Hyperloop Testing Starts Next Year 157
neanderslob writes: In 2013, Elon Musk told us about a theoretical transportation system he'd been thinking about for a while. It was called "hyperloop," and it was a tube-based system capable of sending people and things at speeds of up to 800mph. Now, a company called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies plans to start construction on an actual hyperloop next year. The idea is to build it to serve Quay Valley (a proposed 75,000-resident solar power city in Kings County, California). The project will be paid for with $100 million the company expects to raise through a direct public offering in the third quarter of this year. The track itself will be a 5-mile loop and won't reach anywhere close to the 800mph Musk proposed in his white paper — but it's a start.
Headline/summary discord (Score:1)
Breathless headline: We're testing a Hyperloop next year! It's almost ready to go NOW!!!
Summary: Um, we're still producing CGI and real-estate brochures. You just have to trust us!
Re:Headline/summary discord (Score:5, Funny)
Have we decided whether it will be blue or gold?
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Right, but you have to be a special kind of idiot to think the California Supertrain is a legitimate project to provide effective transportation. It is about sucking out Federal subsidies and the notion that it will ever be viable or economically sound is just foolish.
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It's almost like the Concord verses the 747 again. (Score:5, Insightful)
Meaning the Boeing 747 became extremely popular while the Concord wound up eventually going to the dustbin of history because per passenger-mile, the Boeing 747 was cheaper than the Concord, despite taking much longer to move passengers from New York to London.
And that's the problem I see with the Hyperloop: sure, it may be technically possible to send passengers in a train in a tube with a vacuum at 800 miles per hour from Los Angeles to New York, but at the end of the day, its the cost per passenger mile that matters. And a large airplane traveling along at 500 miles per hour, which doesn't require 3,000 miles of dedicated hardware to travel through, is going to be far cheaper than buying a 3,000 mile strip of land and building a tube. across it.
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And a large airplane traveling along at 500 miles per hour, which doesn't require 3,000 miles of dedicated hardware to travel through, is going to be far cheaper than buying a 3,000 mile strip of land and building a tube. across it.
Depends on how many total passengers over the lifetime.
Re:It's almost like the Concord verses the 747 aga (Score:5, Insightful)
It also depends on the cost of the alternatives. The California Highspeed Rail from SF to LA, currently under construction, is projected to cost $500,000 per seat to build. Even if the ticket prices are heavily subsidized (and they will be) they will have to be very high to recover that expense.
Re:It's almost like the Concord verses the 747 aga (Score:5, Insightful)
$500k actually sounds pretty cheap per seat. Even the lowest estimate of use put forward by critics of the project was 23M passengers/year. To pay for construction in the first year each passenger would need to generate $43 in profit over running costs. Realistically they could charge much less and still turn a profit in a reasonable time.
Japan is currently building a maglev high speed "rail" line between Tokyo and Osaka. 86% of it will be tunnels through extremely challenging terrain. Initial speeds will be 550km/h, rising to around 900km/h in time so somewhat similar to the hyperloop proposal.
The cost in very, very high. Far higher than what the US is paying. It's new technology and it's difficult terrain. The pay-back time is going to be long. Decades before it shows a profit. The thing is, Japan Rail is in it for the long haul. That line will be running indefinitely. The current ones started in 1964, more than 50 years ago. The tickets are reasonably priced and the volume of passengers will be high. It's much, much faster than flying and much, much cheaper. The technology itself is valuable, and will be exported to other countries.
Oh, and pollution is much lower and from flying. It's safer too. There really is very little not to like.
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Perhaps we won't see a 3000 km long hyperloop, but there's plenty of places where a shorter one would fit. I put it in the same league as Maglev [wikipedia.org], which also requires a specialised track.
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Just because it's in TFA doesn't mean it's right. At the same maximum acceleration of a Tesla Model S (1g in "insane" mode), you need 3.6 miles to get up to full hyperloop speed. If you want to take 100 miles to do the same thing, you're talking about 0.04g, which is absurdly slow. That acceleration would give your car a 0 to 60 time of 75 seconds...
