Hyperloop One Conducts First Full Systems Test But Only Traveled 70MPH (jalopnik.com) 235
Thelasko shares a report from Jalopnik about Hyperloop One's first full systems Hyperloop test: In the test, Hyperloop says its vehicle traveled the first portion of a track using magnetic levitation in a vacuum environment, and reached 70 mph. It's a significant leap past the company's test a year ago, which sent a sled down a track for a grand total of two seconds. And while that's not the lighting-fast speed that Hyperloop Ones says its futurist transport system could go, the company says this test -- conducted privately on May 12 -- is only Phase 1. Hyperloop One's in the process of the next phase, now aiming for 250 mph. "By achieving full vacuum, we essentially invented our own sky in a tube, as if you're flying at 200,000 feet in the air," said Shervin Pishevar, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Hyperloop One. "For the first time in over 100 years, a new mode of transportation has been introduced. Hyperloop is real, and it's here now."
It's Here Now (Score:5, Insightful)
This must be one of those new definitions of "here now"
Re:It's Here Now (Score:4, Interesting)
While it sounds really cool.....I'm wondering of the practicality of it in becoming anywhere near a mass transit system.
Re:It's Here Now (Score:4, Insightful)
While it sounds really cool.....I'm wondering of the practicality of it in becoming anywhere near a mass transit system.
It will never be a mass transit system. If a Hyperloop line is built it will only ever be a novelty attraction, perhaps for tourists going to Las Vegas or some Arab Sheik's toy in the desert. At the speeds they are ultimately aiming for it will need to be built in almost straight lines, so across anything but flat landscapes it will need some spectacular viaducts or tunnels - all costly to build to say nothing of the running costs.
It could be built. Anything that does not contravine the laws of physics can be built if you throw enough money and ego at it, and Musk has enough of both. But it will not be operated for long once Musk or that Sheik get bored with it.
Cool prediction, Bro. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: It's Here Now (Score:4, Insightful)
It will never move!
It will never sail!
It will never fly!
It will never break the sound barrier!
It will never make it to orbit!
Faggots like you must be exhausted being constantly wrong.. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over.
Your examples of "It will never .." are all technical attributes. If you actually read my post instead of knee-jerking I actually said "It will never be a mass transit system", which is an economic attribute, and you might also have spotted my words "It could be built". I'll go further and say that a Hyperloop line probably will be built, but only one or two fairly short ones - and soon becoming mere tourists' novelties.
My point was that it would fail as business proposition, only propped up by Musk's money and that of the fans who invest in him.
BTW, I don't think you know what a "mass transit system" means. It means something like the New York or London underground systems, or BART, shifting millions of people for short distances. I don't think Musk would want to comapre Hyperloop with any of those anyway.
Re: It's Here Now (Score:4, Interesting)
My major issue with the hyperloop is that it overlaps with planes and trains in all the wrong ways. It requires a fixed path like a train, but that path requires an order magnitude more materials and engineering to construct. Why not just lay rail? It is as fast as a plane, but constrained to its path in the tube. Planes can go to any airport, as needed. And that infrastructure is already built, along with the connection infrastructure to get people to/from the air hub.
It would be far, far cheaper to just lay high speed rail instead of the hyperloop. All the tech is available, well tested, and much closer to mass production. If you can't do HSR/bullet train and turn a profit, I don't see how you do so with the hyperloop. Sure, it's far, far faster, but the design, manufacturing, testing, certification, and implementation cost of what is essentially a giant pipeline with a flying submarine in it vs HSR is so much higher I can't see the ROI making the hyperloop worth it.
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More amateur physics! Yeah! (Score:3)
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Catastrophic failure is typically bad for any transport moving at speed.
Did that tree just fall on the train tracks.....oops.
Did a sinkhole just open up in the freeway.....oops.
Did we just hit a flock of seagulls.....And I ran, I ran so far away...Err, I mean crashed and died.
