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Hyperloop One Announces Opening of Its First Manufacturing Plant (techcrunch.com) 128

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Hyperloop One is today announcing the opening of its first manufacturing plant. Called Hyperloop One Metalworks, the 105,000 square-foot building in North Las Vegas will be the new professional home of many of the company's 170 employees, including engineers, machinists and welders. These folks will build and test a number of components for the DevLoop, a full-system prototype of the Hyperloop, set for testing in 2017. The project, if successful, promises a half-hour travel time between Stockholm and Helsinki, which is the equivalent of about 300 miles. The company plans to have a working prototype of the Hyperloop by 2017 thanks to this new plant."Hyperloop One Metalworks is the first Hyperloop manufacturing plant in the world," said co-founder and President of Engineering Josh Giegel in a press release. "The ability to have a world-class machine shop in-house gives us an advantage to build rapidly and develop the Hyperloop in real-time."
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Hyperloop One Announces Opening of Its First Manufacturing Plant

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  • by Edis Krad ( 1003934 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2016 @07:51PM (#52595707)
    300 miles = 482 kilometers.
    Incidentally, 482 km in 30 minutes is about 960 km/h. Not bad!
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Which is equivalent to one (1) Stockholm-Helsinki-Distance-Unit. And so we come full circle.

      BTW, it's also 283701 smoots.

    • Hyperloop sounds like snake-oil to me. It will never work with anything remotely like existing technologies. Think about how much heat expansion you'll get on the tubes. That means you'll have to have lots of joints for expansion. Each of these will have to have perfect seals. It will be under 10 tons of pressure per square metre, and any rupture will cause air to rush into the tube at about the speed of sound. Tons of air. Thunderf00t has a takedown video. It is worth watching, just to consider the points
  • by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2016 @07:58PM (#52595755) Homepage Journal
    ....just like the Segway did.
    • ....just like the Segway did.

      It's going to carry mall cops to Cinnabon at 960 km/hr? Saul is not going to like this.

    • ....just like the Segway did.

      Except you could actually build the Segway, and they did. And no, it's didn't change everything, it barely changed anything.

      This hyperloop bullshit is technologically impossible to construct and maintain, let alone protect against the simplest of threats or malfunctions.

      • This hyperloop bullshit is technologically impossible to construct and maintain, let alone protect against the simplest of threats or malfunctions.

        Exactly what they said in 1900 about the airplane...

        • Exactly what they said in 1900 about the airplane...

          A few well-known people at the time scoffed, but the majority of technical people at the time realized it was indeed possible.

          One cool thing about airplanes is that, unlike the hyperbullshitloop, when one of them has a failure, it doesn't kill everyone else in every other plane flying that route.

          The temperature-contraction of the tube issues alone make this unworkable, but don't let physics get in the way of your fantasy. Producing a high vacuum environment in that size of a vessel is also wildly impractica

    • I'm curious how much it will change given it seems like such a ripe terrorism target. I mean think about it, it's a really big evacuated tube that houses an object that moves very fast. I can't help but wonder what kind of hell a well timed explosion could cause.

  • What a coincidence! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I just watched this video debunking the feasibility of the Hyperloop [youtube.com].

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Fwipp ( 1473271 )

      What a trash video. He basically says "um have they considered that you'll be going fast and that crashing is bad?"

      He's not even consistent - he claims in one breath that any crash would breach the outer walls and that repressurization would be catastrophically fast, and in the next that humans couldn't possibly survive until the tube repressurized and would die nearly instantly from being exposed to vacuum.

      He also doesn't really know how anything works and throws in meaningless stats constantly. Like when

      • Have you ever heard of a "fluid hammer"? The mass of the hammer matters there.
        • by Anonymous Coward

          Have you ever heard of a "fluid hammer"? The mass of the hammer matters there.