There's no need to accelerate that absurdly slow. Cars, airplanes, trains, they all accelerate much faster than that. On the other hand, if their 100 miles incl
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1) No, but you're talking about acceleration rates (if it takes 100 miles to hit full speed) that are half that of a high speed train, despite not needing to carry your motors or power (for acceleration with you). There's no reason to be accelerating that slowly. Aircraft, as you point out, accelerate much faster, and passengers tolerate that just fine.
2) A full system would require that, as would a test track, but the article merely said they needed that much track to get to full speed. It didn't qualify i
Re:It's almost like the Concord verses the 747 aga (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it's the Return on investment (ROI) that matter in business. Or in other word, how many time it'll take to make enough profit to cover the cost of the initial investment. And in this case, the US$9.95 billion California High-Speed Rail is a huge example on how much money you can make on transportation.
If we take Elon Musk word, the ROI of the Hyperloop beat the crap out of any High-Speed Train project. But there's another term really important here, something we call Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL). Basically, this level told how much maturity a technology have reach. While HST is really high, Hyperloop on the other hand have a MRL really low. Meaning that nothing is proven about the real ROI of the Hyperloop and a huge R&D cost is needed to raise the MRL.
What I love about this is that they raised a sort of huge "kickstarter" to cover the cost of the R&D and raise the MRL to give us a real idea on the ROI of the Hyperloop. Only then we'll have an idea if Hyperloop will revolutionize the transport industry or not.
Re:It's almost like the Concord verses the 747 aga (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it's the Return on investment (ROI) that matter in business. Or in other word, how many time it'll take to make enough profit to cover the cost of the initial investment. And in this case, the US$9.95 billion California High-Speed Rail is a huge example on how much money you can make on transportation.
Using the $56 million per km quoted on California High-Speed Rail [wikipedia.org] as the low estimate of how much it would cost to build a hyper loop, the minimum cost across the US would be $56 million per km * 3000 miles * 1.6 km per mile = $270 Billion dollars MINIMUM. That's going to have a hell of a long ROI, and because of that I can't see anyone in their right mind financing such a project in the near future.
Re:It's almost like the Concord verses the 747 aga (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it's the Return on investment (ROI) that matter in business. Or in other word, how many time it'll take to make enough profit to cover the cost of the initial investment. And in this case, the US$9.95 billion California High-Speed Rail is a huge example on how much money you can make on transportation.
Using the $56 million per km quoted on California High-Speed Rail [wikipedia.org] as the low estimate of how much it would cost to build a hyper loop, the minimum cost across the US would be $56 million per km * 3000 miles * 1.6 km per mile = $270 Billion dollars MINIMUM. That's going to have a hell of a long ROI, and because of that I can't see anyone in their right mind financing such a project in the near future.
Did Musk ever propose transcontinental hyperloops? I don't believe he did. As I recall this was always intended as a regional transportation technology, something for distances short enough that air travel is inconvenient because of the airport delays at both ends, but long enough that traditional train travel is too slow.
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Did Musk ever propose transcontinental hyperloops?
No, but the OP did, in an argument comparing planes to hyper loops.
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I hope Elon Musk isn't getting arrogant, with the push into communication satellites, and hyperloop. The size of the hyperloop vehicles, suggests that it will have a lower capacity than a high speed rail line.
But much higher velocity, which can be combined with frequent runs to create high capacity.
If a high speed rail line wanted to, it could run the long, double deck high speed trains from Japan, that can carry ~1,600 passengers, every 3 minutes. Multiple trains could be stuck end to end.
That would provide massive throughput, but higher latency.
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No intercity route in the world needs that kind of capacity. How many passengers per hour will this hyperloop carry at peak capacity?
How much will this yet, unbuilt thing cost?
