Slashdot Mirror
Pipeline Mass Transit?
pipingguy writes "'Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) is a new kind of transportation system that requires less than two percent of the energy of current transportation methods. It is also much safer, and can be faster. [...] Anyone can visualize 2 tubes (one for each direction) along a travel route. Air is permanently removed from the tubes; so travel takes place without friction. Pressurized passenger capsules (like a 2 - 8 person airplane cabin), travel in the tubes on thin steel wheels or on nearly frictionless Maglev. Airlocks allow access without admitting air to the tubes. Linear motors (as used on new rollercoasters) accelerate the capsules. During most of the trip the capsules coast; using no power. When the capsules slow down, linear generators recover most of the electrical energy used to accelerate the capsules.' Some CG images and drawings here, the FAQ is here." MSNBC had an article on monorails a few days ago. Don't bother making Simpsons jokes, the article has them covered already.
And what would happen should the system happen to malfunction and shutdown locking the passengers inside with a limited supply of air?
Sure, the energy requirements may be a fraction, but consider the cost of installing a complete system in an urban environment that could actually use it? Here in Chicago, it would be extremely difficult to construct a good system without severely screwing up traffic even worse than it is already.
The very first underground train in New York worked exactly like this, pneumatically. Everything old is new again, eh?
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
2) maintaining a vaccuum could conceivably be dangerous.
3) most right-of-ways for such a huge undertaking are probably already claimed by other projects in any major metro. Yah, I know eminent domain & all that, but that'll end up in court forever.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Why, you ask? Not because it's not interesting and efective technology, but because we Americans don't like mass transit. We want cars. We have a *right* to cars. Look in the Bill of Rights. It's there. Or if it's not, I think it should be, so it might as well be there right next to my right to own a minigun.
Seriously, though, there are hundreds neat ideas for viable mass-transit available, but I'm stuck riding a 30 year-old, beaurocracy-lader system called BART to work everyday. That has, to put it mildly, soured my viewpoint somewhat. Until we remove the corruption that wil always accompany mass transit, we might as well forget about it.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
You mean "Futurama".
I've always wanted to ride in one of those tubes. This sounds similar. :-D
We could have had a reliable form of mass transit in the United States in major cities within the 20th century, if:
1) The government never funded the interstate highway project, which was a military-industrial complex endeavor that would provide ways to move troops across the country in case of invasion like the Autobahn did in WWII, but was more to serve the needs of making the automobile the main form of transportation in the US.
2) The auto and oil companies didn't conspire to rip up all the rails so the automobile could take over.
Efficient mass transportation will never happen as long as cuthroat greedy multinational corporations control the world -- and we are going to pay for it dearly when we run out of fossil fuels in 40 years.
When I was a kid there was a store that still used pneumatic tubes to transport invoices from the cash register to the office and back. I always wanted to ride in one.
It won't be the same without giant quarters and nickels along side of me though.
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
"Air is permanently removed from the tubes; so travel takes place without friction" - So air is the only thing that causes friction?
...but will we ever see anything like it? I often wonder how many advances in large industries like transportation are blocked by large companies who would lose a lot of money by the loss of maintenance revenue a beneficial technology would cause. Consider the problem of transportation commissions and the constant struggle to maintain their piece of state or city budget. If better technologies emerge requiring less upkeep once built, and some of the money allocated to the department goes away, jobs are lost... I wonder if advances like this actually taking hold aren't just a pipe dream. (err.. pun intended)
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
So basically your travelling in a pressurized capsule, in an airless tunnel? Wow that presents all kinds of scenarios for potential disasters. It may be energy efficient but I would have to think that the cost of engineering something reliable and safe like this would far outweigh the energy savings in the near term anyway. And if you frequent mass transit...the idea of a dozen people in an enclosed capsule breathing recirculated air for hours doesnt sound real pleasant either.
I guess they could go cheap and just make a really big version of those things they use at the drive up window at banks....
The New York train was pulled along by a pressure differance between the front and back of the train with atmospheric pressure in the back. This new train has a vacuum both in front and back of the train and uses linear motors for propulsion.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Who is going to build it?
"The philosophy is an open system (like Linux), where improvements are made by many collaborators working to achieve mutual benefits"
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Now that articles are making pre-emptive Simpsons jokes, if they would just include "OMG FP FP FP!!" and "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...", we could eliminate half the comments on Slashdot.
> Don't bother making Simpsons jokes, the article has them covered already.
But that's the kind of commentary Slashdot does best!
From their website "For fiscal operation, both corporate and public operation is encouraged by the non-exclusive, low cost licensing plan. The license promotes both cooperation and competition."
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Back in the mid-late 90's, there was a series called SeaQuest DSV , which later became SeaQuest 2032 (which was utter crap compared to DSV). Anyway, there was an episode where they had a system exactly like this. This thing spanned entire oceans and and considered quite efficient. The only problem was smoe bad-guys killed the "breaking system" so the capsule/train would crash into the station at a few hundred miles per hour.
Since then, I always thought that this transportation idea would be really cool to reproduce. I mean sure... it would be hard to do, but imagine something trans-continental or even trans-oceanic. In a large-scale, it would be probably only a little slower than the concord but heller-efficient and quiet ('cause of the vacuum).
Of course, I would say that for right now it's beyond our current technology to do stuff like this (at least across the ocean). Personally, for now, I think we should work on making our CURRENT transporation systems and roads more efficient, clean, and more "attractive".
In Matt Groening's Futurama, this form of transportation is commonplace. Even better, they've been able to do away with the annoying capsule!
:P
I hope that by the 30th century, we too will have mastered the technology required to insert a human being in a vacuum tube without them exploding or asphyxiating
I seem to recall reading a (reasonably detailed) description of a system like this in a SF book. I think it was a book by James P Hogan, I can't remember which one though. (Hey, it's 7:30 AM on a sunday, my brain won't be on-line for another 4 hours)
and 4) vacuum is too difficult for most of us to spell. :)
For one, how does removing air remove friction? It means that there is no atmospheric friction, yes, but there is still contact with the walls or ground of the tube.
"During most of the trip the capsules coast; using no power."
Um, no. It either has to be running on wheels or constantly supported by electromagnets the entire time. If the first, there is a constant requirement of energy to continue moving a massive object against ground friction. If the second, well, maglev isn't cheap. Even if, as suggested, "linear generators recover most of the electrical energy used to accelerate the capsules", that is certainly not a lossless process.
Second, how do you maintain a seal on a tube the length of a subway tunnel? That's a huge surface area, and not particularly easy to make either waterproof or airtight, even underground. And what happens if there is a breach in a passenger car? Your passengers will suddenly find themselves in an oxygen-less environment. Even a cabin depressurization on an aircraft at 10 km doesn't subject the passengers to total vacuum.
This proposal doesn't strike me as being fully thought out.
Can anyone say vaporware? This sounds really cool, but look at the language they use: all benefits and no drawbacks. Can anyone trust a viewpoint like that? Plus, the website is really horribly designed, which leads me to believe they have no money and have never built one of these. I like the idea though, a lot. I'm just skeptical of these utopian idealists.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
I belive that this was originally the idea of Tenacious D. You can hear Jack Black sing about it in the song "City Hall".
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
Mono- *DoH*!
Certainly, the energy requirements may be a small fraction, but consider the cost of installing a complete system in an urban environment that could actually use it? Here in Miami, it would be terribly difficult to construct a good system without severely hampering traffic even worse than it is already.
They say that the pods (or whatever you call them), will run on thin steel wheels, I suppose because they think that the thinner the wheels, the less friction or something, which shows that they obviously never took general college physics, because if they did, they would know that friction is not dependent on how big the contact area is.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
Hasn't it already been patented by the Logan's Run creators?
The web site seems very thin; merely an idea someone is trying to promote. They mention they don't even have a working model. And don't say they even intend to build one.
I totally want one of these now, but these guys don't even seem to have a real foothold beyond a patten and a bit of research.
I can see it now. They'll get Gates to finance this thing (he just loves innovation, and giving money, doesn't he?). Now, he'll make them use Windows boxes for traffic control. Next thing you now, some controller downtown will get a blue flash on his face, and you'll find yourself in a cute little cylindrical coffin stuck in a tube-traffic jam, in vacuum, with 18 minutes of oxygen left and a real urgent need for a bathroom. You can say I'm old fashioned, but I'll stick to my bike for a while, thank you very much.
Well, it certainly makes it sound wonderful; lower cost, less pollution, less effect on the environment. So what are the downsides to this technology? I refuse to believe that anything can be 100% wonderful..
Twenties Retirement
I think this will be _very_ difficult to establish.... not only for the aforementioned ROW considerations, but for physical reasons. A *perfect* vacuum is almost unattainable on Earth (very small capsules notwithstanding)... the energy required would be enormous to create a vacuum that is sufficient to reduce friction and drag to useful levels.... Besides, what are the occupants going to breathe? The capsules would have to be airtight... all of this seems pretty challenging and time consuming for a marginal benefit... I would like to know how much better this system is compared to straight mag-lev... _C
Bad spellers of the world untie!
OK so it is not a new idea.. but at least hire someone older than 13 to build your website before you go looking for investors!
