert99 writes "Since Elon Musk announced the details of Hyperloop earlier this week, we've seen a number of experts debunking the technology involved, but at least one is more upbeat about the possibility of 600MPH train travel. Speaking to Alistair Charlton at IBTimes UK, professor Phil Blythe from the Institute of Engineering and Technology said: 'My gut feeling is, don't dismiss it out of hand just because it sounds a bit wacky,' adding 'You're always going to have long distance travel, and if there was something that could replace air travel between cities and hubs, and is low carbon [with] low energy requirements, it make sense to explore it, it really does.'"
Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a loopy idea, but not fundementally unsound in any way.
Every aspect of it, from the induction motors, to the earthquake proofing to the aerodynamics to the solar power is all well understood.
The difficult bit is really the engineering on a large project and developing all the parts and actually building the thing. I wouldn't trust most people with it and the usual suspects for government contacting would surely make a massice hash of it and cause a 50x budget overrun.
But that's nothing to do with the project per-se. Musk does have the kind of track record showing he can pull off big, complex engineering projects which are generally regarded as difficult and expensive applications of existing tech. Not only pull them off but do them well, quickly and cheaply.
So please, don't bring up arichair engineer objections to the design without first reading that big, long document which covers most of them and actually providing some reasoning.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time you buy a parcel of land the neighboring parcels know they're suddenly worth a fortune to you, because you can't just go around them at 800 mph. You have to stay within safe and comfortable G-force maxima for your passengers, which means no more than gentle changes in routing -- and that means you'll have hundreds of hold-out roadblocks in the midst of your route, refusing to sell unless you can provide them with an instant and very comfortable retirement. And if you can't persuade them to sell... well, somehow you have to find a route around them, and buy even more property to make your new route happen.
And then there's the neighbors whose property you aren't buying who will mire you in lawsuits because they don't want an ugly Hyperloop system at the end of their property.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Land is going to be what kills this project, before it even gets as far as anything technical. How do you acquire the land for the route as a private entity, without eminent domain?
If you had even read the basic media coverage of this, you would know that he is proposing mounting this over the central reservation on freeways, so no land purchasing would be necessary.
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Isn't this supposed to be built in the right-of-way for highways designed for vehicles going at 70mph, but now we have vehicles going 600mph?
Sure, you're not engineering against the traction-value of tires on pavement, but there's going to be some significant discomfort going through those turns.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:4, Insightful)
But when nothing around you changes for hours, it's hard to tell you're going that fast.
Take I-80 coast to coast. The big challenge is staying awake through 1000 miles of corn, but you'll start to appreciate just how much of it we grow.
Travel would be a lot less arduous (Score:3)
Take I-80 coast to coast. The big challenge is staying awake through 1000 miles of corn, but you'll start to appreciate just how much of it we grow.
That's the beauty of 800mph travel. You only have to look at the corn for an hour and fifteen minutes, then you get a change of scenery. New York-Cleaveland-Chicago-KC-Denver would be a nice route to have, with maybe a southern spur St Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, along with a second western route from New Orleans through Houston, San Antonio, Touscon, Pheonix,
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if they were designed for it or not. They happen to be straight enough anyway, bar a very few locations. This simplifies the land grab issue thousands of fold. Given that this is being proposed as an alternative for a rail link that requires a land grab along its entire route, that's a massively simplified problem.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Informative)
A quick look at the freeways between LA and SF shows that they are mostly straight, with only very minor turns occasionally. A quick look shows that there's only two places where the route curves more tightly than the 14km radius turn required to keep under 1g acceleration at 800mph. Both of these locations are close to the end points, where the thing would still be under acceleration anyway, and if you really wanted to run at 800mph through them, there are 14km radius turns available in the area.
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The third dimension is trivial to avoid tight turns in, and even zooming in on the map reveals no significant tight turns that can't be straightened simply by dodging from one side of the road to the other.