Air travel between LA and SF metro areas is the busiest air route in the US (and third-busiest in the world), with about 7.7 million passengers annually, or 21,000 per day. Assuming a 12-hour day, the Hyperloop could accommodate this with one 30-passenger capsule every two minutes each way, and the system is designed to quadruple this capacity at rush hour. (one capsule every 30 seconds.) Of course, if the Hyperloop is built, it will generate plenty of its own demand. And of course, it can be modified to c
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No internal organ squishing required.
Wuss.
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$56M doesn't really apply here, even if we were talking about a transcontinental hyper loop. I don't know if you've ever driven across the country, but there is a whole lot of empty space. Building stuff there is significantly cheaper than where stuff already exists.
A 4 lane highway in rural areas costs about $5 million per mile (*). And while a road is not an enclosed vacuum tube, the vacuum tube would be many more times complex to build (and maintain) than the road - for example, there its the infrastructure needed to keep the hyperloop pumped down to its working pressure, as you can be sure that leaks will occur.
But that infrastructure will have to be dispersed across the length of the hyper loop, as a pumping station in LA or NYC will not be able to deal with a le
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I take a lot of that back. Apparently I know fuck all about what a hyper loop actually is. It is not a hard vacuum at all.
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Maybe Musk thinks you can build a tube for less than $1422/inch ?
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I made a mistake about the cost of California High-Speed Rail, it's actually $68.4 billion for a the things as of 2011 estimate. Sorry about this.
Re:It's almost like the Concord verses the 747 aga (Score:5, Funny)
I the cost of California High-Speed Rail, it's actually $68.4 billion for a the things as of 2011 estimate
As far as I can make out, the Hyperloop is a High Speed Railway inside a tube that structurally can take a vacuum. Plus things like airlocks to get in and out, and some very clever safety measures to allow people to escape in an emergency.
Yes, that has got to be cheaper than just a High Speed Railway, hasn't it?
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Yes, that has got to be cheaper than just a High Speed Railway, hasn't it?
Is CHSR a government project?
In which, yes, it probably will be a lot cheaper.
Yeah, that's right, satire!
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Sure, because the cost of materials has little to do with the cost of building a highspeed railway. You've got a mighty wide right of way, and you need to buy a huge amount of land for that, plus there's a ton of labour to prepare that right of way, clearing it of all obstacles, leveling the terrain, installing the track, the filler, etc.
The hyperloop could theoretically end up cheaper because it requires a smaller right of way with much less labour to install. The cost of materials would be higher, but the
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Sure, because the cost of materials has little to do with the cost of building a highspeed railway. You've got a mighty wide right of way, and you need to buy a huge amount of land for that, plus there's a ton of labour to prepare that right of way, clearing it of all obstacles, leveling the terrain, installing the track, the filler, etc.
Well, I don't know about the USA, but in the UK there is no way that you could put a tube on stilts above some-one's land (let alone buildings) without buying it off them, or paying a significant rental for the wayleave, as it is called. Even the latter would only be acceptable if the land use was not residential.
Again in the UK, when railways were first built, in cities a lot of them were built on arched viaducts (in South London particularly) so that the arches could be rented as workshops and warehou
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High-speed rail requires a 100-foot wide right of way for double tracks. It's not just about building over things, it's about not requiring the very wide right-of-way that high-speed rail requires.
Re:It's almost like the Concord verses the 747 aga (Score:4, Interesting)
High speed railway is *phenomenally* expensive. It requires massive earthworks because of the very limited turning radius and limited climb angle of high speed trains. It requires very specialised rails that have to be laid under very high tension and welded so that the result is seamless and can withstand large temperature variations. It's also much more expensive to ballast because normal ballast doesn't cusion things well above certain speeds and turns into nasty pebbles instead of spikey lumps of rock. The result is big and heavy which means it needs its own strip of dedicated land. Finally, the air resistance for high speed rail grows quickly. On the very high speed test trains it gets comparable to aircraft. Despite having a smaller frontal area per passenger mile, the trains go fast in the thick lower atmosphere. The costs of those things add up a lot.