Go to your local library and read `The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, By Robert Heinlien
Amazon
Back in the sixties, he wrote about this concept in enough detail (including the linear induction motors), that any decent engineer with a good budget could build one.
so if anyone tries to patent it, I can show prior art...
Otherwise, its a great idea, and I'd love to take a ride... if they ever actually build it.
According to the article: ETT could make transportation so economical that advertisers will pay travel cost if you watch their presentation en route.
They also want us to buy licenses to use their patents by simply Pay[ing] the one time license fee of $100.
Sounds like a scam to me.
Fry: Whoa!! [He sees the tube transport system and gives it a try.]
Man: Radio City Mutant Hall! [The man is sucked up into the tube]
Fry: Um. Cross Town Express? [He is sucked up into the tube] Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! [People look up from the street and stare at him. He is taken across the city, past the Statue of Liberty, underwater and finally out the other end smack into a building.]
Man: Pfft! Tourist!
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Okay, you can say "pneumatic" instead, then.
My deviantArt site
I wonder if I can "Profit as an ET3 Licensee" by spell-checking their fucking website. I mean, hell, I'm otherwise sold on the presentation alone. Especially the sickly green colours.
"If you could drive a car between San Francisco and New York in five and a half hours, nobody would ever fly... "
If you can get the police to stay out of my way. I bet I could.
You'll never keep a vaccum with this.
Not with the hundreds of miles of tube.
Not with termal expansion/contraction.
Not in an active city with people building, digging holes, running infrastructure.
Not in an even remotely seismic active area (remember the earthquake in NY?).
While its a cool idea, its just that, an idea. There's no way to overcome the problems and still make it as durable and cost less than existing technology.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I can just see the first test of a long stretch of track, where the orb/carrier speeds up, takes a corner, and suddenly *gasp* spawns a leak, which quickly evacuates the tube. This public fear would have to be throw away before anything like this could possibly take hold as something feasable, not counting the economical forces which will keep it from taking off.
as they've had the idea of Tube Transport in "futurama" for ages now!! :-P
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
The question the safety of a vacuum system like this, just imagine if the airlock malfunctioned and you get sucked into the tube...
but then again, that would be another cool mass transit system.. let's skip the capsule thing altogether, and just get sucked into a human sized tube that would feed you right into your office bright and early every morning.
Note that for local transportation, the problem isn't speed but coverage. I can't realistically take public transportation to work because it would take me far too long to get to the nearest station and because trains take far too long to get to the destination (because of a lot of stops).
For local transportation, another concept makes more sense to me: Personal Rapid Transit [1], [2]. Personal Rapid Transit consists of small passenger cabins (1-3 people) that you call to the nearest station and take to the station nearest to your destination, almost like a taxi or chauffeur. And unlike evacuated tube transports, they do not require a lot of digging or construction.
And, politically, personal rapid transit seems more promising in the short term: it's something that can be done at the local level.
This is wrong on so many levels.
1. Air friction isn't the majority of the friction
2. The energy to travel is low, but maintaining a the airless enviroment will have a hudge energy overhead.
3. Passenger cars etc will have to be built VERY well (like space capsules) at a huge cost to keep any sort of atmosphere inside.
In summary, HUGE COSTS.
The business social case seems pretty thin. I'm not sure that the system would cost society LESS resources, to take on current methods it would require using less resources. Each load may be cheaper, but the construction and upkeep costs would be huge.
We have trouble keeping ROADS pothole free and these guys want to have vacume tube travel requiring a lot of things to work perfectly so as not to kill people? Not gona happen.
Plus, the current costs of transport are pretty low when taken in historical terms. Transport overland of 100 miles in the middle ages would cost upwards of 10% of the value of the cargo and only relativly expensive things got moved.
Total 100% vaporware. The costs of this system would be HUGE. There is no free lunch. I'm just a lil phb mba type guy but this thing isn't going to be built, ever.
(OK, so this is pretty off-topic -- you have to admit it's kind of moving, for those of us old enough to remember the Classic Simpsons :)
Lyle Lanley: Well, sir, there's nothing on earth
Like a genuine, Bona fide, Electrified, Six-car Monorail!
What'd I say?
Ned Flanders: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
Patty&Selma: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: That's right! Monorail!
[crowd chants `Monorail' softly and rhythmically]
Miss Hoover: I hear those things are awfully loud....
Lyle Lanley: It glides as softly as a cloud.
Apu: Is there a chance the track could bend?
Lyle Lanley: Not on your life, my Hindu friend.
Barney: What about us brain-dead slobs?
Lyle Lanley: You'll be given cushy jobs.
Abe: Were you sent here by the devil?
Lyle Lanley: No, good sir, I'm on the level.
Wiggum: The ring came off my pudding can.
Lyle Lanley: Take my pen knife, my good man.
I swear it's Springfield's only choice...
Throw up your hands and raise your voice!
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: Once again...
All: Monorail!
Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken...
Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken!
All: Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!
[big finish]
Monorail!
Homer: Mono... D'oh!
At http://www.swissmetro.com. By no means a small undertaking. I personally don't think they'll ever get funding even though the idea is cool. They must have larger infrastructure costs than maglev and even maglev is prohibitively expensive.
No not really new. I have (somewere) a set of history books (done up like an encyclopedia) that talk about pneumatic tubes under the ground. Also showed models about atomic cars as well.
Besides what makes anyone thing this idea will take off when we have problems with regular rail travel?
Mapquest says it's 2906 miles from SF to New York. That puts your average speed at about 530 MPH. I'm pretty sure the cops wouldn't be able to catch you at that rate, anyhow.
If you decide to try it out, let me know and I'll race ya.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
The energy gain (the ~98%) would be spent on the necessary means of keeping the vaccuum inside an actual vaccuum.
Great Idea though.
Hey, if this becomes the next form of mass transit, it will take a long time for Osama to figure out how to take down an American icon with one of these cars! Let alone high jacking it with box cutters if it's autonomous. LOL
Yep, and B5 had the same kind of thing on Mars, an elevated transport of cars in clear tubes. So we know it is practical.
Same story with the jetliners we're flying in. They're pressurized containers flying at altitude. In theory, one can fly longer than the air would last in the cabin... How do they manage to keep enough breathable air in the plane to last for a 10 hour international flight?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
But probably not too hard to figure out by oneself...
It could be an interesting idea to make some kind of static magnetic mounting (excuse me, I don't know what the correct english term would be, I mean a kind of transrapid not requiring superconductors, but static magnets).
As they are planning tubes under the earth, I would propose a brachistochrone construction. Would be faster without requiring more energy.
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
Sure, for a technology that's supposed to revolutionise public transport, and cost billions to implement, some individual somewhere files a patent. That's supposed to reassure all those guys who're doing the investing?
And what's the "invention" in thinking up this stuff? I've seen and read about stuff like this for ages. Truly, the USPTO never ceases to amaze.
Moreover this is not like the pneumatic tubes you might have seen at various places that use differential air pressure to suck or push canisters along. Those are hardly high speed and hardly frictionless.
L. Neil Smith suggested something like this in one of his books, but he wanted to power it with liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen behind the vehicle in the tube.
They must maintain a vacuum however the length of one tube is from city to city, so even one hole along the path destroys the vacuum. I imagine maintenance costs to prevent this and security costs to prevent malicious people putting holes in it would be high.
Another thing is suppose one of the cars gets stuck. These things are going 300-4000mph in an environment that's supposed to be virtually frictionless. How do you stop all the other "cars" behind the broken one in time?
How gradual do the turns have to be? You can't exactly make a quick right turn at 300+mph and still have a comfortable ride. Maybe there will be no turns and it will stop every time it needs to change direction.
And doesn't this kinda remind people of network switches? Computerized management of "people packets" zooming through tubes?
The air at altitude for a jetliner will cause you to black out (hypoxia- look it up...) because there's not enough oxygen present at pressure for you to breathe. People fly all the time with more than a dozen in the cabin and for hours at a time with no problems- they seem to do it all the time these days.
This is not to say I wholly agree with their idea, just that your concerns are largely unfounded.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
bahahhahaha thats one of the funniest comments ive read lately on the dot!
hehe
they already have something like this with legos, in the big mission to mars series set a few years back you could shoot the aliens around in little capsules inside tubes
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
If this thing is ever going to get built in the first place, I think it's going to need a different title. I, for one, don't feel terribly comfortable riding in anything that's named for what you do if something goes wrong.
Does this graphic disturb anyone else? As far as I can tell it's effectively saying "lets melt the ice caps and destroy a couple equitorial environments for the sake of generating power". That's a nice environmentally friendly attitude they've got there.
"So, in closing, mono means one, and rail means rail."
"But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
These guys are running the stupidest scam ever. The third sentence on their homepage tells you how easy it will be to profit off their idea. The company can't be more than a bunch of ignorant tools looking for a good way to make some cash. Their premises are repulsively ridiculous, evacuating a tube does not permit virtually free transport, there are other losses there. And the maglev technology they speak of is hardly economical, feasible, or practical on a large scale. There are only a few maglev trains in the whole world, they've been around for awhile, and are incredibly expensive to operate, much less construct in the first place. These guys are saying they've invented this wonderful panacea to solve all our problems, but they have no idea what technology is required for their system, how much of that technology has never been developed, and how ridiculous it would be to attempt on such a large scale. Why don't they propose a national Disney-esque log ride for a transportation system! Better ideas have come from kindergarteners. My dog is smart enough to know how much this idea blows.