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True, but with a traditional railroad a break in the tracks will kill one train-ful of people, not everyone traveling along the entire track system. A large-ish break in the tube would cause a shockwave to travel through the tube (an "air wall", in your vernacular) until it hits every vehicle. There are ways to mitigate this - for instance, you can have vents all along the tube that could actuate ahead of the shockwave. A smart system could gradually open the vents furthest from the break and more immediate
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This is hilarious, I can't get enough. (Score:2)
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You design a tube system over terrain exposed to temp differences with a few thousand flexible joints to handle expansion and contraction. Keep the whole thing near a perfect vacuum and send cabs filled with people through it at 760 Mph.
Engineering. Hard stuff for many. Easy if you do not even think about it.
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Hmm...I"m wondering, even with liberal use of "eminent domain", it seems that digging, or above ground install and connection of this type of thing, would be quite difficult to do nationwide in the US....and that's just the private property and existing city problems. The wildly varied and often difficult terrain across the US would pose a lot of problems putting together a system like this, that requires what I'm guessing is pretty complex and massive equipment to put tube, and keep power and vacuum on such a system.
While it sounds really cool.....I'm wondering of the practicality of it in becoming anywhere near a mass transit system.
You're missing a piece of the puzzle. As we speak, Musk's tunneling machine...named "Godot," is tunneling in LA. Oh, and the company under which this work is being done? "The Boring Company."
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The Hyperloop is fucking stupid. Another mega project to make contractors rich.
I'm on a hyperloop team so I get a kick out of replies like this.
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So far we have rail lines, urban subway lines, power utility lines with towers (above and belowground), state and federal highways, oil and gas pipelines (above and belowground), and water pipelines. It doesn't appear that hard to run transportation lanes of any type.
Don't know about the USA, but in the UK it took years of public hearing, legal processes, parliamentary debates, safety studies, and economic studies to build about 100 miles of railway from the Channel Tunnel to London. Most of those existing railways and roads you refer to were built at least 100 years ago when you could just drive peasants, rednecks and Red Indians away from the proposed route using men with shotguns.
And when someone is dead set on not selling or leasing the land the lane is routed around which is not an uncommon practice.
Not as easy with Hyperloop as with a road or even a conventional railway. Hyperloop wi
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Must be a one of those new definitions of "new form of transportation" too. It's not new to take a technology that's existed for 200 years and upsize it.
It's neither new, nor here now. It's also got all the ugly problems that Trains have such as defined tracks with massive infrastructure costs. The reason cars won over trains is because of this, in comparison to RR tracks Roadways are ridiculously cheap and I have to believe that this hyperloop track will make a regular RR track look cheap. For comparison a
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For comparison a high speed rail line from LA to SanFran is projected to cost $42 billion (I suspect the real number is closer to $200 when you factor in all the other costs like moving utilities). Building a road the same distance would cost 1/100th that. I suspect a hyperloop track for the same distance would be 10x as much as the railroad.
Musk claimed $6 billion, though that's obviously a very early estimate and most think that's very optimistic. Though you got to think there's a reason he gave this one up instead of creating a company to do it, I'm sure he'd find the investor money to only take a relatively small risk himself. There are a lot of unknowns and unsolved issues and then a non-trivial construction period before this could possibly go into production.
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He said the reason that he gave it up is that he's running two companies (and had a hand in a third when SolarCity was separate), and he didn't have the time to get involved in a another large-scale company. This isn't hard to believe given the rapid expansion of SpaceX and Tesla. Even Musk only has 24 hours in a day, and even he has to sleep sometimes (though finding out he's taking something like Armodafinil wouldn't surprise me). He's since started two smaller companies (the Boring Company and Neuralink)
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The reason cars won over trains is because of this, in comparison to RR tracks Roadways are ridiculously cheap
Do you have a citation for that? From a quick search, rail costs $1-2 million per mile (source [acwr.com], while a 2 lane road costs $2-3 million per mile in rural areas and $3-5 million per mile in urban areas (source [artba.org]). Certainly doesn't seem "ridiculously cheap" in comparison.