          Only for incompressible fluids. Not air.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        A crash or compromise of the internal vehicle would expose the occupants to the vacuum, a crash or compromise of the outer shell would cause a rush of atmospheric air at the speed of sound to hit the vehicle. That is to say given you can even plausibly get a vacuum that large. It hasn't been done before and requires a lot of engineering including vacuum seals that don't even exist yet. The current design as marketed doesn't even account for the steel tubes expanding and contracting.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          including vacuum seals that don't even exist yet.

          I've worked on vacuum vessels that sealed a door large enough to drive a car through, yet pumped down to the ultrahigh vacuum regime. The leak rates of those seals is low enough that you could have thousands of them and still be able to pump down to a vacuum good enough to remove air friction, as that is orders of magnitude higher pressure than UHV work. For things that aren't going to open and close on a regular basis, you can just weld things together, which gives a very good seal with well established

      • I think you should see another educating video about effects of near vacuum on thin metal shells [youtube.com]
        • by cdrudge ( 68377 )

          And if you watched the Mythbusters episode where they tried to crush a railcar with a vacuum [thetvaddict.com], you'd see that it was actually pretty difficult for a normal rail car and required them to drop a large block of concrete on the "thin metal shell" to dent it enough to collapse it.

          So all that your video demonstrated was a vessel designed for atmospheric (or higher) pressure isn't suitable for a hard vacuum. Shocking. I guess Hyperloop won't be able to build their track out of old discarded damaged railcar tankers.

  • by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2016 @09:45PM (#52596215)

    Three different people posting the same Youtube link to the same babbling jackass.

    You people do realize that Elon Musk had actual rocket scientists working on the original Hyperloop paper, right? Whether or not Mr. Musk's own physics degree is worth anything or not, the degrees of his employees definitely are, or SpaceX rockets wouldn't fly. They did modeling of vacuum evacuation of the tube. They did modeling of stresses on a basic pylon, using the same software they use to model the stresses on SpaceX rockets. They did modeling of the capsule. The math and engineering have been vetted pretty seriously. At least, the original version.

    Whether or not Hyperloop One's version has enjoyed the same degree of scrutiny by people who have been demonstrated not to drop a decimal place I don't know, but regardless, you can stop linking to the babbling fool.

    The fundamental flaws of Hyperloop are political, not physical. The link proposed between SF and LA will never be built because it would have followed the highway, which would deny the Right People the opportunity to get rich off of real estate speculation, the way the Not Very High Speed Rail project is allowing.

    • More than speculation in real-estate, it would not stop in the middle, further isolating those areas.

    • Elon Musk is entrepreneur in visionary, and his recent [slashdot.org] statements [slashdot.org] makes you reconsider adequacy of his vision.
    • by Kiuas ( 1084567 ) on Thursday July 28, 2016 @05:20AM (#52597619)

      You people do realize that Elon Musk had actual rocket scientists working on the original Hyperloop paper, right? Whether or not Mr. Musk's own physics degree is worth anything or not, the degrees of his employees definitely are, or SpaceX rockets wouldn't fly. They did modeling of vacuum evacuation of the tube. They did modeling of stresses on a basic pylon, using the same software they use to model the stresses on SpaceX rockets. They did modeling of the capsule. The math and engineering have been vetted pretty seriously.

      I think you slightly miss the overall point of the video. The math is one thing, and surely no-one's claiming it's impossible to build a system that works with enough effort, however the real question is whether or not such a system will be worth the advantage, which, as the video explains, will not be much more than an hour cut from the travel time when you take into consideration that the system will likely have to have close to airport-level security anyway.

      The cost calculations they've been showing thus far are vastly understated, they assume no maintenance costs whatsoever, and the costs for the building of the thing are sketchy at best.

      Overall the whole project of HyperLoop One as it's been thus far presented is heavy on hype and light on facts and doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence because of that. For example as mentioned in the video, they currently waive the challenges caused by thermal expansion of by saying they can have a moving tube at the endpoint, that is, that they'll just allow the whole thing to expand few hundred meters and just move the station with it, but it should be obvious that you can't have 600 miles of solid steel tubing without any expansion joints and assume that this thing won't buckle at all and cause issues... I'm no engineer but this still seems very sloppy if they want their project to be taken seriously.