Come on... Nobody would be able to remove enough air to have TOTAL vacuum in a tube miles long.
:D Instead, the capsule is shot back like a pressure gun :D
So we are talking about a tube with some air in it in where a capsule moves.
Now, imagine that as the capsule moves, the fraction of air that is still in the tube must be pushed forward, until that there are so much pressure that the capsule can't move anymore..
And I doubt that creating vacuum in a tube so long would burn only 2% of energy used for other systems...
You wouldn't have to waste time to get to an airport - the terminal would be a neat little station a few minutes away.
correct me if i am wrong but... wouldnt that be kind of a pain in the arse to stop every few minutes... I dont know if i quite grasp the concept, but that would add alot of travel time with acceleration and deceleration, and how do these things fit together? do they all connect? do they go to within a few minutes away to anywhere... hmmmm... sounds like a few bugs yet... I would think that there would need to be some sort of connecting transportation to the main system... I would think that these wouldn't be anygood for anything but, what i would call, interstate driving
sig is broken try again tomorrow
I used to think about this a lot, for the following reason:
Imagine if we had a tube at ground level going all the way around the Earth.
If the tubes are vacuums, you can continually accelerate an object within them, since there is no terminal veolicity at constant acceleration the way there is from air. (At least at nonrelativistic speeds.)
Now let's calculate what orbital speeds are at sea level. At sea level, if you start out with zero downward momentum, you fall less than 10 meters in 1 second. If during that time you shoot forward far enough in a straight line that the Earth's curviture lifts you 10 feet, you've achieved orbit. NASA gives the Earth's diameter at the equator as 12,756 KM. Now the following calculation is REALLY easy using a diagram, but a bit tricky to describe. It uses only the pythagorean theorem.
Draw a circle, and two radii, one due west, one appreciably north. Draw a tangent at the circumference where the westerly radius touches (tangents are at right angles with radii). Now extend the second radius until it touches the tangent line. You should have a triangle whose hypotenuse is 12,756 KM + 10 M, of which one leg is 12,756 KM, and the other leg unknown. The other leg (along the tangent line) represents how much we need to move forward in 1 second, and we calculate it by taking the square root of the difference between 12,756.01 squared and 12,756 squared.
This number is 15.972. In other words, by MY calculation (I'm fresh out of high school though, so YMMV), orbiting at sea level requires you to go 15.972 miles in a single second. Compare that with the Space shuttle's "velocity of 27,880 km per hour" (/3600 seconds-per-hour) = 7.744. In other words, at an altitude of 322 KM, it can take nearly twice as long fall the same amount, which is explained by lower value of acceleration-due-to-gravity at that height. (Repeating our calculations above, substituting 12,756+322 for 12,756, we get sqrt( (12756+322+0.01)^2 - (12756+322)^2 ) = 16.172 KM, versus the 15.972 we had at ground level. However, to cover the same 10 feet, it now has a longer time to fall.
ANYWAY, the upshot of all this is that if you can accelerate something to 15.972 KM/s or (57,499.2 KM/h or (x0.62) 35,649 miles per hour, it will coast its way along without needing anything under it, and without consuming further gas.
This could be a really great way to deliver packages.
Draw a circumference at sea level that goes through a lot of interesting places, lay down a vacuum line (it doesn't actually need to support anything!! All it needs to do is be thin plastic that holds its shape at 1 atmosphere crush) all around it, then start this huge, heavy monolithic Delivery Bird sailing around at 35,649 mph, reaching every point along your line every fifteen minutes. I'm not sure how you get packages (including passengers) on and off the thing, but it sure sounds cool.
So, in conclusion, it's too cool to work.
your forgetting the grandaddy to all of this... the JETSONS!
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
Hah. Yes.
I personally think the price of air tightening these things is beyond anyone's imagination... we're talking about *tons* (litterally) of rubber joints for airtightning...
Also imagine an air leak into the system: capsules will start slowing down, and eventually grind to a halt in the middle of a 3 mile stretch of 2 foot wide tube. Then what?
Doesn't this seem like a more technologically advanced version of the Pneumatique, the air driven subway system that operated briefly in NYC a bit over a century ago? Only instead of the air being used to force the cars through the tunnel, it's removed to reduce friction... Still a bit on the nuts side, imagine what would happen in the event of a derailment (explosive decompression, anyone?), and of course maintaining the vacuum in the tunnel itself...
What would be more logical, however, would be to simply evacuate the air on one side of the car, to provide propulsion, making the train almost silent...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
good point, but from what i have seen of the website, it looks like a couple of 13 yearold h4x0rs put it up.
This is a really cool idea. However, although I am sure the technique works, I wonder how feasable it is in Real Life. A number of reservations I have:
1. Cost. How much will it cost to put down those tubes everywhere, keep them vacuum, maintain them, etc? How much does it cost to manufacture a vehicle for this system? Is this all going to be cheaper than driving an automobile (especially in countries with lower fuel prices)?
2. Popularity. Although I don't know the situation in the rest of the world, I know that in Holland people prefer going to work by car over going there by train even if trains are cheaper, faster, more comfortable, safer, better for the environment, don't have parking problems, and allow them to do some work or socialize while traveling. For some, this goes even if the train stops just as close or even closer to work than they could part their cars.
3. Usefulness. A transportation system is only useful if it gets you where you want to go. How precise this needs to be depends on the distance traveled and the frequency of the visits to this destination. The greater the distance, and the lower the frequency, the more willing people are to use additional means of trasnportation to get to their destination. Since it would probably be impossible for this system to achieve anywhere near the granularity of the road infrastructure, it's use is probably for longer distances. There, it competes with cars, trains, and aircraft. This syste will never be able to beat the flexibility of cars, nor the speed of aircraft. Trains are higly impopular with travelers. What niche will this system occupy?
Just some thoughts...
---
Caution: breathing may be hazardous to your health.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's already been done. Well, New York to LA anyway. Next year, they're doing San Francisco to Miami. I hope you have a lot of money, an exotic car, and no fear of tickets or jail time (and have the money to bail yourself out of jail). It takes a little more than 5 hours (more like 5 days), but it's about as close as you're going to get.
If you don't have the balls to participate in person, there's a Gumball 3000 video game on the PS2 (seems to be only in Europe, or at least I couldn't find a US version). It's based on the pre-2002 European Gumball 3000 races, not the latest US races (2002 and upcoming 2003).
...that it has happened. I live in Chicago and I can tell you that the mass transit here (consisting of elevated trains, subways and buses) are all quite reliable and serve us so well that most of the city rides one of the three everyday. There's no point in driving downtown or across town here, the mass transit does it easier, faster most of the time (especially during rush hours) and especially cheaper ($1.50 per ride or $1.50 per gallon of gas plus the cost of parking, which can be upwards of $20 a day). So don't give me your we'll-never-have-reliable-mass-transit-in-the-US-m ilitary-auto-company-big-oil-conspiracy crap!
Who could actully take this company seriously, with such nasty web design?
p.s. the only reason my site sucks is that i'm not trying to sell anything.
Sounds like a great system to me. Even if the vacuum seal broke it could still function. Things like this are going to have to become reality if we want to preserve our planet, and at the same time move into the future. But it will not happen, at least not for a long time. People fear change and greed puts the nail in the coffin.
Mass transit is a good example. Why don't American's use it? Because cars are more convinient. To hell with the environvent, people want to drive their gas guzzling SUV to the office where it will sit all day until they start it up again just in time to sit in traffic. It's not going to change until gas prices go up to high for most people to afford. Personally, I welcome it with open arms.
A more geeky example would be the slow adoption of Apache 2.0. It's flat out better and faster than the previous, but no one wants to upgrade. This caused the code freeze; technology being held back once again.
You know airlines, and car manufactuers will try to hold back anything that prevents them from making money. This will probably be the main thing that prevents something like this from making it out. Ever hear of the sweeteners Stevia or Sucrolose? Probably not, because sugar and artificial sweetener companies have been holding it back for years. Stevia has a sweetness like licorice, but without the licorice flavor; it has been used for thousands of years. Sucrolose is derived from sugar and tastes almost the same; it was invented over 10 years ago. Both are safe unlike some of the popular sweeteners, such as aspartame.
Boring holes through the ground is expensive. Laying train track (or vacuum vessels, as it were) is expensive. Purchasing turnstiles, escalators, and elevators is expensive. Paying personnel is *very* expensive. In contrast, the energy needed to run a train (or vacuum "train") is dirt cheap. Therefore, this project is barking up the wrong tree.
Closed loop wind tunnels are massive energy consumers.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
The article mentions a monorail train in wuppertal, germany. What they don't mention is the fact that a short while ago, i belive within two years, there was a pretty bad accident where the monorail was derailed and fell into a canal. People died. I have family in wuppertal and have been there three times. The monorail is for commuters and works just like other public transportation, you buy a ticket and board. Although, its a more fun ride.
im a hippie
Except this particular technology has nothing related to pneumatics.
The automobile became the worlds most popular form of transportation for one reason...it goes where you want it to go, when you are ready to go there.