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Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would you go anywhere near Santa Clara? The proposal is to go up the I5. And no one claimed there would be no deviation from the freeway, just only minor deviation. If you'd actually read the documentation you'd also see that where you do deviate the issue is far less of an issue than for a conventional railway, because being mid-air, the farmer only has to put up with a few pylons being placed in his field, rather than a 30m wide swath that he can't cross. The bottom line is that it is substantially easier to get this across the country, and requires substantially less land purchasing. Where it does involve land purchasing, it's much easier to convince the owners that it's okay, due to not cutting their land in half, and not taking a large section of it; and it's substantially cheaper because you only need to buy the land to site the pylon bases.
Generally, it's a win all round compared to railways.
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You read the PDF and find out the proposal includes 15.2 miles of tunnel.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Informative)
Why not just look at Elon's PDF, which already has a map with all the radius circles drawn on it?
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Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, after Tesla's second profitable quarter, Mr. Musk's net worth now encompasses the total estimated cost of the passenger-only Hyperloop. He'd have to liquidate everything to pay for it out of pocket, but his net worth number is currently high enough to do it.
But of course, he has no need to do any such foolish thing. When you have $6 billion, you never have to spend any of your own money, because other people are always eager to loan you money for cheap. The only reason Mr. Musk spends his own money is to maintain total control of his companies. He knows that if he allows the various morons with money too much control over his companies, they will fail. There's a reason they want to loan him money, instead of founding new ground-breaking companies themselves. They don't know how to run a ground-breaking company anywhere except right into the ground.
If this was purely an engineering project, it could be done, it would work, and it would make money. But it's not a purely engineering project. The proposed route is I-5. That means getting whole boatloads of state and federal politicians to sign off on the idea. So really, if he has any intention of actually building a Hyperloop 5 years hence, talking about it now might be only barely in time. Politicians are slow. They have to make sure all their best buddies get money out of every deal and they have to be sure their asses are covered at all times. That much ass covering and bribery takes a long time.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Never fails. Smart people looking foolish by their own overconfidence. Yes, we know you're way smarter than the average knucklehead around you. And they have lame brained ideas all the time that you can quickly point out how dumb each idea is. It happens to all of us. But it only works with your local knuckleheads.
So just stop it. At the very least phrase your objection in the form of a question. And realize that the more obvious it seems to you the more likely it is that you are the one overlooking something.
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Land is going to be what kills this project
Yeah thats why I think Musk should look for a way to build the tubes under the surface of the ocean. Tether them from weights with cables, just deep enough to avoid surface movement. Build a standard, modular tube segments. Float them and sink them.
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Did you actually read the original paper? It addresses the land problem.
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It does run along freeways. You're making a false assumption that because something wasn't designed to carry things at 800mph, it can't carry them at that speed. the vast majority of the freeways are dead straight, or involve only very gentle curves. The small areas where the curves are too tight can be shortcut across, which will indeed require a small amount of land grab, but this is being proposed as an alternative to a rail link that would involve a land grab along its entire length, so that's alread
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The tube can go from side to side across the freeway to straighten those out.
Maybe you could try reading the proposal before handing out Armchair Engineer advice.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of repeatedly talking from ignorance, why don't you read Musk's proposal? It covers the use of the highway in detail, showing that there is no problem on the route he proposes.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Land is going to be what kills this project, before it even gets as far as anything technical. How do you acquire the land for the route as a private entity, without eminent domain?
Somehow it didn't seem to be a problem when the railway was being built over Indian lands... *ducks*
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How do you acquire the land for the route as a private entity, without eminent domain?
Didn't he say he was just pushing the idea, not going to implement it himself?
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Land is going to be what kills this project, before it even gets as far as anything technical. How do you acquire the land for the route as a private entity, without eminent domain?
Why would you?
There are 200+ national governments out there. Convince one of them that it makes sense partnering with you. Once the first hyperloop system is built other governments will follow, including the state of California sooner or later, assuming the system is vastly better than high speed rail. Governments are pretty thick but most of them won't turn down an obviously awesome offer that's going to create profits for businesses and jobs for citizens.
It does need to be really good to overcome the inertia of government stupidity coupled with big corporate lobbyism. There is already a maglev system called Transrapid that is somewhat better than HSR in almost every way (50% faster, slightly cheaper to operate, etc), but governments prefer to build steel on rails because it brings profit to several existing large corporations and their many lobbyists, as opposed to bringing profit to just the corporation that owns Transrapid and their (fewer) lobbyists.
