SpaceX Is Livestreaming A Hyperloop Pod Competition (spacex.com) 93
SpaceX is livestreaming a competition between hyperloop pods from outside their headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and at least one Los Angeles newspaper is also covering the event live on Facebook.
"This competition is the first of its kind anywhere in the world," SpaceX writes, noting that 27 teams put their pods through a "litany" of pre-qualifying tests hoping to qualify for a run on the track on "Rocket Road".
An anonymous reader writes:
The mile-long track is "roughly half the width of a full-scale Hyperloop system," according to Fortune -- but it's still a near-total vacuum inside, making it possible for the magnetically-levitated pods to attain extremely high speeds. "The winning team will be the one that hits the highest top speed -- then stops before hitting the end of the tube. 'There'll be a bit of tension," Elon Musk mused. 'Will it brake in time?'"
Sunday's event "will mark the first time anyone gets to see the Hyperloop pods in action," according to Business Insider, which has photos and descriptions of the 27 pods -- including the MIT Hyperloop and the crowdfunded non-profit rLoop, which crowdsourced their open source development effort on Reddit.
SpaceX engineers ultimately awarded the highest overall score to the team from Delft University and determined that the fastest pod came from the Technical University of Munich, Germany. But SpaceX will also be hosting a second competition this summer focused on one criterion: speed.
SpaceX engineers ultimately awarded the highest overall score to the team from Delft University and determined that the fastest pod came from the Technical University of Munich, Germany. But SpaceX will also be hosting a second competition this summer focused on one criterion: speed.
A bowl full of Meh. (Score:3)
I'm a big fan of the proposal laid out in the Hyperloop Alpha document. But these maglev vactrains in the "competition" have nothing interesting about them by comparison to the Hyperloop Alpha low pressure ground-effect train system. They throw the advantages of Alpha out the window, in favour of age-old concepts with economic problems (maintaining a hard vacuum, cost of maglev track vs. plain pipe, etc) that have similarly been known about for ages.
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I'm a big fan of the proposal laid out in the Hyperloop Alpha document. But these maglev vactrains in the "competition" have nothing interesting about them by comparison to the Hyperloop Alpha low pressure ground-effect train system. They throw the advantages of Alpha out the window, in favour of age-old concepts with economic problems (maintaining a hard vacuum, cost of maglev track vs. plain pipe, etc) that have similarly been known about for ages.
Pssshhh, you're obviously just a one of those haters who doesn't want to admit that Musk is the most revolutionary innovator in the world today. You're like those guys over at Paypal who fired him as CEO because he wouldn't back down from his brilliant plan to move all of their *nix servers to Windows; you just can't handle his vision.
cost of maglev track vs. plain pipe
...
What 'plain pipe' were you thinking of, exactly? Plain joints, too?
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Actually, yes. The joints in Hyperloop Alpha are just standard orbital welded, like water pipe and oil pipe. The only difference is that they have tun run an orbital polisher down the center as well.
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The joints in Hyperloop Alpha are just standard orbital welded, like water pipe and oil pipe.
Using the present tense does not a persuasive argument make. Those joints remain completely airtight even with a pressure differential of nearly 1 atm? Thermal expansion under the California sun doesn't weaken or break that airtight seal? Mild earthquakes doesn't weaken or break it? The absorbed force of a 600 MPH capsule weighing lord knows how many pounds going around a curve isn't going to weaken it?
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Hyperloop Alpha is a design document. It already exists, hence present tense.
Why are you acting like 1 ATM pressure differential is a high pressure differential for 1" thick steel pipe to bear? Natural gas pipelines operate at about 17 atm, and that's hardly the highest pipelines go. And orbital welding of pipeline segments is an extremely mature technolog
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Also, while you're perusing it, calculate the amount of steel used, then look up the price of that much steel pipe, versus how much they're budgeting. And how much typical pipelaying projects cost, relative to length and diameter, versus the estimate. I did. Contrary to what internet quarterbacks who never bothered to read the document before playing amateur engineering critic might say, their budgeting for the track is quite conservative
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I'm not even sure that you understand what welding is, let alone orbital welding. There is no "seal". It's a uniform piece of metal. The metal is literally melted by welding, and rehardens into a single piece. Basic carbon steel doesn't weaken from welding (like, say, T6 aluminum does), it can actually get stronger. An orbital pipe welder is an automatic piece of hardware that circles a piece of pipe on its own, connecting two segments; it leaves a perfect, identical, machine-precision weld every time.