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Obligatory xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/1860/ [xkcd.com]
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This must be one of those new definitions of "here now"
In the world of quantum mechanics, this makes perfect sense; but on the downside, as soon as you observe it, the wavefunction collapses and the train ends up at a random place and time, which is why we ask our customers to keep their eyes closed while travelling.
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Vacuum rarely kills people. I mean, it'll fucking hurt, but you don't go pop like in a Bond movie or something.
And if it is closed system, you would be able to detect loss of vacuum quite quickly, I imagine, and do something about it (e.g. open a bunch of small emergency valves to flood the tube with natural air quite quickly, also slowly the train in the process).
That said, it's still a stupid idea that nobody really wants or needs.
Re: It's Here Now Until ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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You're right... you'd have about 15 seconds of useful consciousness and death in a minute or two, and you're not going to get rescued in that minute or two, sorry.
Considering that you should have air for the entire journey in tanks I imagine you'd have oxygen masks dropping down like in airplanes, that should buy a little more time unless the cabin is cracked wide open. And I don't think emergency pressurization is such a big deal, more on that below.
But don't worry, this isn't a very likely scenario. Far more likely is the vacuum of the tube being compromised, in which case the on rush of air will hit you at approximately mach 1 and you'll likely be dead instantly as it is basically like getting hit by a bomb's shock wave. Worse case you survive long enough to realize you're now the bullet in a very large gun that is capped at either end... and then you die on impact.
There's a reason most bombs are surrounded by shrapnel, yes air has a weight of 101 kPa = 101 kN/m^2 = 10300 kg/m^2 at 1G. But it's also just air, it'll quickly rush around any obstacle and create a pressure on the other
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Far more likely is the vacuum of the tube being compromised, in which case the on rush of air will hit you at approximately mach 1 and you'll likely be dead instantly as it is basically like getting hit by a bomb's shock wave. Worse case you survive long enough to realize you're now the bullet in a very large gun that is capped at either end... and then you die on impact.
No, it won't hit you, it'll hit the train. Which, like any large aerodynamic object traveling at faster than the speed of sound, will very impressively... slow gradually to a stop with the passengers barely even noticing. And you're still going to be traveling down the tunnel even if the vacuum is compromised, so the only thing you're going to be hitting as a bullet is more air. All that really happens if the vacuum fails is you go from a Hyperloop capable of traveling with minimal energy loss, to a regular
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https://youtu.be/Z48pSwiDLIM [youtu.be]
I love amateur physicists on Hyperloop threads (Score:3)
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Any hyperloop system would need to have a lot of sensors watching for shock and pressure events and pods capable of hitting the brakes to a
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Oh, ffs, people what kind of idiots are you.
Going from, say, zero atmospheres of pressure to one atmosphere of pressure, is no different from going from two to one.
One atmosphere = 14.7 psi. That's not even a fucking half-flat car tyre. A bicycle road tyre can have 10 times that. Are cyclists blown into oblivion when their tyre pops? No.
It would be comparable to me stabbing your car tire that already looked a little flat and half-deflated. Sure.. PFFSFSFFSFSYSFST. Done. No explosion. No horrendous
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One fails and kills everyone in a hard vacuum...
Hyperloop brings one of the key dangers of high altitude flight down to earth.....and below.
Re: It's Here Now Until ... (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously this is just a scheme to trick investors into building a giant cannon from which to launch sharks... with lasers.
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Except it's not a hard vacuum. It's somewhat thinner than the air outside an airliner, but we know how to deal with that.
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They mention that it's the equivalent pressure to 200,000 feet up, which is .022 kPa. Surface pressure is 101.33 kPa, about 4600 times greater.
It's not hard vacuum, but it's not far from it for practical purposes.