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Maglev is only slightly faster than TGV or similar high speed rail, and normal trains, eg freight services can't run on maglev tracks, whereas they can run on LGV tracks.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Interesting)
The Japanese maglev testbed runs at 500km/h regularly, with record speeds of over 550km/h in open running, not in a vacuum tube. Most TGV/HSR/shinkansen fast rail tops out at about 320km/h -- I think there's some Chinese HSR that goes a bit faster on scheduled runs. The planned Tokyo-Nagoya maglev will start operating at 500km/h but they're laying out the track to go faster in the future as the engineering improves. That's not "slightly faster" than TGV.
Freight doesn't run on LGV, or if it does then the operators are crazy. Heavy freight cars would destroy the track which is optimised for high-speed passenger transport and slower freights would collapse the passenger scheduling to the point where delays and cancellations would be frequent, not a good selling point for HSR. I've made a lot of shinkansen trips over the past few years, only once did I end up on a delayed train. The rest arrived and departed on schedule to the second (and I mean that, the second-hand on the platform clock reaches "12" and the train starts moving.)
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Well the fastest Maglev is 581 km/h, on a test track. The fastest TGV is 574.8km/h, on the LGV Est line under test conditions. That's why I say it is only slightly faster.
Freight certainly does run through the Channel Tunnel, which links LGV Nord in France to HS1 in the UK. It is timed to fit around the gaps in the passenger schedule, and overnight when passenger services aren't running. Also, the last 17 km or so of LGV Nord on the way into Paris is regular commuter lines running at slower speeds. The
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The fastest ever car (Thrust SSC) handily beat the top speed of the current fleet of passenger aircraft (since Concorde and the Tu-144 retired). So what? The Japanese maglev test vehicles regularly run at 500km/h plus and its record runs were at 580km/h while carrying passengers in unmodified cars. The TGV's stripped-down racecar no-passenger one-off record was 574km/h, damaging the track and overhead as it went, and the best high-speed rail like the TGV runs at 320-350 km/h. 50% better speed is not "slight
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Not to mention the most heavily over-regulated, eco-nut dominated state in the union.
The protests against it for every reason from noise pollution to the presence of some endangered skink in a ditch on the route will alone prevent this project from ever reaching fruition.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:4, Informative)
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The real trick will be to fight off the lawsuits from all the podunk tow
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ummm.... ever consider underground?
354 miles underground, that's 4 times the length of the longest tunnel in the world (Thirlmere aqueduct), which itself was mainly cut-and-cover.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever considered underneath the ocean? We are talking about connecting cities that are on the coast.
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Ever considered a tunnel through outer space? We are talking about connecting cities that are on Earth's surface.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:4, Informative)
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Musk does have the kind of track record showing he can pull off big, complex engineering projects which are generally regarded as difficult and expensive applications of existing tech. Not only pull them off but do them well, quickly and cheaply.
Citation, please. In particular:
1) What are the "difficult applications" which Musk himself is to be congratulated for? Don't confuse this with e.g. the artificial SpaceX arrangement, where a huge wad of NASA money sponsors experienced engineers who happen to work under the umbrella of a private enterprise merely to suit ideology.
2) What is regarded as "expensive", beyond the usual public-private agreement whereby a big contractor always makes the first hit nearly-free and then spends the rest of eternity m
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Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Informative)
Uh. nope. The passenger-only capsule is 15,000kg and the passenger+vehicle is 26,000kg. The only number close to 3,500lbs in the documents is the 3,500kg weight of the capsule external structure.
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Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Funny)
It is a loopy idea, but not fundementally unsound in any way.
Ah, but that's irrelevant. The underlying plan is to build a prototype, get it panned on Top Gear, and sue them for lots of money.
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It's a sealed railroad at 5 times the maximum speed of a hypertrain. 25 times the kinetic energy, rattling the supports at speeds and over distances that have never been approached by any mechanical ground based vehicle, and completely vulnerable to mechanical failure or flaw at any point along its pth.