The idea of public transporation is a joke. Busses and trains never really go where you want to go...and if they do, they are late getting there. Most public transporation is very uncomfortable, inconvenient and expensive, which is why 90% of the world doesn't use it.
We should spend more time and energy making private transporation more efficient, environmentally friendly, and enjoyable....not waste time and resources (public and private) on the failed idea of public transporation.
-ted
Source: AP Newswire
9 78 2345
http://www.nytimes.com/news.asp?newid=123091350
ETT capsule explodes upon docking with tube gate!
This is the third time we have had to put this thing on the ballot so the "leaders" on the city councel would let us build it. This vote will bypass the city councel. One of the best slogans from the last vote was "Re-elect the Monorail!"
The Stranger (pdf file) has a very good editorial on why you should vote yes.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
While we're here, check out San Francisco's crackpot candidate for Supervisor. This guy has actually built models of his tunnel and tetrahedron projects. If we act quickly we may be able to get him to adopt the vacuum idea before he gets elected Tuesday.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
i cant help but think of the transport tubes in new new york. and THOSE make me think of the tubes they use at costco to send the recipts from the till to the room in the back, which is acctually even more like this thing because you load a bunch of things into a capsule which is the vaccumed from one point to another.
Since when does no air == no friction?
If you take two sticks into space and rub 'em they're still going to wear against each other. No?
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
An actual implementation has been proposed back in 1997 and discussed at the political. A 40 miles pilot track is being planned between Geneva and Lausanne.
The main obstacles are cost and, as for all big constructions in Switzerland, the need to address any and all concerns about degradation of the environment.
Check it out!
In a large-scale, it would be probably only a little slower than the concord but heller-efficient and quiet ('cause of the vacuum).
There's no sound transmitted in a vacuum, but your ears are presumably not in that vacuum. If someone were outside the pod in a pressurized suit, banging on the hull with a monkey wrench, you'd hear it inside. Likewise, the sound of wheels against tracks, electrical hum, engine noise -- exactly the things you hear in a subway anyway.
The magnitude would undoubtedly be less, since there would be no ambient noise, but here your comparison breaks down regardless -- the Concorde cruises at supersonic speeds, beyond the speed of sound. You hear vibrations transmitted through the superstructure, but leave everything else behind.
This could take all those "trapped in the elevator" scenes in horror and seduction movies to a new level!
The Wright Bros didn't try to traverse the Atlantic to test their first plane, fellas.
I work in two different buildings on the same street. Heck, my whole campus (Boston Univ) is a mile long down a single street...but we'll just concentrate on my two buildings.
They're separated by about 2 city blocks. I would be willing to test a vacuum-based system that could send me from rooftop to rooftop at my desire. I would also be willing to test any Star-Trekkian transporters, maglevs, camels, resynthesizers ala The Fly circa 1986, and any glide-wires.
No trebuchets or catapults, please. I'm lazy...but not crazy.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I'm not sure if that makes this a "new" idea. In a paper Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, wrote in his freshman year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he proposed, "in detail a railway line between Boston and New York, in which the cars were run in an evacuated tube and were prevented from metal-to-metal contact with the guide rails by electromagnets." This quote is from a Goddard Biography by Edward Pendray. Goddard estimated a Boston to New York travel time of 10 minutes.
So when I ride this do I have to have a deposit slip?
Genesis II
http://home.att.net/~paxteam21/G2/g2.html
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0070101
If capsule got air leak somehow passangers will
be suffocated inside.
The idea that this is a new kind of transportation is completely wrong. Such vacuum tubes were in the drawing boards since the 60's. I have seen several pictures of prototypes which were just artistic reproductions of real designs. However, the oil crisis of 73 made these and many other "alternative" transportations go into oblivion.
I wouldn't blame exclusively the Arab magnates for this. The problem looks much more complex and includes the dismissal of Lunar expeditions and the pre-"Star Wars" craze of the 70's. But I consider that for the last 30 years we are seriously stucked in development. We are a shadow of the technocratism of the 70's. We have been developing extensively, and, majorly, we keep sitting on the same ideas and technologies that were created then. Till now, we have not exploited the whole spectrum of inventions and ideas created back then. We have even run backward, as it will take some other 10 years to get back to the Moon. And we see on overold idea, with the same plus and minuses pointed back then, being presented as new.
Sincerly I'm terribly scheptical that this thing will go out of the drawing board. If anyone manages to do it, it will be great. However, I believe that people lost the hand for creativity and risk and go more for the extravaganza of the invention. Much like steam engines were for ancient greeks and egyptians... (Yes, they knew the steam engine...)
Was this principle not already shown some thirty years ago?
Smugling people acros the border using service modules in the sovjet gas pipe line.
006,75
My god it's ugly. If they want this project to be succesful they'll need a webdesigner to fix it up. Otherwise it just looks unprofessional and nobody will take the idea seriously.
The Welkin: Online Music Reviews
ready!!!
JUMP crap i missed
Exactly this concept of transportation has been under consideration in Switzerland for a long time under the name Swissmetro. The idea is to link the major population centers together, creating in effect a single country-wide city. The technology is ready to build the demonstration track from Geneva to Lausanne (~30 km), but so far, the government and the Federal Assembly have been unwilling to shell out the CHF 1.5 bio (about /$ 1 bio) required to do it.
Go hither for a cool simulation video or thither for technical details, or even yonder for the math.
Cities will be designed around Ginger!
there's nothing new in this story, in fact the concept dates back over 160 years.
http://mikes.railhistory.railfan.net/r027.html
the atmospheric railway came in two flavours - one where the carriages were attached to pistons inside an evacuate tube, the other where the entire carriage was inside the pipe - an experimental section ran in croydon, london in the 1840s
why would you want teh sex with supermodel naomi campbell when you could have the mature winnie mandella.
On Moonbase Alpha, we call these things, "Travel Tubes".
Man was not meant to
-fly
-go faster than 60 MPH
-go to the moon
It's always easy to shoot things down (for any of you scientists - ever have journal club?), than to see the possible merits of the idea.
OK so L.A., Japan and other seismicaly active areas are probably "out" for placement of these systems.
Any industry chemists, engineers or physicists out there with any experience low pressure systems? Remember this doesn't have to be a "total" vacuum, just low enough to balance the vacuum pump to fuel ratio.
..........FULL STOP.
Does anyone remember the Sea Quest episode where they built one of these things underwater? They brought up an interesting point... what happens when the brakes go out at extreme velocities and no friction to slow you down?
Two things:
t m
1) The Swiss metro project seems about to have a go at this; see
http://www.swissmetro.com/sito/default_eng.h
2) Apart from the description in Heinlein, the US patent (see ttp://www.et3.com/US_Pat5950543ETT.htm) refers to two overseas patents; one in Germany and one in the UK:
4028292 Mar., 1992 DE 104/138.
1207563 Oct., 1970 GB 104/138.
The Swiss-metro site claims that their idea was
conceived in 1974, which would predate the US patent:
"Rodolphe Nieth develops the concept of a Swissmetro to provide high-speed travel between Switzerland's principal urban and rural areas."
I have no idea really about the validity of a patent in the US in the presence of overseas patents on the same subject. Do they count as prior art at all?
Poke a small hole in the tunnel while at the underground station and run like hell! It'd take a serious amount of air to fill in few miles of a huge vacuum pipe.
This concept has been looked in for the last 20 years in Switzerland under the name of "Swissmetro".
A quick summary of it here.
The most complete analysis of the project I've seen here.
Basically, it's probably doable, but the major roadblock is a VERY strong political support (even in a very pro-mass transit country like switzerland), because of the massive costs to validate the faisability of it. In Switzerland, that support has not materialized in the last 20 years.
-- p a n a p i c - panoramas des alpes: Mont-Blanc, Mont-Rose, Cervin, etc...
Even if you do manage to invent a method of tranportation that uses "less than 2%" of the energy of "current methods," all you're doing is enabling the same old planet to support that many more warm bodies. You're still gonna run out of other things, like fresh water, a place to put the trash, coal, tolerance, etc, etc...
At what point does the species introspect and note that it probably isn't necessary to have 6, 8, 15 or 20 billion copies of itself stumbling around munching on stuff? Hmm?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
C'mon....do the math. Total up the world's capacity of public transportation....and then compare it to the number of people in the world who commute....the two figures aren't even close. If the system worked well, and was economical, people would ditch their cars for it. My fiancee commutes to Jersey City, NJ every day. It costs her $400/mo for that privilage and it SUCKS.
I'm a realist...humans are free and independent creatures...they like forms of transporation that are ready when they are. The best implementation of that is the car.
Now, your crack about the middle east is low. I like driving my PERSONAL automobile. It is gas fueled, but it isn't a gas-guzzling SUV....it's a VW golf, and it gets great gas milage. I'd use an ethanol-gasoline mix if I could buy it somewhere near me.
Public transporation is a failure...ask the guys running Amtrak, they'll tell you that EVERY public transporation system in the world is government funded/supported because they can't sustain themselves on their paying riders.
We need to develop fuel efficent PERSONAL transporation and the infrastructure to support it. That's the only model that will work.
As far as the American without a passport comment...my parents are Greek, and i've been to Greece many times (and other places in Europe). Public transport there sucks as well. I'd much rather drive my own car on the autobahn.....