The hyperloop system claims to solve some of them and long, large airtight pipes are also well established technology in the oil industry for pipelines.
Whether or not the hyperloop claims are valid, I don't know, but it's not as wild as it first seems.
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High speed railway .... requires massive earthworks because of the very limited turning radius and limited climb angle of high speed trains.
Obviously you don't know much about railways or dynamics. High speed trains can take much steeper gradiants than lower speed ones, partly because they are so powerful (have to be, for the speed) and partly because their momentum takes them up with little effect on speed (kinetic energy relates to the speed squared). The new lines built for the French TVGs have such gradients, following the natural land contours, that some passengers complain of the up-and-down feeling - like you get with hump bridges on t
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Actually, high speed rail can climb much better than regular trains.
Why? Both types should be limited to the friction between the driving wheels and the tracks. You can put a motor in every carriage, but regular trains often have that as well. Where is the advantage for high speed rail?
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'the Hyperloop is a High Speed Railway"
Nope. Rail is heavy and thus mostly must reside on the ground
There are things called viaducts and tunnels. A lot of modern high speed lines are built with one or the other. Japan's in particular are largely elevated, and much of the UK Channel Tunnel link line through south east England is in tunnel. And if the railway (sorry "non-railway Hyperloop" if you picky about semantics) is not "heavy" it will not be carrying many people, an equivalent to Concorde in the airline world; as such it won't be solving many people's transport problems.
and thus cuts everything in half along its path
There are things called bri
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The usual way to determine if a project is making money is to subtract operating costs and the amortized portion of construction costs from operating revenue - and to date the unbuilt California High-Speed Rail system has precisely zero operating revenue. It's projected to make money (according to it's backers), but projections aren't revenue.
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The usual way to determine if a project is making money...
Government projects are the only enterprises less subject to the ordinary methods of determining profit than tech startups.
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What I'm interested in about the hyperloop is that unlike airplanes, high speed rail and traditional tube is that in the concept you'll have 6-8 passengers/capsule and 3 capsules/train = 18-24 passengers/train, which hopefully means you can have many more dedicated routes and/or a mix of long-hop/short-hop routes using the same infrastructure that'll serve the whole 3000 miles and not just the endpoints.
Around here the train is used for a lot of regional travel instead of bus, shorter than airplane and ever
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Branching would be really tricky, but there's no physical barriers. Note that even Musk's proposal isn't as far as you can take the concept. If you fill the tube with very low pressure water vapor instead of very low pressure air (via more pumping to overwhelm leaks, plus water vapor injection), your top speed jumps 40%. Fill it with hydrogen and it jumps 300% (normally hydrogen is a real pain to work with due to flammability, embrittlement, etc, but the densities in question are so low that such issues ar
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Branching would be really tricky, but there's no physical barriers.
I wasn't talking about branching at (full) speed, just how effectively you can insert/extract trains from the loop though I suppose low speed exit/merge tubes could be built. Say you have stations 1-5 connecting two major cities with suburbs at 2-4, could you effectively have a schedule like:
1-5 express
1-5 express
1-5 express
1-5 express
1-4, same time 4-5
1-3, same time 3-5 (and maybe 3-4 local following)
1-2, same time 2-5 (and maybe 2-3 local following)
(pause long enough for train to get out of way at station
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For any given leg of the journey you probably want all the trains traveling at the same speed, as set by the long-haul trains - there's no passing lane in the tubes after all, and a train going 800+mph covers an awful lot of ground in 30s. If you want to make a 15 minute trip by 200mph train, you've just backed up the 800mph trains for an hour. So any switching would have to be at roughly full speed - once on a side loop you could then do whatever you want of course. And the linear accelerators are likel
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The hyperloop uses low pressure air because the design assumes there will always be lots of leaks, which can be overcome by the pumps. Air will always be leaking in, so you just pump it back out. And because it's not a vacuum, the pumps aren't as insane as they'd need to be to maintain a hard vacuum.