The stresses involved and reliability requirements are both an order of magnitude greater than any ground based transport system. Coupled with Not In My Back Yard for this swooshing deathtrap, It Ain't Gonna
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I agree. I often think that if contact lenses hadn't already been invented, armchair theorists would be able to give you a dozen reasons why they couldn't work.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not an armchair engineer, but I am a real scientist. And while I have never seen anything at this scale, I have read a lot of proposals. This one did not set off my general bullshit alarm.
I really, really like that Musk has everyone talking about the Hyperloop and the ancillary discussions of public transportation in general, but there are a couple of details that are glossed over in the big, long document. One is the acceleration/braking by linear induction motors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he seems to jump from idea that they already work in rotary engines and that MVA inverters are already commercialized (in mining equipment and trains) to the conclusion that they therefore will work in the linear configuration shown in the document. The wording there was sneaky.
The second is holding a vacuum, ~0.001 Atm., through the whole tube. Has that ever been demonstrated on such a large scale? He shows some metrics from commercial pumps, but then seems to assume that they will scale constantly with volume... how many pumps? Spaced how? What sort of maintenance requirements? How long to pump down the shunts at stations where modules are loaded/unloaded? Vacuum is non-trivial at commercial scales. Perhaps this sort of thing is commonplace and I have just never seen it (and I have seen vacuum chambers that would accommodate a pickup truck). But it felt to me like he was making a lot of assumptions about how easy it is to work with vacuum at those scales.
Those are both issues that can be demonstrated/prototyped, but it is as naive to say that the proposal was anything more than a whitepaper as it is to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but he seems to jump from idea that they already work in rotary engines and that MVA inverters are already commercialized (in mining equipment and trains) to the conclusion that they therefore will work in the linear configuration shown in the document. The wording there was sneaky.
An acquaintance has a small demo unit made as an (expensive) novelty item sitting on his desk. It's an aluminum pendulum and a 3 phase linear motor (just because, as he says). Runs off a couple AA rechargeable batteries. The pendulum is a disk and can be converted to a balanced disk by removing a weight. Once converted, you flip a switch and instead of going back-and-frth, it can spin up to 20kRPM in about a minute. The configuration is entirely immaterial, it's really a very basic thing, electrodynamically speaking. After you press the brake button, it similarly stops in about 40 seconds, while recharging the batteries.
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:4, Insightful)
There are examples of maintaining a much much harder vacuum on this scale. All particle accelerators, including the LHC, are kept at a hard vacuum. The Large Hadron Collider is 27km long and 3.8 m wide, wider even than the proposed passenger + vehicle version of the Hyperloop. The large tunnel is kept at 10^-6 mbar (9.8 x 10^-10 atmospheres) for months at a time. The beam pipe is kept at "several orders of magnitude better vacuum."[Source [PDF] [cds.cern.ch]] The discussion of the beam pipe vacuum deals with how well the system removes individual hydrogen molecules.
So maintaining an industrial-scale vacuum is a solved problem, to much thinner vacuums than are necessary for Hyperloop. Mr. Musk's log scale plot of the effectiveness of vacuum pumps was intended to show where on that log scale the cost effectiveness of running pumps suddenly falls into a hole, to justify his choice of 0.001 atmospheres. I'm sure some effort and some experimentation would be useful to validate how many pumps set how far apart are needed to maintain the target vacuum, but the mathematical models definitely have exhaustive and detailed physical validation already.
Large scale linear electric motors also already exist and are already used in transportation. Tokyo's Toei Oedo Line is a subway that runs on linear electric motors. All together there are 11 subways in China and Japan running with linear electric motors. They run on wheels though, rather than air repulsion skids.
Both of your objections seem like solved problems to me. What I question is how well any system can be engineered to maintain tunnel smoothness well enough over time that the height of the tunnel floor never deviates by more than 0.5 mm along the length of the suspension skids over decades of operation. I don't know of any existing project that has maintained that degree of smoothness over such a distance. I suspect pylon design is critical to maintaining that smoothness, and the interior of the tunnel would have to be periodically resurfaced.