As I recall, Thunderf00t calculated that an effective one-piece pipe like you're describing would expand and contract lengthwise, under normal California temperature differences, by several hundred meters over the course of its 300+ mile stretch. Do you have different figures for that calculated expansion? I guess that's not utterly unworkable in principle, but I do wonder what that terminal is going to look like.
No, it's not directly supported by the ground, its supported on the towers by a multiaxis isolation system, which also allows it to shift via thermal expansion / contraction. A big advantage over HSR, which suffers from serious problems with ground shifting under the rails, particularly in earthquakes.
Hmm. I had not encountered that before. It's not just a matter of "read the paper", you see. O
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ThunderF00t is, always has been, and always will be a moron. You do a disservice to your argument by bringing him up.
Which is accounted for in the Hyperloop Alpha design document, via the increase allowing the pipe to slide along its length because - as was mentioned in the last post - it's not rigidly attached to the pylons, but rather held up by a multiaxis damper. The expa
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ThunderF00t is, always has been, and always will be a moron. You do a disservice to your argument by bringing him up.
My skepticism of hyperloop predates Thunderf00t's videos, but he obviously mentioned a valid point and I asked you if you knew of a dramatically different figure than something on the order of a hundred meters. It certainly sounded plausible enough to me, given that would be less than 0.1% of the total length of the pipe.
To put it another way: actual engineers have solved these problems long ago. Which is why you listen to actual engineers rather than listening to a chemist playing armchair engineer like Thunderf00t.
The term "ad hominem" is tossed around *far* too frequently, so let me be clear here: you're well within your rights to insult Thunderf00t. That isn't a logical fallacy. Pretending that th
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If you're looking for a meaningless elongation calculation, steel's linear coefficient of thermal expansion is generally 12 microns per meter per degree kelvin. The distance is 563km. The temperature difference is whatever a person arbitrarily pulls out of a hat - say, 20C. The length change is 135 meters.
But this is, as mentioned, meaningless, because the real world doesn't behave in this simplified way that people like Thunderf00t who have no experience in the field assume. Temperature changes don't d
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so the thermal expansion just serves to relieve tension rather than physically increasing length. ... Temperature changes don't directly result in size changes, they result in internal stress changes.
Well, it seemed like you were pretending like the stresses were magically taken care of by these multiaxis gimbaled whatevers.
If we're back to acknowledging that the pipe will experience significant changes in force, again, we're talking about pipe designed to hold liquids or gasses, not multi-thousand pound capsules screaming along at 600 MPH. Have you never heard of any engineering project ever that experienced material degradation or failure?
Anecdote time: A few years ago, I seriously looked into
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How could you possibly have gotten that from what I wrote?
"Which is accounted for in the Hyperloop Alpha design document, via the increase allowing the pipe to slide along its length because..."
"The expansion would be visible as a millimeters-per-second crawl of the pipe"
"The document describes how to deal with thermal expansion in this manner, including the need for the end station
Re:A bowl full of Meh.So using pipe segments to bu (Score:2)
I know you don't bother to read design documents before talking about topics, but could you at a bare minimum read the comments of the person you're replying to?
Let me rephrase: It sounded like you were saying the lengthwise expansion would indeed occur, but that this wouldn't cause undue stress because the pipe would be allowed to move freely on these supports, thereby allowing movements to easily propagate along the length of the pipe (if not the entire length... I'm not sure how things work out at curves, for instance.) Millimeters per second actually sounded like a lot to me.
This is turning a bit pedantic and tangential, though. "It's good that it's so fas
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That is correct. It is guided, but allowed to expand. All the towers have to do is withstand any lateral forces. If the stress in the pipe is
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The maximum G forces in the car are 0,5g.
Where the hell do you live that this is an acceptable way to write a decimal expansion of "1/2" and yet you really, really care about LA to SF? I'm writing Trump a letter to have you assholes deported before this contagion spreads.
Same amount of force, less time.
There's force and there's force. I suspect that 600 MPH could possibly create some interesting frictional forces if things go a little wrong. And for the last time, a moving force differential along a tube is not the same as continuous uniform force, but whatever. I've run out of
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For as little as I've heard about Hyperloop (Score:2)
I'm actually surprised anything is being done with something the was pretty much dismissed as vaporware.
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Remember when they said the same thing about DARPA 2004 project?
Turns out engineering requires time.
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you can never train for every scenario.
You can train it for more scenarios than you can train a human for. And the knowledge is cumulative. If one car in one place records "unseen data" you can roll that out to all cars next software update.