-ted
Okay... Say they do manage to create a vacuum that actually works. And say they do create tubes and cars that don't rupture. And say they can build secure enough airlocks to handle the tremendous vacuum. And say they do manage to claim enough right-of-way to pull this off...
Exactly how long would it take to pressurize and depressurize an airlock capable of fitting one of these cars in? Not to mention the fact that the car will expand and contract when inside the airlocks. (That is, unless they are made of the same quality materials that nuclear subs are.) Passengers will probably feel that pressure gradient. Also, if you have to wait 5 minutes for the air to be evacuated out of the airlock, then accelerate, travel, decelerate, and then wait 5 more minutes for the airlock at other station to be filled with air again, most shorter trips would be faster by bicycle. Currently, subway trains are usually pull into the station, unload, reload, and pull out of the station withina couple of minutes. To be more efficient than existing subway systems, there will need to be either a large number of trains per hour, or a large number of cars per train (or both).
--guru
Try living in Los Angeles without a car.
The BART is fantastic. It has trains that run minutes apart. It covers some serious ground. You can get from the Embarcadero across the bay to Jack London Station (Amtrak) in mere seconds. It would take you about four times as long to drive there, not including the infamous Bay Area parking problems.
You're on fucking crack, dude. Learn some patience.
Meet George Jetson
His boy elroy...
"Statistically, the death rate due to terrorism is much lower than deaths caused by operator error, weather, and mechanical failures."
Ouch, given how we were on code orange or whatever for all those months in this post 9-11 world, just how easy is it for the braindead slob, reliance on solar power, or shoddy equipment to screw us over?
Yeah, the idea of patenting this is ridiculous. I invented the idea of Evacuated Tube Transport when I was a kid. I remember thinking about the Maglev trains I had read about and thinking how cool it was to remove all rolling friction. Then, I thought about how the rest of the friction could be removed: take out the air.
Of course, it may be that I had read about the idea in a SciFi story or something instead. The point is that it is a trivial idea to invent with modern knowledge.
If this is a new idea, I'm the king of the Ottoman Empire (haven't heard that in a while, have ya?)...
I've been thinking about this for some time. For all the problems you can come up with, I can list the solutions... Think it's terribly hard to maintain a vaccum? Well it doesn't need to be a perfect vaccum... The less air, the better, but you would have to have a prototype to figure out exactly what atmosphereic level is the most effecient to maintain.
Just increasing the temperature in the tube, or the air speed would quickly drop the air pressure to the point that travel in a tube is more economical than in our standard atmosphere.
As far as the tube cracking, it wouldn't need to be one single enclosure... Any number of doors can open as vehicle is going by, and then close to seal that section after. Almost like an air-tight Panama canal.
Want the sceneic route? Materials like plexiglass can be utilized to give the passengers a view of the outside world.
Despite all the arguements, it boils down to one fact... No matter what the technology inside the pipe, or the air pressure, it will be faster than trains, cars, or busses. And it will be, BY FAR, safer than any other mode of transportation.
Even if it doesn't outrun planes (which it will), even if it isn't less expensive than any other mode of travel (which it will be), even if it isn't safer than ony other mode of travel (which it definatly will be), it will still be easy to find a local station, and it will be far less hassle than planes, trains, or automobiles.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
So no, I wouldn't expect to see any tubes erected by ET3. Now or ever. This is just another example of the deep flaws in the patent system.
It's GNU/matic
This is basically an ad for the patent holder! Or am I too cynical?
-psyco
OK, you're all skeptical. Here's the FAQ from my investment prospectus.
OK, trying to find some references that prove this is not a new idea.
Here's what I've got so far:
---
Title: Abstracts of concepts of high speed ground transportation systems.
Corp Author(s): TRW Systems Group. ; United States.; Office of High-Speed Ground Transportation.
Publication: [Washington, D.C.? : TRW Systems Group],
Year: 1967
Description: 1 v. (various pagings) : ill. 28 cm.
Language: English
Abstract: Includes Carveyor, Metro-Belt, Tex Train, Marco System, Starrcar, Urbmobile, Roller-Road, RRollway, Trans Drive, FOA Tubeflight, Gravity-Vacuum transportation, Tubeway, Airmobile, rolling sliding systems, tracked levitation systems, Metran, Urban transit systems.
SUBJECT(S)
Descriptor: High speed ground transportation.
Note(s): "Prepared under contract no. C-353-66 (Neg) 5 July 1967, for the Office of High Speed Ground Transportation, Department of Transportation."
---
Flat out for trains; ; The Boston Globe; ; ; Jul 01, 1991; ;
Flat out for trains
Can the Swiss lead the way? Maybe so, if they turn out to be the first to exploit emerging transportation technology to slash travel time between major urban centers in their mountainous country. They want to build a train system using magnetic levitation to allow them to achieve speeds of 300 m.p.h. between Geneva and Zurich on one leg and Basel and Bellinzona on the second.
The technology would be enhanced by the construction of tunnels that would be kept under partial vacuum to make passage of the trains easier.
The sacrifice for riders: some of the most spectacular scenery on the tourist circuit. Passengers will get there zip-zip but miss plenty of Alpine views on the way. Can't have everything, it seems.
---
Title: Options for sustainable passenger transport: an assessment of policy choices
Source: Transportation Planning and Technology 19, no.3-4 (1996) p. 221-233
Language: English
Abstract: If the current trends in transport are not changed, a sustainable transport system is not feasible. In order to achieve such a state, new technologies may be an interesting option. In this paper, several success and failure factors for the introduction of new technologies are analyzed. These possibilities are identified in different areas, notably economic, spatial, institutional, social/psychological and technological fields. Within this context the following new options are discussed: the electric car, people movers, subterranean infrastructure, telematics, the high speed train, the high speed maglev train, shuttles in vacuum tunnels and alternative fuels. Finally, some policy choices, which may stimulate future technical developments, are discussed. It is concluded that an active government policy may stimulate the introduction of new technologies, which may make a substantial contribution to achieving a sustainable transport system
---
I commute to work every day on the London underground (the tube). I really can't see this working. We already have "Service today is cancelled due to leaves on the track", "Service today is cancelled due to signal failure" and "service is cancelled this Sunday due to planned engineering work".
You expect this organization to maintain a hard vacuum in the tunnels? They are under constant pressure to keep costs down, and it shown in the reliability problems. It's just too damn easy to break a vacuum seal. It might work for a day, but to succeed it has to work for 100 years (yes, the London underground has been running for longer than that)
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I can't do the math, as I haven't the figures available. I suspect you can't do the math either, as you don't quote any figures. :-) What I can say is that I've been to a number of countries that run very efficient public transportation (I'm especially thinking of the Netherlands, and the Amsterdam trams). India, Japan, northern Europe all have at least adequate public transport systems. You don't say how far Jersey City is from your fiancee, so it's hard to say if the train cost is reasonable or not. The question to ask is how much it would cost her, considering fuel and maintenance to run a car for that same commute each month (and don't forget parking fees, of course).
Now, your crack about the middle east is low. I like driving my PERSONAL automobile. It is gas fueled, but it isn't a gas-guzzling SUV....it's a VW golf, and it gets great gas milage. I'd use an ethanol-gasoline mix if I could buy it somewhere near me.
Nice car, I'm a big fan of the Golf (my advisor runs one). While you have a point that personal transportation is more useful in general than public transport (no schedules, service to everywhere there's a road, etc.), this doesn't preclude public transport at all. Most people put a large chunk (most?) of the miles on their vehicles going to work every day, and this ratio likely increases if one works in a city one can't afford to live in (working in NYC, living in Jersey). Use public transport during the week, drive to your vacation paradise in your gas-electric hybrid on the weekend...
Public transport, when properly executed, doesn't just cut on gas usage, but also smog, noise and traffic. It puts less strain on a city's infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, parking ramps, &cet.) And it also encourages slightly more walking, which is vastly better for the population for other reasons.
Your point about Amtrak is well-taken, but I don't see it as particularly relevant. Do most roads pay for their own maintenance? Isn't that what part of a state's gas tax goes towards? Aren't there Federal highway subsidies? Toll roads may mitigate the cost of upkeep, but I hardly think they are self-sustaining. Why should public transport networks be less worthy of tax dollars? Why a different standard, especially given the health and environmental bonus?
For examples, New York has an adequate public transport network, and Washington D.C.'s is absolutely first-rate. So, it can be done, at least on an intra-city level. Most of America's public transport problems come from attitude, not because the concept is inherently unworkable.
Cheers,
The Mouser
Did anyone else immediately think about the opening credit to Futurama as soon as you read this article.
You can't really deny that, I think it is the travel method of the future (so says Futurama).
---
Mike
I'm going to kick the next person that I see with their karma rating in their sig.
Uhhh, evacuating an 8000 mile long tube (DC - Bejin) borders on the impossible, or at best very costly and impracticle. It is a novel idea and would make for some intersting sci-fi, but I really doubt people are going to want to travel in what amounts to coffins (assuming someone can figure out how to make the whole vacuum thing remotely cost effective).
The SwissMetro project started in 1974. Due to the high cost of the project, there isn't yet a trial-run on a short distance, but the two top technical schools of the country (EPFL & ETH) keep working on the projet.