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Yeah, I kind of hate the response the proposal has gotten, and not because I'm such a huge fan of it that I feel like we *need to* create the hyperloop, but because it shows an underlying shitty attitude that our society had acquired.
When someone proposes a radically different method of solving a problem that may increase efficiency dramatically, we dismiss it out of hand. We don't even bother trying to consider the idea, we just say, "Meh, it's probably dumb and it probably won't work, because if it was
Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score:4, Interesting)
There would be no attendant - what for, you can't walk inside of one anyway. Those are sit-only capsules. You probably can't exit your seat at all.
When it comes to emergency response, the default scenario is to reach the destination if mechanically possible. The whole system is designed to complete the journey of all capsules enroute with no external power and no sunlight - there's a lot of power-smoothing batteries at the accelerator sites. They have enough power not only for propulsion, but also to run all of the other systems, possibly for hours. If there was a local blackout, the stations would likely stay up as if nothing happened, the capsule traffic would merely be halted if there was no sunlight.
If further traver is not mechanically possible (many reasons here), the solution is to (mechanically) brake and crawl to the nearest station or emergency access point. There will be small electric motors and wheels to push you along at a modest pace (say 60mph?). The tube repressurization is a passive thing, so not a big concern - if a capsule signals that the onboard life support is down and the backups are down as well, a bunch of valves open and that's the end of it. Probably the repressurization could also be used as a stand-in for mechanical braking; the air-induced drag would surely stop the capsule rather quickly. A failure of the compressor would do the same thing although probably too slowly, there's storage for gas bearing air such that whatever braking mode is used, the gas bearings wouldn't run dry, so to speak. I'm sure the system would be engineered to behave. That's what engineering is for.
The whole "trapped passengers" issue is I'd think a bit overblown. The major active systems in a capsule are mostly not unlike those on a locomotive and on an airplane: a compressor, an electric motor, control and power electronics, a battery bank. Propulsion is external - the capsule merely has an aluminum stator sticking out from it. Due to low drag, the capsule is coasting without propulsion for 98% of the length of the route. For it to keep coasting, the compressor needs to keep on spinning, and you must have no leaks in the water coolant loops. They're not sure yet to what extent the active tilt control would be used.
The idea is nifty, and it's sorely needed. I think that if nobody else in the western world would pick it up, we'll end up seeing it somewhere in Asia. I'd like to be among the first passengers once it's open to the public :)
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It's quite interesting to analyze what would happen should a bomb be brought into a capsule, and a capsule would explode. It's not clear if a charge small enough to destroy a capsule would be enough to repressurize the tube. Let's not forget that the tube sees a roughly 1 bar overpressure from the outside, the inside is pretty much vacuum when you look at the explosion-scale overpressures. Whatever overpressure is caused by an explosion in the capsule, can really only propagate through the air in the capsul
Indeed ... (Score:4, Interesting)
That project was reported to be both technically and economically feasible despite the handicap of having to tunnel all the way through granite. Apparently the project died for lack of interest and political will to see it through.
So, what people refer to as "Elon Musk's idea" really isn't new and also isn't nearly as wacky as some people seen to think. The thing that Elon Musk seems to be adding is marketing and PR. Perhaps that will make the difference.
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The swissmetro is maglev. Also, I think that Elon Musk's main idea is to implement it in California along highway 5, solving the land problem.
It isn't an abstract invention, but a specific solution.
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I think that Elon Musk's main idea is to implement it in California along highway 5, solving the land problem.
It solves the land problem only if you ignore the end points in San Francisco and L.A. Rail takes you downtown. It anchors and energizes the inner city or it is not doing its job.
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The proposed hyperloop requires an hour of transportation or more at both ends because it doesn't terminate anywhere near SF or LA.
No point to point transportation system ever goes where people want it to. So what? People still use airplanes. People still use trains. Don't kid yourself about the HSR project. It won't go where people want either, and for the exact same reasons.
The energy efficiency is quite reasonable and believable. Vacuum pumps are electrical devices with efficiencies that are very precisely known. Likewise for the linear motors. Likewise for turbofans. Intercoolers have known efficiencies as well. Finally,
There's a big difference between (Score:2)
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A lot of those queries were addressed in the their first conversations with the press. Look them up, there's some really good discussion.