As soon as you start talking about putting anything but air in the thing, then that whole idea goes out the window, you now need to go from "mostly airtight" to "completely and utterly airtight", and everything
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The hyperloop uses low pressure air because the design assumes there will always be lots of leaks, which can be overcome by the pumps. Air will always be leaking in, so you just pump it back out. And because it's not a vacuum, the pumps aren't as insane as they'd need to be to maintain a hard vacuum.
As soon as you start talking about putting anything but air in the thing, then that whole idea goes out the window, you now need to go from "mostly airtight" to "completely and utterly airtight", and everything gets incredibly difficult.
You could do a mixture of air with other gases, and gain many of the advantages while still avoiding a hard air vacuum. For instance, 50Pa air + 50Pa water vapor, or even 50Pa air + 50Pa H2. A promising approach would be for the capsules to store on board some of the air they're compressing anyway, to help maintain the tube pressure. The alternate gases could even be added as part of the cooling system; if liquid nitrogen or liquid hydrogen were injected directly into the compressed air stream to cool it, i
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Another design constraint of
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The main advantage to hydrogen would be overcoming the Kantrowitz choking effect caused by supersonic flow;
Yes, understood, and any design choice that further lowers the density of gas in the tube requires more compressor work for the air bearings, which require a fixed mass per second flow.
I don't think that's right. The air bearings function based on pressure, not mass density. 50Pa air + 50Pa H2 would keep the overall tube pressure the same, so the compressors' job wouldn't change. In fact, since the H2 (in my proposed design) would be injected into the ski air stream post-compression, the compressors would have less work to do, not more. The required mass flow to the skis using an air/H2 mix would actually be substantially less than in the Alpha proposal. Again, the pressure is what's impo
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Not only that, but if your craft is travelling four times as fast, you're sweeping through four times as much gas per unit time to compress under the skis.
Hydrogen has all sorts of advantages. And the very low pressures prevent most of the negatives. The only one that I don't know about and would require testing would be what sort of reaction would one see as a craft moves past, with any residual oxygen. If I had to guess, I'd guess that you will get some combustion, but the craft moves past so fast and the
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First off, if servicing that requires full de/repressurization is some sort of frequent event, then the whole concept is doomed for reasons entirely unrelated to anything in this discussion. Secondly, 1/5 ton of hydrogen at industrial rates is about $200. Whoop-di-doodle-doo. And the advantage is being able to travel at mach freaking 4, not about the reduction of drag at a given speed (which is, FYI, true also).
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And the advantage [of hydrogen] is being able to travel at mach freaking 4, not about the reduction of drag at a given speed (which is, FYI, true also).
Making the Hyperloop go that fast would require an impossibly straight and level track. Even at the Hyperloop's current design speed (Mach 0.99), the maximum allowable vertical sag of the tube between 30m-spaced pillars is only about 5cm. Any more than that, and the air ski suspension won't be able to compensate and the capsule will start skipping and bouncing. At Mach 3-4, the tube couldn't sag more than a few millimeters between pylons before overwhelming the suspension. So for the foreseeable future, the
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As someone else already mentioned, it uses low pressure air because the "trains" are ground-effect aircraft, not maglev. They need air.
Secondly, the pumping budget to overcome leaks is so small, both in terms of capital and ongoing costs, that you could increase them by an order of magnitude and not have any sort of practical effect on the budget. Whatever factor you increase over the baseline increases the factor you can replace air by. You don't need 100%.
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Branching would be really tricky, but there's no physical barriers. Note that even Musk's proposal isn't as far as you can take the concept. If you fill the tube with very low pressure water vapor instead of very low pressure air (via more pumping to overwhelm leaks, plus water vapor injection), your top speed jumps 40%. Fill it with hydrogen and it jumps 300% (normally hydrogen is a real pain to work with due to flammability, embrittlement, etc, but the densities in question are so low that such issues are mostly avoided). So we're talking the potential for hyperloop "speedways" for long distance runs that could blow airplanes out of the water.