Serious question (Score:3)
If there's no air in the tube, how do you breathe? I mean, there is air in the capsule but I assume that is finite. So how do they refresh the air and what do they do if there's a rupture?
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Your question is irrelevant because Hyperloop will never carry human passengers because it's inherently an unsafe and infeasible system.
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It seems feasible enough in space, same risk of dying in a vacuum if something goes wrong. Now, think of submarines with orders of magnitude more pressure involved and it also seems feasible.
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It isn't infeasible because it's unsafe, it's infeasible because it'll cost more than air travel to operate, and more than even the government will spend to build, and take decades of lawsuits to get the rights.
Nobody wants a giant implosion bomb running anywhere near their property.
Re:Serious question (Score:5, Insightful)
Implosion bomb? What makes you think that a vacuum chamber (~14psi) will implode with bomb-like force in the event of an implosion?
Humans have built plenty of infrastructure operating at much higher pressure differentials (like water, gas, and oil pipelines) than the paltry pressure of a vacuum.
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A) PSI means "per square inch." A tube big enough to put a train inside has a lot of square inches.
B), and more important, it doesn't matter if it really is dangerous to the average nimrod, it sounds scary, and there are those with a vested financial interest in spreading hysteria about it. Hence, the decades of lawsuits. (And given that most judges are nimrods, too, as are most jurors, it's not at all a given that the lawsuits will fail.)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Exactly - no big deal for anyone nearby. Plus it's a container never designed to withstand vacuum in the first place. The structural demands to withstand vacuum (inwards pressure) are almost need an entirely different than those to withstand an outward pressure.
Re: Serious question (Score:3)
In many cases shinkansen travel is more expensive than domestic Japanese flight to the same destinations with longer travel time, but it's still very popular. You don't have to buy tickets in advance, there's no security screening, it's very quiet and comfortable... etc.
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That's why the next phase aims for 250MPH. Gotta get there before your air runs out.
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250MPH? so still slower than last century TGVs that are everywhere in Europe?
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If there's no air in the tube, how do you breathe? I mean, there is air in the capsule but I assume that is finite. So how do they refresh the air and what do they do if there's a rupture?
BYOO OHYB
How do you breathe on a plane? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Exactly - one of the issues they had to solve was that the passage of the pod compresses the air ahead of it *too much*, like a piston. So pods use front fans to push the air ahead of it under the pod, compressed enough to keep it off the floor of the tube.
I believe pods are sealed with their own air supply, but some could potentially be diverted from the front fans if needed.
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In terms of a rupture, all the pod things would just stop, I would assume. That's kinda' the whole premise of the safety of the design... they just roll through the tube when they're not floating through the vacuum.
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Actually it could. It's one of the things that Astronauts need to deal with as part of the preparation for a spacewalk. The ISS operates using an earth-normal gas mix and pressure (1 bar, 20% O2, 80% nitrogen). When they're spacewalking, the spacesuit is only pressurized to 1/3 bar (5psi), and runs on 100% O2. That pressure change definitely has the possibility of causing "The Bends" in the astronauts if they were to do it too quickly.
Instead, they go through a whole protocol prior to the spacewalk of exerc
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If there's no air in the tube, how do you breathe? I mean, there is air in the capsule but I assume that is finite. So how do they refresh the air and what do they do if there's a rupture?
Yeah....not like airplane doesn't have those problem...or does they?
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"They does". That is why air is bled from the jet engine compressor to the cabin.
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If there's no air in the tube, how do you breathe? I mean, there is air in the capsule but I assume that is finite. So how do they refresh the air and what do they do if there's a rupture?
It is a valid question, but I think that problem is a minor one and we have already solved it for passenger airplanes that fly at altitudes where humans can't breathe. The more serious risk in this system stems from the need to maintain a vacuum at all times - if there were a catastrophic failure of vacuum when the train travels at a very high speed, then it would be like slamming into a wall.