And they absolutely do work outside of their training set. I just did it with DIGITS/caffe: https://github.com/humphd/have... [github.com]
Trained on 6 pictures of dolphins and sea horses it does a pretty good job of determining an unseen set of data. If you start with pre-trained data weights and tailor it to the 2 animal
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You can train it for more scenarios than you can train a human for. And the knowledge is cumulative. If one car in one place records "unseen data" you can roll that out to all cars next software update.
That's doubtful and it supposes that the computer is even capable of recognizing the scenario in the first place. e.g. is the car ahead stopped because a) the driver has suffered a heart attack, b) it's broken down in the road, c) there is traffic ahead of that car, d) baby ducks are walking across the road, e) the road is flooded, f) the lane is closed and the car is a road maintenance vehicle, g) it's a carjacker waiting for the dumb smart car to stop behind it so it can be robbed.
It's virtually an intr
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This must have been how punch card operators talked about coders that could type their own programs.
You're so far off base of what is out there already it's funny. Tell me more about how these cars ".don't work"
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You're so far off base of what is out there already it's funny. Tell me more about how these cars ".don't work"
Oh really? Cite examples of self drive vehicles that could take a guess for scenario a, b, c, d, e, f or g above. I expect you can't.
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Do the cars care why the car in front stopped? The proper response is to stop.
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It's virtually an intractable problem for a computer to solve. Even if a computer could reliably drive 99% of the time that means 1% of the time it fucks up and the chances are it will require an alert human to takeover to prevent the problem or extricate it. And self drive vehicles are nowhere close to that level of reliability.
Uh - FYI. This stuff already exists.
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And that's even without counting ANY of the scenarios above. Just regular driving at 20mph on nice wide roads. Other self drive projects like Ubers ar
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You realize how sad this is, right? I mean, even people complaining that Linus using cuss words routinely get modded up to +5.
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But this is the serious context around that joke: People can regularly trash RMS, Linus, even Jobs around these parts and stand a reasonable chance of being modded up, but you can't [slashdot.org]
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Let's not fall into the 'victimhood'-role. We have Wu for that. ;-)
I just looked at your list, and the problem was that it was very subjective. for instance, wanting to go to Mars may seem like insane to you, but looks awesome to me. He might be overly optimistic and ambitious with his timetable, but better that, then having no zeal or goal at all (or just lining your and your shareholders pockets, like most CEO's strive for).
I fail to see the gravity of these 'flaws', nor are they clear flaws to begin with
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LAMP may not have been popular yet, but it was certainly a household word by then,
Linux was, I mean. I've no idea if the LAMP components existed yet.
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I'm one who still dismisses Hyperloop as "vaporware", and I think the competition is a great idea for university students. It's perfect for that. It gets teams of students solving a diverse set of fun engineering problems in a low-pressure environment (ha), and maybe get to blow some stuff up. I'm actually warming to the idea of the Hyperloop project because of this.
It will, of course, never be an actual large-scale transportation system - maybe a novelty "future that never was" type of thing - but engineer
The criteria for the competition (Score:2)
The win goes to whichever pod gets Mr. Musk to the airport the fastest without having to interact in any way with the common rabble.
Annnnnnd.....GO!
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It explains a lot, when you think about it. Even Paypal.
Engineering education than step to production (Score:3)
With the exception of one team this is largely a practical academic exercise.
The Hyperloop concept could be found in a physics text book circa 1990 (or earlier) as a thought exercise of how rail systems could achieve speeds equal or faster than air travel. Practical considerations of the cost to build such a large scale system (for example LA to NY) would be approaching a national commitment approaching that of the "Man on the Moon" of the late 60s (~2.5% of the USA national GDP for 10 years - effectively 1 in 40 people).
This competition is similar to the solar car challenges of the 1990s / 2000s where it exists to expose the engineering students to the large number of compromises needed to achieve the desired goal (weight, power, size, cost, etc). Ability to find an optimal solution while addressing the multitude of competing constraints is a key talent to be able to succeed in any engineering discipline - especially aerospace (talent identification for Space-X?).
Back to the issue of Hyperloop - we are probably 20 years away from a working system with a number of technologies still yet to be developed. Toyota released the Prius in 1997 as result of their development efforts towards a fully electric car. At the time the technology for a fully electric car was "not ready yet" and the release of a hybrid car was a bridging technology. As a development platform towards fully electric cars the hybrids have successfully filled its original role as a number of manufacturers sell plug-in electric cars (we have moved a step down the path to mainstream electric vehicle transport).