Branching at full speed is probably not possible with the Hyperloop as designed; the skis are curved to match the diameter of the tube, with a ~1mm clearance with the tube surface, so there is no passive tube design that could accommodate a "switch". In order to continue from Section A to either Section B or Section C, you'd have to make an intermediate length of tube several hundred meters long that could be physically moved at one end from B to C, with sub-millimeter precision, with the entire thing enclo
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Wait, meaning that while it's
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Well, there are physical barriers to a static design that allows branching. Actively moving an entire section of tube to reconnect it to a new one is sort of a brute-force approach, and highly unlikely that it would be worth the complexity and risk, in my opinion at least.
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That kind of deceleration assumes an instantaneous transition from 100 to 100000 Pa, which is not possible absent total destruction of the tube immediately prior to a pod at cruise, in which case deceleration due to air is moot. Otherwise the pressure in a 381 mile long tube must rise gradually.
Ok, let's look at an emergency scenario where a capsule (not the tube) undergoes rapid depressurization. To save the passengers, the ambient pressure in the entire tube must quickly (within a few seconds) be brought up to levels at which oxygen masks will function; about 20kPa. This can be done by flooding the tube with air evenly along its length; no tube destruction required. The question is whether a 20kPa tube atmosphere would impose problematic aerobraking forces on the capsules. At 700mph, you'd proba
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What sort of claim is that? Since when do oxygen masks need 20kPa to function? And secondly, if there's "problematic loading on the capsules" from too much pressure on the pressure-compromised capsule, then your pressure is also way too high inside. Which means that you've repressurized the tube way too much. So the solution is: Don't do that!
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Most people will black out if the oxygen partial pressure drops below about 14kPa. A highly conditioned athlete or acclimatized mountain climber could stay conscious with 10kPa for a short time. 7kPa O2 is equivalent to the summit of Everest without
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zblockquote>See: Cabin_Pressurization [wikipedia.org]
A person needs at least 20kPa *from the mask to breathe*. Not 20kPa *ambient pressure*. Please learn to read.
Aerodynamic loading = pressure. If you have high loadings, you have high pressures. Period.
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The mask pressure must match the ambient pressure, or else the wearer's lungs will rupture (unless they're wearing an enclosed pressure suit). Please learn physics. Again, this is the reason for the 40,000ft flight ceiling for commercial aircraft; oxygen masks rapidly lose their effectiveness with an ambient pressure below 0.2atm, which is why pressure suits are required for pilots flying at highe
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Well, construction costs should be lower than rail thanks to pylon's dramatic reduction in necessary ground preparation per mile, and the technical simplicity (it's just a big, airtight pipe after all), and it should be dramatically faster than commercial planes, as well as being much cheaper to operate. Bigger up-front costs, but only minor operating costs, and the operating costs are the vast majority of the expense of airplanes.
It is still very much a "point to point" transportation system, which does l
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And you have a background in Civil Engineering that lets you understand this? Or are you just hand-waving like Mr. Musk and saying "somehow it'll be cheaper"?
how do you figure? You think keeping hundreds of miles of tubing is really going to be cheap? Go look at a highway budget
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The ground-preparation benefits of raised roadways have been known for decades, nothing special there. The problems are (1) making a system that interfaces smoothly with ground-level transportation, and (2) minimizing the amount of construction necessary for the spans. The Russians(?) even did some interesting work way back on a system of paired concrete-encased cables that tireless cars could drive along - far cheaper than roadways per mile, and wonderfully suited to rough terrain. But who wants to drive
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unlike airplanes, high speed rail and traditional tube is that in the concept you'll have... 18-24 passengers/train, which hopefully means you can have many more dedicated routes and/or a mix of long-hop/short-hop routes using the same infrastructure that'll serve the whole 3000 miles and not just the endpoints. ........It's a lot easier to find 20 passengers going somewhere at the same time than 400-800 so that could be a major game changer if the technology works out.