BTW jets are overbooked because it's the best way to maximise the profit on a flight, not because of any underlying logistical issue. An unsold seat is a wasted fraction of a trip, so they overbook to ensure that even if an unusually large number of passengers cancel, the flight will still be full. It'd take only a few extra planes in the air to provide everyone a seat, bu
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Q: What happens in a 600mph crash ?
A: You die anyway, even TGV (train with huge velocity) the rails are shielded by fences along with CCTV and detectors, at such speeds you can only prevent catastrophe with preemptive measures, there is no AFFORDABLE other way, but you also fly by airplane right, and take on that risk ?
Q: How do you elevate?
A: you place them under ground
Q: G-Forces .. r=500m or so
A: www.wikipedia.org calculate how big a circle must be, to put only 2-3 G-s on the body, it's not that big
Q: Li
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Q: How do you elevate?
A: you place them under ground
And if you think it's expensive to elevate it over the highways (proposed idea) just imagine how much it will cost to go underground [wikipedia.org].
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Q: How do you elevate?
A: you place them under ground
Wrong, this is one of the key features here – it's overground, so that it doesn't involve expensive tunnelling, and can have solar cells on top of it to power the thing.
Q: G-Forces .. r=500m or so
A: www.wikipedia.org calculate how big a circle must be, to put only 2-3 G-s on the body, it's not that big
Bear in mind that most humans never experience even 2g acceleration. About the most likely place they are to experience 2g is at a go-kart track, and for most, 45 minutes of that will give them neck ache because their neck muscles are not used to supporting their head under that load. You'd need to keep cornering forces to under 0.5-
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According to their previous comments, it banks during turns so the acceleration felt during cornering is always downwards.
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In planes they avoid the whole issue by using anti-gravity fields.
Re:There's a big difference between (Score:5, Informative)
What do you crash into? There is a big difference between a head-on collision, and merely a slide along the tube without air cushioning. When you're in a tube, the only other thing you can crash into is another train that goes the same way (or has stopped). Since there's no on-board propulsion, there's no scenario in which a train can propulsively overtake and hit a train in the front. It can only happen if the train in the front brakes, and somehow this doesn't get the trains behind it to stop. Very, very unlikely. The braking systems would be entirely passive, so basically if you blow the fuses on all the on-board batteries, the thing mechanically brakes an in entirely passive fashion. Also, for the trains to stay unbraked, they must be in constant communications with the control center. Presumably if the communications are lost for more than a 100ms, the brakes come out.
Oh, and they are not stupid, they did plan the route in detail, with bend radii and speed profiles all included.
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I believe it's spelled moron. But regardless, the whole concept of this system is to keep a consistent flow of traffic a high speeds. Slowing down for turns would break that model and could create congestion. Hence me question.
If its necessary to slow down at specific spots then the traffic pattern can be adjusted to manage this. Hint: closed systems are very easy to model. You get congestion because of changes in the traffic pattern. All other travel systems are subject to weather effect which disrupt the normal operations and generate congestion.
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it wouldn't create any congestion. On roads congestion happens because every single human driver with his pathetic reflexes adds 1s delay.
If the cars are comp controlled and programmed for the same V(x), interval between cars would be constant for each x.
Why all the fuss? (Score:2)
Sure, it sounds fantastic, but isn't this pretty much the same as a system proposed way back in the 50s?
I'm pretty sure I saw that in a reprint of an ancient Popular Mechanic.
(Maybe it was Popular Science, but was that one even being printed in the 50s?)
Besides that, he's not putting any money into it, and he doesn't have blueprints or anything, just an idea. Science Fiction writers do that level of work all the time with new ideas.
On a technical note, what about shifting of the ground, espec
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The earthquake problem can be handled like the Japanese bullet trains, sensor network and automated shutdowns
http://www.railway-technology.com/features/feature122751 [railway-technology.com]
Popular Science (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure I saw that in a reprint of an ancient Popular Mechanic. (Maybe it was Popular Science, but was that one even being printed in the 50s?)