The rolling stock for Hyperloop is only one part of the problem (my guess is this will be resolved within 5 years) - the other monster that needs to be tamed is building the track and associated infrastructure cost effectively. For comparison: Railway sidings are $1-$2 million/mile, Highway $4-$10 million/mile, Light rail $35 million/mile, High speed rail (California) $56 million/mile.
What is required is an X-Prize style competition for building the Hyperloop track as the cost of the rolling stock is likely to pale into insignificance.
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The Hyperloop concept could be found in a physics text book circa 1990 (or earlier)
It's closer to the 1890s than 1990s. Vacuum tube trains are a very old idea. Sticking a jet engine on the front of the thing and making some use of a small remnant air pressure is a newer concept, but that has nothing to do with this competition, which (as someone else has already noted) is just maglev in a vacuum tube.
What is required is an X-Prize style competition for building the Hyperloop track as the cost of the rolling stock is likely to pale into insignificance.
Good luck with that. SpaceX is a successful company (in no small part because NASA has had all kinds of internal and external problems), but it's not like the X-Prize competition magically
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You can build anything cheaper if you make a lot of them, and even cheaper if you don't build in factories not on site.
There's obviously a floor on how far economies of scale will get you, and *particularly* heavy things that have to be structurally sound for safety reasons.
This is why there isn't a $5000 (or indeed $500) car that's street legal in America. The demand and the volume are obviously there. Or let's not even get that complicated: someone else in this thread quoted $4M-$10M per mile for highway construction. Surely there's tons of incentives to get *that* price down, eh? I mean, it's just a hard, smooth surfa
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but at that point it's probably more worthwhile/realistic to brainstorm to see if we can build a cheaper maglev track.
Well, that's a tall order, given that people have been noodling about maglev for decades, and working systems have even been built. People have been brainstorming; we're at the stage of needing more practical experience as grist for the brainstorming mill.
We know that maglev physically works, it just doesn't work economically yet.
On the other hand it seems to me that the challenges of building a Hyperloop track aren't quite as unbeatable as you suggest. We've been building pipelines for years, some of whic
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Well, that's a tall order, given that people have been noodling about maglev for decades, and working systems have even been built. People have been brainstorming; we're at the stage of needing more practical experience as grist for the brainstorming mill. We know that maglev physically works, it just doesn't work economically yet.
*Sigh*. Maybe you could re-read the post you just replied to? In summary:
1. People have been thinking about vacuum trains for over a hundred years.
2. This competition (along with some other specific hyperloop proposals) *is* maglev. Maglev plus a vacuum tube. So if maglev is too expensive, pretty sure this isn't going to be any cheaper.
The forms of hyperloop that aren't maglev (and thus aren't represented in this contest) rely, from my understanding, on a jet engine in addition to a linear elect
I'm pretty sure you're full of crap. (Score:3)
1. SpaceX is pretty important. Tesla is pretty important. The gigafactory is a big deal. SolarCity is a good idea. Elon Musk has been involved with several pretty important things. People take Elon Musk seriously because he is, frankly, a pretty fucking serious guy. Your petty psychological need to reject anything that smells of hero-worship is way more disturbing than any actual instances of hero worship. There is absolutely nothing absurd about calling someone a tech visionary when they are clearly a tech
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Honestly, hyperloop is *probably* not going to work. It is nice to see them try but they have some serious engineering challenges that they will not be able to get past no mater how much we like Elon. Thunderf00t on youtube makes some very compelling arguments why this is probably not going to work. If those can be addressed then yeah maybe. But still probably not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDwe2M-LDZQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk
People keep thinking this is 'low' pressure. This is n
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The so-called civilized world could learn a lot from Japan's immigration policies.
Wow.
You do realize that Japan's "immigration policy" is based on cultural and racial purity. If you are not ethnically Japanese, you cannot ever become a citizen.
There are some "green card" equivalents of course, but as I recall there are serious impediments to owning property as a non-citizen in Japan. And I'm fairly sure that America and (especially in recent years) Europe take in more refugees.
This is what's great about the shinkansen. Of course, it actually takes longer AND COSTS MORE for most trips, but the fact that you can just show up at the station on the day of your trip, buy a ticket from a kiosk a few minutes before the train arrives, and hop on board with no security screening at all, makes it very nice indeed.