But then you will need to wait around until 19 other passengers turn up who want to make the same journey as yourself. Also, running trains of such low capacity severely limits the total capacity of the line (and hence the payback) because the trains must be kept a minimum distance from each other (at least the braking distance).
Trouble with mixing long-hop and short-hop on rail (we call them main-and-local or fast-and-slow in the UK) is that the local train stopping holds up the "fast" train behind, so
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Concord is a grape. Concorde is a plane. Concordes was a Montréal football team. Get it right, nerd.
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I just cannot see how a large tube holding a vacuum extending 100 miles or 300 miles or 500 miles or 2,800 miles is ever going to be cheaper than a rail track the same length (assuming right of way problems can be solved--and note the high speed rail system between SF and LA had to be slowed down because right-of-way issues put too many curves in the track) is ever going to be cheaper per passenger mile. And if it turned out per passenger mile a train was cheaper (without government subsidies) than flying a
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As for your inability to see how a tube could be cheaper than a rail track, you can always just read the proposal [teslamotors.com]. The hyperloop was specifically suggested as an alternative to an existing rail p
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Rail needs an extremely expensive foundation, and right-of-ways. Hyperloop requires occasional pylons, radically reducing the ground-level expense. And it's not like the tubes themselves are high-tech, it's just a bunch of sturdy, reasonably airtight tubes - size large urban water pipe would probably do the job fine with a little cable suspension to support the lengths between pylons.
Re:It's almost like the Concord verses the 747 aga (Score:4, Informative)
The HyperLoop Elon proposed was estimated to cost 1/10th of the LA-SF CHSR project, but it only had 1/10th of the capacity.
Unlike the CHSR project, the proposed HyperLoop project actually only connected the outskirts of LA to the Oakland bay, leaving out the expensive part of going to downtown LA and downtown SF.
The estimated HyperLoop projects assumed they save on expropriations by placing the track elevated over existing highways.
But to travel at 800 mph without making your passengers sick and barfing, the route actually needs curves to be 16 times as smooth as the 200 mph CHSR.
The estimated HyperLoop costs were low by an order of magnitude even when comparing to known costs of elevated track and even of oil pipelines. Let's not even talk about the actual precision needed to make this work at 800 mph.
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But to travel at 800 mph without making your passengers sick and barfing, the route actually needs curves to be 16 times as smooth as the 200 mph CHSR.
You can save some by using tilting trains: they can go around much tighter curves at speed than regular trains with a low barf-factor.
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You can also tilt the track, canting in railway terms.
Canting in normal railway lines is limited due to the need to handle slow trains, but on high speed rail it's often allowed to be higher.
That's why it's uncommon to use tilting trains above 250 km/h: it's usually preferable to tilt the track than to increase the weight of trains by adding tilting systems.
Though the Japanese have some.
That said, "much" is a relative statement, Whether you tilt the train floor or the track the accelerations experienced by
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But to travel at 800 mph without making your passengers sick and barfing, the route actually needs curves to be 16 times as smooth as the 200 mph CHSR.
The Hyperloop will bank freely like a bobsled; the passengers will experience virtually no lateral acceleration. (The same is true of an airplane in a tight bank.) This will make the ride far less barf-inducing. The lack of turbulence will also help greatly.
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As I wrote in the another post[1], you need to limit both lateral and vertical accelerations, which puts constrains on how much you can get from banking.
Eg, if you bank almost 90, the passengers will experience no lateral acceleration, but they will experience vertical acceleration, for which tolerance is even lower.
At 800 mph, even the sloping the line up/down will be a problem.
This is all well understood and researched, as it's a massive and expensive problem for all modes of transportation that go at lea
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But to travel at 800 mph without making your passengers sick and barfing, the route actually needs curves to be 16 times as smooth as the 200 mph CHSR.