Well, feel free to commit suicide as an attempt to do your part in reducing the population problem.
Or is just that there are too many "other" people?
Politas
They would consider building one of these across a fault line like the San Andreas fault? I somehow doubt that a vacum tube would remain one in the event of a shift along the fault line or that the track would remain intact.
I don't see this as really feasible excep in countries with almost no major geological activity, and there you have the problems of funding, plausibility and public fear of an obviously risky concept.
A World Out of Time by Larry Niven had one of these.
Well, another patent that's clearly unfair - but does it really matter this time?
How long do patents last and how long will it be before anyone actually tries to build one?
By the time it becomes an issue, the patent will have lapsed, I'm sure.
We're sadly in love with our cars, and while we can still instigate wars in the middle east to keep gas prices atrificially low, we'll never give them up.
Seems funny, in the 70's we all drove little tiny Japaneese cars to cling onto our one car one person commuter lifestyle, cars that were barely big enough for one person.
Now, Madison ave. has conned most of America into thinking they need SUVs, and we commute one person, one vehicle, in trucks that easily hold as many people as a subway car. =)
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
These tubes are at least as dangerous as ordinary mass transit because they're moving people at high speed inside heavy machinery.
Then there's all these fun differences to keep in mind:
Safer? Sheesh.
When I saw the headline I visualised _real_ pipeline mass transit: people being pumped through pipes.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
So we get a hole in the tube and we get a real fast blow job then we die. Sorry ladies you get swollen labs and nips. ..(sigh) .. As seen on TV.
.. ..
Damm and if I farted no one in the tube would hear it
So I guess loud speaker to announce arrivals would not happen either.
Hey you could have your luggage outside in the tube and it would get smaller cause the air gets sucked out
Sponsored by Electrolux no doubt.
we could call it SUCK
Some
Useless
Carrier
Killer
We could put in a bunch of neon and have great light show on the trip..
I can see it now
Hey mister what's this plug do
POP..
Great work son you just sucked 25 people back to NYC.
Now for the emergency speach by the crew.
Welcome to invitro ladies and gentlemen.
In the event of a emergency, you are in deep excrement. We have no friction type braking as there is no friction . We have no radio cause it don't travel so good in a vacuum.
But we do have the MS low orbit satelite system to tell us where we are.
So in case of emergency please reboot your seat.
If you get a blue screen of death . You are screwed the reason is
The explanation of charge separation, nuclear rotation, toroid formation (electricity/current/space/time/matter), also the 45-degree tilting of the rotational axis of atomic and celestial bodies with respect to the magnetic axis, the subatomic particles (the items of the substructure which are relationships or events or functions, not actual "particles"), the quantum substructure of matter itself, as well as the relationships among, magnetism, gravity, mind, and consciousness, also time and space or electricity [matter], and especially the FIVE (not four) basic forces of nature.
Because this nut case said so
http://www.dnai.com/~zap/
Anyone want to take stab at teaching dude html ??
Like my name
it stinks too
doesn't anybody worry about vandalism on these isolated tubes? If by simply breaking a tube with an axe or something one could kill hundreds of people, I think there are many people who would take this opportunity to wreak havoc, unless the tubes were isolated underground (which makes them significantly less economical).
Read jack phelps dot net
Baraka. I'd feel like a little baby chicken and the chicken factory (see Baraka) or that cool thing at the drive up teller at the bank that I've always wanted to be little enough to ride in.
Brilliant transportation concept. What are the natural resource capabilites for building a network like this?
Why do I get the feeling that the United States would take for ever to get with the program?
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
Everyone's pointed out already that maintaining a vacuum is not going to work out in the long run. However, reducing the pressure of a metro *sounds* doable.
Passenger jet cabin air pressure is, what, 50% of sea level pressure? Less than that? Nobody seems to suffer too much except your feet expand a little after several hours.
So anything fundamentally problematic with reduced air pressure in existing metro systems? Since the air resistance grows exponentially, this should bring quite a bit of savings. Waaay easier to do than vacuum, too.
on his wireless keyboard, if he has an appropriate receiver? nice to know :)
Hope bluetooth is in stores soon...
For TV Series...and I am sure that a look into Golden Age Science Fiction will find this idea, and if not, in the 1960s for sure. It's not a new idea...
ttyl
Farrell
p.s. Do check out Genesis II if it is ever on late night TV...some of the charators had two belly buttons...it would make Brittny & Co jelous!
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
It sounds awesome!
But I as many others recon it can be very dangerous because of the risk of suffication, outburst etc. I also wonder how fast humans can travell without getting injured. Are we made for travelling at these speeds. I doubt it! At least if we are supposed to be in a tube going at 4000miles
Perhaps it's better to use for transportation of goods and materials. This will save the enviroment for a lot of pollution and is not as dangerous. Just brilliant!!
Imagine if two of these pressurized cars collide, and their seals break. All their air would escape into the tube, and any passengers that survived the impact would suffocate in a fairly gruesome Total-Recall-like manner.
The safety section of their FAQ doesn't even address this.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
old hat
People keep stealing ideas from stories I write, should I sue?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
What, have you been living in a cave the past century?
It's interesting how many concrete and hard statements are being made about things like cost and ease of construction, considering nobody's ever built one of these before. I almost feel like I was reading about an upcoming software product that's expected (by the vendor) to revolutionize the world!
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Read the thread before you post...
They are talking about the fact that there will be SOME gas in the tube, not much, but it will be there.
Aerospace engineers have been doing this kind of problem in the lab for years, we call them shock tubes, you can also check google.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
In switzerland we have been having a firm that has been promoting building such a train for a long time. Several universities have done feasibility studies to show that it can be done. It is currently discussed if the state should pay for the enormous costs involved.
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
They have no intention of building anything, just make money for their shareholders from tha patents. And this encourages innovation? All it does is put a roadblock against someone who really wants to build it.
From their site ("company summary" page)
Our aim is to generate returns for our shareholders by acting now to acquire control of important blocks of intellectual property (patents and trade secrets) in the ETT field. We currently own the patent and trade secret rights to Evacuated Tube Transport, the first practical evacuated tube transport technology. We believe that these ultra efficient and environmentally benign systems, will become key components of numerous future worldwide transport systems. ET3.COM INC. intends to take full advantage of the generic nature of this unique technology by securing the intellectual property rights on the lion's share of all specific applications, new devices, and novel systems issuing from it. Management also believes that we are well positioned to gain control of other major intellectual property by developing new patents and trade secrets through our own internal efforts and by developing patent-exploitation agreements for the patents and trade secrets belonging to others.
"capsules 2 feet in diameter and 8 feet long could be used for one person lying down" (from the faq)
I wonder... who in the world would climb into a capsule lying down to use this transport? Even space capsules of the 1960s had more room!
I'm evacuating my tube just thinking about it!
A description of a larger scale system can be found here.
Horizontal Deformation Velocity Map, Version 2.0, Crustal Deformation Working Group 1, Southern California Earthquake Center, 1998.
Modeling broadscale deformation in Northern California and Nevada from plate motions and elastic strain accumulation, Murray and Segall, 2001.
Didn't anyone actually read the ET3 website? Did you pay attention to site design? Did it look proffesional? I know my spelling and grammer are not perfect, but i expect more from a legitimate undertaking. The business plan sounds like you send them money and ideas for their proprietary use and then _hope_ the patent holders decide whatever idea you had is worth giving you shares in the company. Did you notice they mention "sublicensing"? Sounds like a network...Dang..gotta work....
I remember this as an idea from and late 70's early 80's rodenberry flick (maybe made for TV). It was called "Genesis 2" which starred a tom selleck wannabe (or maybe even him), who was cryogenically frozen only to be awakened after a huge nuclear holocaust had destroyed the world and it was being re-created by the survivors, who were fighting a war between themselves.
It was very much a rip-off of planet of the apes, but they used a GLOBAL underground super-high speed transit system that they claimed was "safer than air travel".
Invest the money in getting fusion and solar
power to be viable and economic. Having free
energy would solve so many other problems, we
wouldn't have to worry about scrimping and saving
on energy all the time. Want fresh water?
Desalinate seawater using free power. Conservation
is a joke, when we run up into any shortage, we
come up with new technology to solve the problem.
Frictionless, or nearly frictionless?
If you remove ALL the air, and run it on maglev, there is no friction.
Since when is maglev "nearly frictionless"? Am I missing something?
(i'm referring to the maglev system, not air friction, pretend we are on the moon here)
I think part of the problem is the belief that transportation should drive you right to your door, so you can roll out of your comfy car seat and onto your couch.
A transportation system only has to get you within a few blocks of your destination, as it only takes a few minutes to walk the rest. And to top it all off, it's needed exercise that most people don't get.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
I think that's the biggest obstacle to a successful implementation of this system. The automobile is an icon of U.S. culture precisely because you can go wherever you want, whenever you want, pollution, politics, or energy costs, be you know what. There's more than technology or environmental issues tied up in this. [-)
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
And you might have something semi workable.
Have the capsules fly 18 inches off the surface of the tube using the generated air cushion to keep them up.
N thousand mph are pie in the sky anyway.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Diving to 5 atm fairly quickly won't hurt.. unless you have air pockets somewhere, and you get squeezed, like with a bad filling or plugged sinuses...