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If there's no air in the tube, how do you breathe? I mean, there is air in the capsule but I assume that is finite. So how do they refresh the air and what do they do if there's a rupture?
It is a valid question, but I think that problem is a minor one and we have already solved it for passenger airplanes that fly at altitudes where humans can't breathe. The more serious risk in this system stems from the need to maintain a vacuum at all times - if there were a catastrophic failure of vacuum when the train travels at a very high speed, then it would be like slamming into a wall.
I don't even think that catastrophic failure will be the big deal. It will be designed and tested to be safer than driving on the highway where catastrophic crashes happen all the time. I'm sure that various failure modes are taken into account and there are methods of both slowing down the capsule as well as repressurizing the tube if need be. Most likely the capsule will break, have air masks like planes, and connect to the next emergency exit gate to lrease passangers, and if things are really bad, they'
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Re:Serious question (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, modern airliners are moving away from using bleed air for pressurization and the like. The problem with bleed air is that it's hot, dry, and potentially contains atomized lubricants and other things from the engine. (Also why you occasionally get a whiff of jet exhaust as the engines start up). The equipment to process the bleed air into breathable air for the cabin adds significant weight (and thus inefficiency), and the process itself costs engine performance.
On the Dreamliner, Boeing has switched to using an electrical pressurization system. It's lighter weight than the bleed air systems, easier to maintain, and more efficient. Airbus is likely doing the same thing on their new airliners.
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Modern airliners are moving away from bleed air? Seriously? 787 is the only one that uses bleedless engines. Airbus insists that bleed air makes more sense, all the new and upcoming passenger airplanes from UAC, Comac, Embraer and Bombardier will have bleed air and even Boeing will use bleed air on the upcoming 777X. The bleedless 787 was a one-time detour.
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They Better Have Realistic VR figured out (Score:2)
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> Speeding through a shiny lit tunnel?
I doubt they'll bother to light the tunnel in production unless its out of service for repair. Why waste the power?
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That ride is going so suck without a realistic VR experience to make it seem a bit more earthly. Speeding through a shiny lit tunnel? Not for me.
Would it really seem that different from being in an airplane with the window shades drawn??
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The tunnel won't be lit, and there won't be windows in the pod either. It'll have "in-flight" entertainment, just like airlines (which are also pretty boring for 90% of the flight).
For the first time in over 100 years... Segway!? (Score:2, Insightful)
What about the Segway? That massively changed how people take tours of downtown areas.
Re:For the first time in over 100 years... Segway! (Score:5, Funny)
What about the Segway? That massively changed how people take tours of downtown areas.
It also allowed employment of 500-lb men as mall cops.
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My Segway unicycle is an urban assault vehicle. When I lose control at 12MPH, it careens through crowds like bowling pins. LOOK OUT PEOPLE! Most city folk just take it in stride along with the sirens, helicopters and homeless. Chaos is a way of life in a proper city. As it should be.
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Questions (Score:2)
How the pods transition from vacuum to normal air?
If a pod breaks down how is it retrieved?.. eg. Are there access hatches?, Does that mean big valves every km or so for isolation? How long does each section take to air up & re vacuum?
To be honest, I can't see this economically working for people. Can you imagine being in a coffin in a steel vacuum tube with no inertial reference. Someone breaks down, which then means hundreds of pods have to stop until the problem is fixed.
This might work for freight..
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Can you imagine being in a coffin in a steel vacuum tube with no inertial reference.
You'll be hurling through the loop.
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... but given energy is likely to get cheaper, I don't see the economic advantage vs planes/trains.
Cheaper in what sense? Soylent Green cheapness?
This is not a new idea (Score:5, Interesting)
In the 1973 Gene Roddenberry movie 'Genesis II' they have an underground transportation system very much like the hyperloop. This is also the movie where Mariette Hartley famously has two belly buttons. When she appeared on Star Trek the censors wouldn't allow her to show a belly button so Gene decided to give her two as a middle finger to the earlier censors.