Popular Science in its modern form was first published in 1915. Popular Mechanics, 1902. In its prime, Popular Science published countless projects for the amateur scientist, radio hobbyist, model maker, craftsman and mechanic. along with some very good reporting on sciences, technologies, medicine, the military and so on.
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Popular Mechanics is a different magazine, although they're of a similar vintage. You might enjoy:
http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Popular_Science.html?id=Ok8XtrhowscC&redir_esc=y [google.co.uk]
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Sure, it sounds fantastic, but isn't this pretty much the same as a system proposed way back in the 50s?
Our modern space launchers are "pretty much the same system proposed way back in 1900's" [wikipedia.org]. And I don't see you grumbling about that.
Run it through the ocean (Score:2)
That way land is free and the tube can be made totally standard and mass produced. Anchor it to the sea floor at a depth of 50 meters. That would make it easy to run between LA and SF, and many other routes would become easy too.
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That way land is free and the tube can be made totally standard and mass produced. Anchor it to the sea floor at a depth of 50 meters. That would make it easy to run between LA and SF, and many other routes would become easy too.
Like London to NY, in 5 hours, or LA-Tokyo in under 8.
10% of the capacity of high-speed rail (Score:5, Informative)
An actual transit engineer crunches the numbers here:
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/19848/musks-hyperloop-math-doesnt-add-up/
And finds that while the journey for individuals may be faster, the system as a whole would have one-tenth the capacity (i.e., the ability to move people in numbers) than the planned high-speed rail system. You could solve this problem by building 10 times as many tubes, of course, but that would eliminate the 90% cost savings Musk is touting.
The radically reduced travel times vs. HSR are also deceiving. The maps Musk released show the system travelling from the fringes of the Bay Area to the fringes of the LA area, because it's hard/expensive/impossible to get land for the straightaways you'd need for the project within densely built up urban areas. To get from San Francisco to the hyperloop station, or from the hyperloop station to downtown LA, you'd have to switch to local transit or drive, which will double or triple travel time. Not coincidentally, must of the construction and expense that adds to HSR's very high price tag will come in SF and LA urban areas, since that system goes from downtown to downtown.
Re:10% of the capacity of high-speed rail (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual transit engineer certainly doesn't know how to think outside of the box ... And if you read his credentials, he's not a transit engineer (is there even such a thing?)... He's a civic planner who's been employed in his field for a short 7 years.
He says the headway is essentially restricted by the amount of time it takes for each pod to decelerate to a stop, close an airlock, pressurize the container, open the other airlock, etc ... Then trying to get the old arthritic passenget in/out of the pod in 60 seconds. Even I, a lowly firmware guy, can conceive of a few different ways to handle that. These are not huge obstacles on which to form the basis of analysis and reject the idea.
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What makes you definitely better at handling people and mass transportation system - than a dedicated professional... with 7 fucking years of experience more than you would ever have at planning such things.
Because it's not that fucking hard to come up with solutions to the issues he brings up! Breaking time at .5g (standard acceleration rates) doesn't allow for a car every 30s? No shit, because you don't use the standard breaking rates in an emergency. Loading and unloading takes longer than 60s? Have track switching and multiple loading/unloading platforms. Trains have to stop and go through an airlock? Same solution, track switching and multiple locks. Hell, with the virtually unlimited amounts of po
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That blog fucked up the numbers. They apparently don't understand the difference between "normal breaking" and "emergency breaking."
The capacity of the hyperloop is 25% of high speed rail and one can question how realistic the high speed rail numbers are. Maximum capacity of X is utterly useless if you'll never reach close to it.
Re:10% of the capacity of high-speed rail (Score:5, Interesting)
The maps Musk released show the system travelling from the fringes of the Bay Area to the fringes of the LA area, because it's hard/expensive/impossible to get land for the straightaways you'd need for the project within densely built up urban areas.
Most people in the Bay Area do not live or work in SF. In fact San Jose which is the south end of the Bay Area alone has almost 1 million people (and growing) compared to 800k in San Francisco (and not growing).