It's when you ascend that you have to be careful... but if you did a quick dive to 5atm and then headed back up, you wouldn't have to go especially slowly.. as long as you are not having trouble equalizing pressure in your sinuses/ears/etc.....
Go deep enough, somewhere around 100 feet, and nitrogen starts to act similar to nitrous oxide, which isn't really good when you have to keep your wits about you...
The only time you have to come up slowly, and take decompression stops is once you've been down too long and you have to wait for dissolved nitrogen to leave your system safely so you don't go fizz.
Interesting points, but I just have to say that most jetliners cannot truly glide. With all engines out, the average jetliner has all the the flight capacity of a brick.
Jetliners can glide just fine with all their engines out -- sure, the glide ratio stinks (maybe 10:1) but most flights are planned so that an airport is always within the all-engines-out glide distance.
Read about the "Gimli Glider", a Boeing 767 which made a safe landing after both engines flamed out due to fuel exhaustion.
Kiscica
"Air is permanently removed from the tubes; so travel takes place without friction."
So, air is the only source of friction?? Well, lucky for me, then, the disc brakes in my car must be full of air!
Lately, my 5-year-old son enjoys the word "moron". It might apply.
(I'm ignoring your parenthetical statement.)
It's unlikely that they would actually make the pressure very different from atmospheric pressure. This would reqiure extremely strong tunnels, extremely good seals, and a great deal of energy to evacuate the tunnel in the first place; and any damage to the tunnel would be disasterous.
Instead, it makes more sense to fill the tunnel with a very light gas, like helium, at approximately one atmosphere (either higher so that oxygen doesn't contaminate the tunnel, or lower so that people don't get asphyxiated by leaks). There would then be much less friction than with wheels and much less air resistance than with air.
I'm sure there are a dozen other comments pointing out that this is an old concept... but none seem to have mentioned this particular version. Many years ago (late 50's, I believe) a Rand physicist by the name of Robert Salter came up with something that sounds a whole lot like this supposed "news". He called it the Planetran, and it's popped up in the press and fiction many times. It's even made an appearance in some very strange recent articles about the so-called "shadow government".
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
When I was younger, I had dreamed up a transportation system using this methodology.
Amazingly, my idea was almost identical to this, except I didn't really come up with a good accelleration method such as hte maglev.
Too bad at age 10 I wasn't thinking about patents.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
[drum roll]
Making money from it, not by actually DOING anything, but simply by acquiring intellectual property rights and then licensing the technology.
Or perhaps, finding a bunch of sucke... er, venture capitalists desparate/stupid enough to believe in a crazy scheme like this, right after the dot-com bust.
This executive summary page really says it all. For example, their financial strategy is:
So essentially, they control a few patents and have some trade secrets (as mentioned elsewhere on the page), and they're going to make money by licensing it. They're not actually going to DO any of the work. Somehow, others will magically finance the construction, solve the technical problems, work out all the logistics, operate the system, and maintain it.
They even make an estimate/wish that ETT will "advance" over the next 30 years. Unlikely as that seems, one thing is absolutely certain. Those patents will lapse into the public domain by then, and that would be plenty of time to reverse engineer any ecomonically important trade secrets.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I'm glad he patented this thing back in 1999. That means the patent will expire by 2024. I doubt any will be built by then. Lots of stupid obvious patents will expire in 25 years and no one will ever be able to patent them again.
:)
I like this idea. I can see huge benefits to this over airplanes. Smaller numbers of people traveling faster, leaving more often, no runways needed, no taxying, no pilots, less waiting, less security, less money, closer parking. I'd use it!
I'd prefer it if the tubes were underground. I'd hate to have some moron park a barrel of fertilizer next to the tube and kill 100 people. Make 'em dig for it!
You could build it using a mini version of the diggers they made for the Chunnel. I'd suspend the tubes in water though. It leaks much slower than air and a thick water buffer around the tube would protect it against seismic shifts. What happens when it get's stuck and you have to go to the bathroom?
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress had them back in 1966. I believe they were called "ballistic tubes," and had all the properties mentioned in the patent.
Of course, Heinlein's tubes also travelled at orbital velocity so as to reduce friction and/or power to the maglev coils. This feat would obviously be much harder to replicate on the earth.
http://www.wegrokit.com/miahm.htm
Can anyone beat 1966 for prior art?
there's more than one way to do it, but your way is wrong
Why not have the passengers do a little pedalling? They could then generate a portion the electricity from the sweat of their brow--helping to "Slim Up America." Or, rather than make it a high-speed system, we could make it a little lower speed and have them bike their way.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
... so, stop it, you're killing me. But hey, a tube running from NY to LA would be a great idea.
...
... but that's a very short run and the price must be somewhat overhead-y.
The proposed tunnels under the Santa Ana Mountains are projected at $100 million per mile.
Assuming they are underbudgeted and are for simple road tunnels anyway, and allowing for the scale and depth of a 3000-mile tunnel with reasonably-stringent controls on the running tunnel, and also allowing for the number of digging machines to perform the job in 10 years, I can settle on $250 million per mile total costs for the NY-LA tunnel.
Thus, $750 billion.
Even with an ambitious 10-year construction program, that's an average of $75 billion a year.
People squawk over a mere billion for a single project, so I can't see budgeting seventy-five billion every year for the thing.
Structure: The running tube would have to be evacuated. But it can't be sealed to the rock tube in which it runs. The rock tube will shift at some point over its 3000 mile run due to subsistence or a quake. Shifting will misalign the running tube, at least cracking it and letting in some air. So, the evacuated running tube would have to be suspended and buffered in a larger rock tunneling. I don't think that making [a large rock tunneling] into the [evacuated running tube] would be workable. If the capsule runs in a simple tube, then all the other stuff can be outside in air, thus easily maintainable while the system continues to run.
Drive: Since the running tube needs to be evacuated, driving has to be manual or electromagnetic. Manual drive is promising. It stays with the capsule and leaves the running tube simple. But, it will probably involve some friction. Electromag drive is frictionless, but requires something complicated along the running tube. Hopefully where my ignorance here ends, some fine engineering can begin, where some electromag system can tap power along running inductive lines and put the complicated stuff on the capsule and thus leave the running tube simple once again. I do foresee the need for having drivers -- and access points -- occur often in the tube, since one can be stranded within the tube for some reason.
Safety: This system will be as dangerous as an airplane. If the capsule is really going at a couple of klicks per second, then any catastrophe will be spectacularly and instantly fatal. The effects of other failures will be gradual, like air leaks and electrical failures. Enough oxygen can be put aboard to alleviate the problem of stranding.
Finally, there is the problem of finance and lawsuits.
Well, that kills the entire idea. Unless slave labor is employed to grind out the tunnel, no one in America will want to foot the bill. The only economic and timely way to make the 3000-mile tunnel is to have a multitude of tunneling machines digging the line with a similar multitude of machines laying the running tunnel. This translates unavoidably into $X-per-mile costs. How much? Well, the British Channel tunnel ("Chunnel") cost $15 billion for 31 miles, thus $500 million per mile
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
But the original design-idea dates back to 1934, when Hermann Kemper received a patent on "magnetic levitation of trains". He already envisioned sub-ocean trains in vacuum-tubes, back in the 1930s !
I can't find the text of the patent anywhere, but I read this in a magazine some time ago.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Big deal. I did Seattle to Wash DC in 5 or 6 days in a jetta (filled with stuff, too). Would've been less, but i stopped off at some cool places to take pictures and I only drove 6 hours a day. My grandfather drove DC -> denver in 36 hours.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
A quibble:
There's the metro north also, I can take a train to just about any place in the state of NY for a few dollars.
Metro North serves much more of CT than NY. And the majority of NY state might as well be Idaho as far as train service goes.
You cannot get a few dollar train from NYC to Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Binghamton, Watertown, Ithaca, Auburn, Oneonta, Oswego, (need
I continue?). You can get a slow, expensive, unreliable Amtrak to Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.
As per usual, you residents of the five boroughs think that western CT and northern NJ(*) are part of NY State, and that the far greater land mass of the state doesn't exist.
(*) Yeah, I know you try to disown it.
New York has an adequate public transport network, and Washington D.C.'s is absolutely first-rate
As a New Yorker living in Washington, all I can say is that the D.C. system really bites the big one, whereas the Subway rocks. People mistakenly think the D.C. Metro is "cool" or "good" because it is so aesthetically pleasing (actually, I find it neo-fascist and distrubing). In reality, the design decisions that were necessary to make the system look the way it does (e.g. large cathedral stations requiring deep tunneling) have also made it one of the least functional systems in the world. The Metro is heavily dependent on expensive, and impossible to maintain escalator systems, it is impossible for them to add new track capacity, since it is not possible to reconfigure stations, the cars are too long, with not enough doors...I could go on. Once the Metro is as old as the subway is now (in about 75 years), I am sure it will be just as grubby and "used" as the subway, only much less functional.
As to the main point of the the thread, and the article: I think mass transit is a major investment we should make. I particularly agree with the sentiment that cars have ruined the urban geography of the U.S. Also, anyone who thinks that cars don't require government funding should come observe some of the elections in the D.C. metro area (both Maryland and Virgina have road transportation issues at the top of their local issue hit list). Personally, I walk to work, and keep my car in an underground garage for when I need to go to Home Depot on the weekends.