Some critics of the Hyperloop concept have focused on the possibly unpleasant and frightening experience of riding in a narrow sealed, windowless capsule, inside a sealed steel tunnel, that is subjected to significant acceleration forces, high noise levels due to air being compressed and ducted around the capsule at near-sonic speeds, and the vibration and jostling created as the capsule shoots through a tube that is not perfectly smooth or level.[25] Even if the tube is smooth upon construction, ground sh
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Re: It's almost like the Concord verses the 747 ag (Score:1)
Only an American could up with this arrogant bullshit. Concorde was stopped because it exploded a couple times and the public lost faith in it, besides being banned from using most routes because of the sonic boom it produced. Does your education teach you about anything except the USA is (supposedly) number one at everything, it's pathetic.
This isn't new (Score:2, Interesting)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I had a toy that back in the late 70's that was essentially the same thing.
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The new part is actually building it and trying it out.
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Are you under the misconception that hyperloop is a pneumatic tube system?
Hyperloop is a magnetically-accelerated a ground-effect aircraft operating in the sort of extremely rarified air normally only found at high altitudes. The tube's purpose is to provide such a rarified atmosphere near the ground. It's not a pneumatic train. It's not a vactrain. It's not maglev. It's a ground-effect aircraft.
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So, it's a Hamster Habitrail with magnets?
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I thought it was really cool in 1970 when I saw it in Popular Mechanics.
This will put Quay Valley on the Map (Score:4, Funny)
It's not a test track. Like, really. (Score:3)
Instead, this first prototype will test and tweak practical elements like station setup, boarding procedures, and pod design. [...] It’s also a way to prove that yes, this thing can be built.
Way to contradict yourself... Twice. Emphasis mine.
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What he means is that even though it's a prototype he's still going to charge passengers to ride it.
Soon to be replaced with the infinite loop (Score:2)
Sad fact is it will see many bullet holes (Score:2)
Allowing the air pressure to equalize inside, or am I just a pessimist...
While remote and nothing like along side I5, the Alyeska pipeline sees many. These are the search results for: rifle shots in alyeska pipeline http://preview.tinyurl.com/mtu... [tinyurl.com]
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Fortunately, a vacuum spill is much easier to clean up than an oil spill.
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Musk brand suicide booths have a much higher average user rating than Obamacare suicide booths.
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Technically, yes, with the caveat that you'd need regular floating reboost platforms with significant power generation scattered all throughout the Pacific, and of course maintaining the track perfectly straight while floating (one presumes at a fixed depth under the water) provides its own engineering challenges. But room-temperature rarified hydrogen instead of rarified air would allow one to make the journey at about Mach 4. Faster if it's hot hydrogen.
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Tunnels? I thought the Hyperloop concept was to suspend the tubes between pylons so that it would cost only a fraction of even normal rail to construct, with comparatively minimal required ground preparation or interference with ground-level construction.
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The problem with maglev is it's *expensive* - every mile of rail needs not only a better-than-normal-rail foundation to survive the stresses of high-speed transit (maglev only eliminates the high-frequency vibrations), but also a "track" of either extremely powerful permanent magnets, or an active maglev system. And reliabilty must be *extremely* high, since losing power for even a second means your high-speed train is going to cease to levitate and tear up a goodly length of expensive track, in addition t
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No, putting track on pylons even for normal trains is quite expensive. That alone will cost tens of billions of dollars using existing elevated rails in California as comparison. Then there is cost of this magic piple, oil pipelines cost $5M to 6M per mile and they are MUCH narrower than hyperloops. So real cost will be over $100 billion, Musk is off by more than order of magnitude.
Re:proposed hyperloop goes to proposed city (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:proposed hyperloop goes to proposed city (Score:4, Insightful)
"The Hyperloop infrastructure needs to support about 1/10th the weight per meter as traditional rail, therefore it can be done with 1/10th the materials." No, doesn't work that way. The supports would need to anchor something that can't even be allowed to move a millimeter lest the passengers be jarred to death.
Vacuum tubes of miles in length, smooth to extremely high tolerances, will be far more expensive than oil pipes.
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