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Gene decided to give (..) a middle finger
Did he get his phone call?
Seismic activity... (Score:2)
One of the routes that ol' Elon has mentioned repeatedly in his promotion of this thing is Bay Area to LA. Assuming you could even build the tunnel, what about the seismic activity of this region? Seems crazy to go undergound in CA.
I will make a prediction, of which I am very sure: I will never get into one of these contraptions. I'm just not in that much of a hurry ;-)
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He doesn't propose putting (most of) it underground. He proposes putting it on pylons along a highway.
Scramjet (Score:2, Interesting)
This will go precisely nowhere (Score:2)
I'm not opposed to public transit. I think it's ridiculous that I'm probably going to rent a car in my home city, drive down to where my kid goes to college and then drive back instead of taking a bloody train like a civilized nation. But Hyperloop is not how you do it. Worse, the hug
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it's too expensive.
How do you know this? I don't see any estimates of cost in the article. They aren't anywhere near a production model, so how is it that you know it is too expensive?
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Because it's going to be more expensive than standard high-speed trains (rails are cheaper than tubes, existing tech is cheaper than new tech, no pressurization is cheaper than pressure systems that keep people alive.) And high-speed trains are already cost prohibitive.
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You are making a lot of assumptions, for example that the highest costs for building are the costs of materials and equipment. And the GP was referring to the cost of a ticket, which is partially affected by the cost of building, but there are many other factors.
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I never assumed that was the highest cost. I assume that it's cheaper to build two rails than a tube that includes maglev and must be pressurized. But the biggest cost is actually a push -- land and rights of way. I assume that Musk's Boring company is designed to try to make that come out in the hyperloop's favor, but that seems like it's always a push as a train can go anywhere
Why a vacuum? (Score:2)
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Presumably the air mass has inertia such that keeping it moving does not take the same amount of energy that getting it started. An aquarium in a torus does this to simulate ocean currents. The energy would be parasitic drag which could be managed.
Much of the remarks about the engineering infeasibility of the concept center around the problems associated with maintaining a vacuum in a vessel a thousand KM long. I see no convincing answers except not to do that in the first place.
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About the same as it costs to maintain the welds on pipelines. Not much, they don't generally 'just fail'. Assuming they were good to start, X-rays tell you that.
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About the same as it costs to maintain the welds on pipelines. Not much, they don't generally 'just fail'. Assuming they were good to start, X-rays tell you that.
But pipelines are easy to segment with valves so you can work on a single section. So unless the hyper loop has an equivalent system they are going to be trying to pump the entire pipeline down at one time - and that ain't going to work well.
So thats a lot more equipment than just a big pipe.
And I know that pipes don't generally "just fail", but on the other hand these hyper loop pipes better have the ability to be cut open very easily in order to facilitate the egress of people trapped inside their tin ca
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You don't need to cut into the tube, all you need to do is have access points every so often, and if there's a failure that requires passengers to be rescued, just re-pressurize that section of the tube (any practical design will certainly have sections with some kind of lock that can be opened and closed for repair or in case of vacuum failure in a section).
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How much time did you spend thinking about these potential failure points?
Not long because my job requires me to think about man rated safety systems and what I thought up is obvious but not mentioned by the Hyped loop people.
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but not mentioned by the Hyped loop people
It's understandable that they're not talking about catastrophic failures in public, especially before they are even ready to test them outside of a simulation. To assume that means they haven't had internal discussions about these issues is a bit naive.
You know it's like, the last car commercial I saw did not devote 5 minutes to "okay we're introducing the new 2018 xyz! but before we look at the cool new features, let's think about what happens if you're trapped inside our car and it catches on fire? and wh
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Who are you to tell Musk how to spend his money? He can afford to keep a large % in high risk.
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From the diagrams I have seen the idea is that the sealed train is docked and the passengers and cargo are wheeled out the end.