Another *wow*. Do you realize how vanishingly small the percentage of people is that are willing to p
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Another *wow*. Do you realize how vanishingly small the percentage of people is that are willing to pay more for a slower ride, just to avoid security?
Total time, the train is often faster (depends on the distance of course). Security is just one of the contributing factors.
The Shinkansen goes downtown to downtown. There is no need to arrive early, just enough time to walk to the platform before the train leaves, which is exactly the time written on your ticket. You can buy the ticket anytime, even a few minutes before departure if there are seats left, which is often the case.
And even if for some reason, the Shinkansen is a bit slower, it is time spent c
Uh huh. (Score:2)
Your petty psychological need to reject anything
You're projecting. I cram my posts full of disclaimers about what I think is and isn't important, but anything that isn't fawning all over Musk 100% is modded to oblivion around here.
People take Elon Musk seriously because he is, frankly, a pretty fucking serious guy.
He made his millions off of Paypal, a company that basically got lucky when they realized the government wasn't going to shut them down for offering banking services without normal banking rules. Their early business decisions were all over the place and the people who started it (not Musk, although he chose to associate with
Now I'm certain you are full of crap. (Score:2)
> SpaceX has not, to my knowledge, come up with revolutionary new technologies.
Well, they cut the cost of a launch by a factor of 10, and they've landed rockets. I guess that doesn't qualify. And Tesla is releasing Model 3 at $35K, so your "toys for rich people" comment is stupid. Starting with the high-end is a perfectly reasonable strategy.
The real problems here are that:
(a) you don't understand what technology is. I mean that sincerely. You have no fucking clue. Let's try a thought experiment, name a
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Well, they cut the cost of a launch by a factor of 10
Doesn't matter. Per-kilo cost is the only thing that matters. Also, would need to see run the numbers taking into account all of their accidents (and we may not have enough data points yet) to see if that cost savings really holds up.
And even if they had achieved a significant cost savings, that doesn't mean it's a tech revolution. NASA is an expensive, overbuilt pile of shit, full of parasites who are politicians, not scientists. Anyone who is paying attention has known this for 30 years now. [mit.edu] If you
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SpaceX has a very low cost per kg into space. Lower than all the alternatives for many types of missions. >10X lower than previous NASA, and quite a bit lower than rockets from Russia. Probably not much lower than the hypothetical strawman you've offered of a non-bureaucratic rocket.
Landing rockets allows them to be re-used, which will cut the cost further. They've clearly mastered landing the rockets, next step is to recondition and reuse them--that will certainly result in lowered cost. It hasn't been
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SpaceX has a very low cost per kg into space.
Are you sure it isn't bigly low? Tremendously low, even?
>10X lower than previous NASA
Citation needed. And remember, the conversation is about TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION not cost cutting. You're the one who insisted Musk was a "tech visionary".
strawman
Why am I not surprised you don't understand what a strawman is?
Landing rockets allows them to be re-used
It's a good thing no one has thought of this before.
The Space Shuttle, incidentally, was not cheaper than disposable alternatives.
It hasn't been reflected in that cost yet because we're talking about a new technology here.
Viking spacecraft landed on *on another planet* using rockets over 40 years ago [wikipedia.org] They switched to the ai
Sigh. (Score:2)
> >10X lower than previous NASA
> Citation needed. And remember, the conversation is about TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION not cost cutting.
Lots of cites out there for cost per pound. I'd dig one up for you but what's the point? you've shifted the goalposts with your assertion that "no TRUE innovation is based on cost cutting".
The personal computer was also mostly about cost-cutting, I guess that wasn't an innovation.
> American scientists discovered that the mixture was especially effective, when previo
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Was especially effective at what? Decreasing cost per pound? I thought we weren't talking about cost.
Everything connects back to cost one way or another. Congratulations for your assault on the English language; I admit that I did not cram in every possible disclaimer adjective to prevent a ridiculously overly-literal interpretation, especially in the presence of so many clarifying sentences referring to Musk's business acumen and the inefficiencies in NASA.
So: by "cost", I was obviously referring to business / infrastructure / standard practices cost reductions. Cost reductions achieved through techn
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I don't believe you, nobody who is watching believes you, and deep down...you don't believe you, either.
I've already repeatedly given him credit for Tesla, and Autopilot specifically. And I've given him credit for the business success that came from creating a company that is less fucked up than NASA. Why wouldn't I also give him credit for inventing a new fuel, if I found out he had done such a thing?
Just wanted to underline how little you're paying attention here, apparently because you're still obsessed with defending someone instead of objectively looking at the facts.