Not coincidentally, must of the construction and expense that adds to HSR's very high price tag will come in SF and LA urban areas, since that system goes from downtown to downtown.
That's because HSR needs to go to downtown to be even remotely competitive with airlines and thus viable. It's so much slower than an airplane it just can't be remotely as fast unless you add in all the commuting to station/airport time. The Hyperloop does not. It is as fast as an airplane if not faster. That's from station/airport to station/airport. So it can be just as fast an an airplane destination to destination despite not going to downtown since airports also don't go directly to downtown. If people care later on it can be expanded but initially it can compete on price for example.
Inspiration (Score:2)
There are easier ways to use renewables. (Score:4, Interesting)
Blythe believes the long term success of Hyperloop will lie in its ability to be powered entirely by solar panels. "The compelling argument today is that the energy to run this could be generated from renewable resources, so the energy cost and the CO2 emissions are low - that probably gives it a bit more of an interesting argument whereas 15 years ago we didn't care about stuff like that.
But it far cheaper to electrify a conventional train track. And far cheaper to install just solar panels on top of all highways and rail tracks. In fact if we put a "roof" over all the highways in the northeast and install solar panels on them, the savings in snow removal costs in winter and the electricity generated in summer could pay for the whole project. Putting gables over highways and directing the snow to fall on the sides instead of on the lanes is a far cheaper project than this.
The home construction industry still reeling from the 2008 financial shock could use a shot in the arm. Regular conventional structures, gables and trusses, oriented to face the South, over I-90 between NewYork and Boston. Why not? We shoveled 800 billion dollars to the greedy banksters in just three months in 2008. A steady 10 billion dollar a year to put roof over highways is probably a better idea.
Realistic numbers throw cold water on hyperloop (Score:4, Informative)
Levy is not dismissing it "because it sounds a bit wacky." He's dismissing it because a realistic analysis shows that it is wacky.
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What will he say next week to be in the news ?
Indeed. He's the second coming of Dean Kamen.
Precisely. He's like Dean Kamen, but with hookers and blackjack^W^W^Welectric cars and rockets capable of achieving orbit.
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What will he say next week to be in the news ?
I know. For those of us that go around far exceeding the action of just designing and launching a successful electric car and credible challenge to the established auto-industry and develop and produce space vehicles, including the he first privately funded liquid-fuelled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit, he is all talk.
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What will he say next week to be in the news ?
I know. For those of us that go around far exceeding the action of just designing and launching a successful electric car and credible challenge to the established auto-industry and develop and produce space vehicles, including the he first privately funded liquid-fuelled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit, he is all talk.
but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
Sorry, were we not doing this?
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There, I've saved you the trouble of reading the whole thread!
So why didn't you post that up at the top?
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The difference is that airplane technology did not need a preexisting, massive and massively expensive infrastructure in order to make 5 decades of incremental technological and operational progress.
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Instead they are planning on sinking 10x the amount into high speed rail that won't compete with current airline times and prices. This is as much a call on sense of the high speed rail programme as it is the proposal itself.
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Actually the whole idea is that it is a profitable venture, one that's orders of magnitude cheaper than a conventional rail link over the same distance.
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nuff said
I dunno. Futurama depicts those tubes as having a very tight turn radius. That can't be good for your spine.
Re:OTOH (Score:4, Insightful)
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Read the whitepaper. Musk explicitly states that airline-style security will be used.
Re:OTOH (Score:4, Interesting)
The cheapest way to move people intercity is steel wheel on steel rail. Any transport expert worth his salt should know that. Why, in Japan, Europe, and China, they're already moving people at over 200 mph average. Today.
But if you can ignore practical considerations (like "visionary" businessmen can do) because the people (read governments) are willing to let you externalize costs such as land, hazard insurance, accident clean-up costs, etc. then sure, hyper-my-loop away.
Re:OTOH (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, you have to admit, the current long-distance transport system externalizes the hell out of a lot of effective costs. How much land was condemned to build airports? How much pollution do we basically ignore?
We should extend any future technologies the same courtesy, lest we erect an unjustifed barrier to market entry. Or else impose full cost-bearing on current market holders. In the interests of leveling the playing field, of course.