      Simulating these things is one thing since in simulations you can simply assume a working system (ie. a working 600 miles long vacuum-tube), the video is talking about the difficulties of actually building/maintaining such a system using current technology while keeping the costs sensible.

      This is not to say some version of the hyperloop is physically impossible, just that given all the challenges present in actually building and maintaining one, it looks to me at the moment like it's not really worth it.

      As this article well put is: [theverge.com]

      The biggest issues are speed and scale. The Hyperloop was pitched as faster and cheaper than alternatives like cars and trains, but even small shifts in those numbers can dramatically change how it stacks up. It's easy to imagine safety concerns limiting Hyperloop speeds to just a fraction of its theoretical top speed or right-of-way issues keeping stations far from urban centers. Would we still be excited about the Hyperloop if a 30-minute trek became a three-hour one? What if it cost $60 billion instead the promised $6 billion? After enough setbacks, it might not be worth developing the technology at all. Those deployment details are life-or-death issues for the Hyperloop, but as long as the tests are focused on small-scale loops, it's not clear we'll ever get answers to them.

      SpaceX's latest round of tests doesn't seem likely to change that. The test track is only 5 miles, nowhere near the distance it would take to reach 700 miles per hour. Another test track built by Hyperloop Test Technologies will have the same problem, aiming at a 200mph top speed. For the same reason, these test tracks can’t address the unique safety issues that come with near-supersonic travel. The result is just a tube-powered version of conventional transportation tech like maglev and rail. That doesn't mean that useful work can't be done on this round of test tracks, but it means the central question of the Hyperloop — whether it

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The physics are sound but the engineering practicalities may not be. For example, the original design requires air to be actively pumped from in front of the vehicle out the back, because even in low pressure the air resistance is problematic. You can't get much lower air resistance without a much more complicated, and thus expensive and failure prone, tube.

      The issue of the pylons subsiding is also rather severe. On Japanese high speed railways they inspect every metre of track every night, and repair it as

    • The drooling masses of Luddites on Slashdot are probably still claiming that SpaceX's reusable rockets don't exist, or that all the videos of them landing after a launch are faked.

      But you're probably right about the Hyperloop never coming to California, at least not any time soon. They'll probably build a bunch of them in various other countries on the other side of the planet first, and finally, 50 years later, California will decide it wants one after spending a few trillion on a high-speed rail project

  • The fundamental idea was to use air cushion for vactrain [wikipedia.org], which is well known by now. This is just another instance of that. Real news would be if a new principle were to be announced... but hey, maybe will be one of the first instances of this idea :)
  • If I recall corectly, Hyperloop one is building a Maglev train in a vacuum tube, not a "hovercraft" in a low pressure tube. This company should really be called Maglev one, since it is not in fact constructing hyperloops. Nothing new here. I would be curious to hear about the technology behind Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, it seems to me that it's regular hyperloop tech.
  • Is this not the same Hyperloop One that is having massive political infighting right now, with lawsuits being slung back and forth and serious management shenanigans?

    I hope the employees of this factory are getting paid very well for the employment uncertainty they're facing.

  • I don't know from unobtainium, but doesn't it bother anyone else that the Hyperloop is not really a loop?

    A loop is more like a circle than a line, and if you take it in one direction you'll eventually arrive back at your starting point. Everything I've ever heard about the hyperloop just has it running directly from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

    I mean, I guess you could ride it from Los Angeles to San Francisco and then back, but there's a bunch of roads that do the same thing, and we don't call them loops

  • Have they figured out how:

    (1) To make a tube that sags just a few millimeters between pylons? Hint: A 1-inch thick steel tube sags several inches between those pylons.

    (2) How to get people into space suits? Even the Air Force doesn't let pilots, even in wartime, sit in a plane at 70,000 feet without a space suit.

    (3) How to get a common-carrier license, for a vehicle and tube without emergency exits?

    Those are all pretty hard show-stoppers, and they seem to be working on everything but.

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