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I did read your post, I just don't find your reasoning as convincing as you do. Appearing in science fiction doesn't really count as "thinking" from an engineering standpoint. I'm only counting actual engineering work.
People also started noodling around with the idea of maglev about a hundred years ago, but the difference is the first operational maglev train was built 38 years ago, and since then there have been numerous modest but operational systems. There is no shortage of brainstorming going on on h
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I did read your post, I just don't find your reasoning as convincing as you do. Appearing in science fiction doesn't really count as "thinking" from an engineering standpoint. I'm only counting actual engineering work.
I am reasonably confident that some engineers, somewhere have written some equations on it over the past 100 years. Certainly, it was more than just fiction. Exactly 100 years ago there appears to be some sort of paper on it in Popular Science [wikisource.org], for instance.
Clearly you haven't even bothered to read about the competition before offering your opinion.
No, I based that comment on having read about prior small scale 'hyperloop' demonstrations which were just maglev, plus another poster's comment in this thread saying that that's all this was, plus my conversations in a Reddit thread with an enthusiast w [reddit.com]
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It's a go then? (Score:2)
the cost to build such a large scale system (for example LA to NY) would be approaching a national commitment approaching that of the "Man on the Moon" of the late 60s
So cheaper than the California high-speed rail plan [reason.com] then.
Ok, let's roll out! Or hover as it were.
Correction... 2.5% of the federal budget (Score:2)
... would be approaching a national commitment approaching that of the "Man on the Moon" of the late 60s (~2.5% of the USA national GDP for 10 years - effectively 1 in 40 people).
I thought that seemed off, so I checked and it was ~2.5% of the federal budget, or 0.5% of the GDP - 1 in 200 people. It doesn't really have to do with the point of your post, but I thought it was worth a correction.
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Stand the audience to a safe enough distance, and only on the sides of the tube.
If the pod fails to stop debris will go mostly forward, thanks to momentum.
In case of a depressurization, air will post likely rush in, follow the pipe and ram of the end, projecting debris in line with the pipe but not so much on the sides.
So must likely scenario if the pod hits the end of the tube at full speed and nothing is done to absorb the shock : the pods breaks the end of the tube, flying out like a bullet. Through the
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Max speed was 90km/h. The tube looked sturdy. The spaceX took great care to emphasise safety. Out of 25 or so competitors, only 3 were allowed to try to go for the highest speed.
Overall it seemed a very safe contest.
Fuck You Facebook - cannot watch video w/out login (Score:3, Insightful)
Facebook forces you to login before being able to see all of the video. Well Fuck You facebook -- I don't use facebook and will not give in to blackmail and extortion to be forced to agree to FB TOS.
Please stop posting links to FB. Please instead post link to public free links of the same content.
American show, European winners (Score:1)
If I count correctly, 25 of the competing teams were from the USA. Nevertheless the dutch and the german teams performed best in terms of speed and design. Money is not everything. It is a hopeful sign in a world that for the last fifty years increasingly became 'americanized'.
Paai
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My guess would be that the Dutch and German teams outspent the American teams. Sometimes universities find a claim to fame and they dedicate quite a bit of resources to maintaining that.
Of course, I have no actual idea who spent what so this is purely conjecture, to be clear.
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Weird that these teams would be backed by an airplane company, given that hyperloops, if they were ever built, would just take customers away from flying.
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Any opportunity to express an anti-American sentiment, I guess. Whatever floats your boat, hater.
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Dear Brian, although you americans sure put up a lot of effort to be universally disliked, I do not hate you. In a single generation I have seen our own culture disappear, age-old festivals replaced by Valentine and Halloween, our music and movies almost exclusively by american artists, our universities one after the other 'english-only'... I don't think you can even begin to understand what that it means to see your world disappear and taken over by a strange country.
So do not begrudge us the rare occasio
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If you had expressed yourself in a different way, I might have felt some sympathy for you. As it is, I have none. My best advice for you would be, stop reading English websites like Slashdot and go read the equivalent in whatever language you prefer.
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My dear Brian, I do not quite see where I was rude or insulting in my original post. But as you pointed out correctly, english is not my native language.
When I started university, long, long ago in the sixties, literature and textbooks were in french, german, english and, of course, dutch. When you published a paper in whatever language, you had to include abstracts in the other languages. Superficially the recent english-only situation in the western world seems an improvement. Anyway, if you want to pursu
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metal on metal conduction ?