In terms of the vacuum tubes: any one looking for prior art should go back to Buck Rogers newspaper strip from around 1929/1930.
automandc
I'm a lawyer with excellent karma. Something's gotta be wrong.
Or atleast I'd consider it if I held U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,954,064; 4,075,948; and 4,148,260 which utilize "a gravity powered system that requires a tunnel several thousand feet into the earth."
If you wish to avoid future legal action, stop publicly defaming my patented inventions immediately!
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
During frosh year, my Physics book had discussed this very idea in one of those interesting tidbits that they sometimes put in the sidebars. Very cool. I think I remember them saying the potential would be to have the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline used to cross the country (U.S.)? And of course, a lot faster than any current monorail or airplane in existence, due to extremely low friction.
The extra bonus is no Islamic whackos will be able to drive these things into buildings.
Everybody's on about keeping the vacuum, but even before you get to that large problem, you have to dig a lot of tunnel.
A little googling from the monorail story ($124 million/mile) found a subway that ran $224 million per mile. The Channel Tunnel, surprisingly, was no more: I think it must be the savings of scale from digging a lot of it, with no stations for 30 miles, compared to urban subways with a stop every mile or two. (Total: $21B US, for 3 parallel tunnels each 30 miles long).
The proposal requires 2 parallel tunnels, so it would run about $450 million per mile.
It's obviously only of real use for distance travel: you couldn't accelerate to 350 MPH while moving about an urban centre in short hops. Connecting two cities, say 50 miles apart would run you 22.5 billion dollars. That "NY to LA" they go on about would be:
2420 miles X $450 million/mile = $1.1 trillion.
Competing system:
2 new airports the cost of Denver's: $10 billion
Fleet of 44 Boeing 777's @ $230M: $10 billion
That allows departures each way every 15 minutes.
Yes, yes, it takes 4.5 hours, costs way more in energy, etc. But the 98% reduction in capital cost means the trip would be much, much cheaper.
It's a reductio ad absurdum(sp?) argument: what I've just described (an airport at each end for just ONE destination) and a dedicated fleet, is VERY, VERY expensive flying. So if the tube is so much worse, how pricey would it be?
If the tube had no operational or maintainance costs, creating the vacuum were free, and lasted forever, you'd still have to pay off the 5% interest on 1.1 trillion per year. That's 55 billion dollars. If you could manage 55 million passengers per year, (that's a couple of round trips for every inhabitant of NY and LA), it would still be $1000 per trip. Each way.
Who's going to pay that for the time reduction from 4.5 hours to 45 minutes? I guess the same crowd that fly the Concorde. It's not a large crowd. They keep a few planes flying, but they aren't going to make 55 million trips per year.
Sorry.
THEN you can start toting up the cost of putting it into a vacuum...
I'm all for it, as a concept. But we need to invent a way of making tunnels that's cheaper by at least an order of magnitude.
Or Two.
If propulsion is lost, you can't get anybody out of the transportation system. If somebody has a heart attack while propulsion is lost, they're dead because you can't get them out. At least not without letting air in, but then you have the expensive process of sucking the air out again. Yes, it offers low cost because of the lack of friction, but non-vacuum maglev with aerodynamic vehicles offers benefits not substantially lower, with much less risk and logistical problems.
...and a silly one. Like people would be willing to be locked into a pressurized metal tube and hurled at hundreds of miles per hour. ...oh wait, we do that now, but we call them airplanes, and they're much more useful because you can demolish old buildings with them.
...no wait, even airplanes don't work that way any more. Now they mainly fly to and from a few centralized hubs.
...oh wait, soon we'll have nanotechnology and sentient machines and everything will be free except food and land, and the only people who have money will be the ones who are leasing their underground rights to the tube train companies / mining conglomerates.
Never mind.
One can think of a zillion reasons why this would never work. For one thing, you'd have to build a pair of tubes between each possible pair of destinations -- that's a lot of combinations.
Never mind.
And of course, there's the tremendous expense of boring zillions of miles of tunnels, not to mention the exorbitant cost of obtaining the necessary underground right-of-way in a property-crazed world.
Never mind.
* * *
Gerry O'Neill wrote extensively on this idea in his book '2081'. (Gerry also did pioneering work on space colony concepts, solar power satellites, and satellite phones [Geostar], among many others. He also invented the electromagnetic mass driver and the colliding beam synchrotron, to name just a few. The guy got around.)
Long ago I was compelled to the conclusion that I was the only person who owned a copy of this book, or had even read it. Then, purely by accident, I discovered someone else like this, who happened to be a close friend. So we compared notes. She thought the ideas in the book would never happen, because they would be just too difficult to build. I disagreed, saying that most of the necessary technology already existed (it does, and did). Then I went on to say that I found the book rather silly because it describes life in 2081 as being so similar to 1981, with people having jobs and property and such. Now whenever we see each other, we look at each other as if we both had guacamole coming out of our ears.
Once I wrote a really cool science fiction story about a future when the Earth's crust is honeycombed with tubes of all sorts, evacuated and otherwise, that are mainly used to move people and packages around quickly, cheaply and safely. All the debris from the (fully automated) tunneling operations was used to build levees around the continents to hold back the constantly rising sea level (except for the places where poor people lived, they had to eke out a living on vast lashed-together fleets of rotting derelict fishing boats that were now useless because all the fish were extinct). Then I spell-checked it, and Word changed all the words to 'Mine!' and then the machine blue-screened and the hard disk vaporized.
>> Well, feel free to commit suicide as an attempt to do your part in reducing the population problem.
Okay. I guess now is as good a time as any...
GAAAAHHHH!!!!!
Yeah, only an order of magnitude more expensive. Average cost per lane-mile to construct a road: about $500K (rounding up). [Ref] Call it $1 million per mile for a two-line road. Average cost to construct light rail: around $20 MILLION per mile. [Ref]
Sure, these are data sources are not directly comparable and obviously don't include things like maintenance and operating costs (which are probably higher for rail since you have to have paid operators, but that's beside the point). Of course, rail also has much more stringent restrictions as to climb grades, turn radii, and other things that make it far less suitable for many out-of-the-way environments than roads.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
There are 3 (grossly redundant) misconceptions about ETT that need to be clear up: If one reads the patent (http://www.et3.com/US_Pat5950543ETT.htm ) virtually all the other misconceptions will be cleared up too. Misconception 1) Vacuum can't be maintained (or to costly to maintain) in thousands of miles of tubes. Answer 1) You watch TV don't you? Your TV, (CRT too) operates by virtue of a fairly decent vacuum just behind the glass - loose the vacuum - no pitchure. IMy grandma has a TV 20 years old - still works fine, and she hasn't taken it down to the vacuum recharge station lately. Now imagine the hundreds of millions of TV's in the world lined up in a row. A tube is eiser to seal than the shape of a TV tube. Electronic vacuum leak detection is a well developed art, so is ferro-magnetic fluid leak proof sealing technology, so is glass melting. Glass can be used for ETT sealing, but there are better materials, or combinations of glass with other materials. TV's need a much better vacuum than ETT needs to work. For a 350mph ETT the cost to maintain the optimal quality of vacuum is less than 50cents for a 100 mile trip at a volume of only 7000 trips per day. Misconception 2) The cost of the tube / tunnels / maglev etc. will be astronomical. Ans. 2) Compare the structure and maglev needed to support 1200lb ETT capsules no closer than 50foot spacing with that necessary to support 200ton locomotives, or 4 lanes of bumper to bumper 40ton trucks. Our preliminary cost estimates for a 350mph ETT system having 2 elevated tubes ( 5' dia.) combined into a "I-beam" show that less than 16 tons of material is needed for a 100' span. Compare this with the 380tons of material for an 80' span of the MagLev train being built in China. Most ETT systems will not have to be underground as this triples the cost. When tunneling is required, 2 ETT tubes will fit in a single tunnel tube 4meters in diameter, leaving room for two 6'6"by 2' walk ways on each side for maint, and escape. Compare the tunneling expense with the need for 2 tunnels 7meters in diameter for a 2 way train. There are thousands of miles of small tunnels under the cities all over the world, they bring us water, and keep our toilets from overflowing. Our estimates show the cost of 350 mph ETT is about 1/5th the cost of freeways, and the capacity is 8 times greater. A 100 mile trip will use less than one dollar worth of electricity to move 6 people, this is including the cost of maintaining the vacuum AND retire the debt on the guideway. The capacity of one tube is 140,000persons per hour at 280mph - double the speed and the capacity doubles. Compare the tooling and materials and labor to build 400lb (empty weight) ETT capsules with that needed to build 50ton train cars. Misconception 3) The ETT patent is invalid because of prior art. Ans. 3) READ THE PATENT http://www.et3.com/US_Pat5950543ETT.htm - the patent cover page lists more than a dozen prior art references far more pertinent to ETT than the scifi books, movies, and the respected Swissmetro project purported to invalidate the ETT patent. Actually reading the patent will clear up the other misconceptions about ETT. Daryl, Oster CEO et3.com Inc. et3@et3.com
My CS prof didn't own a car because he felt the US auto industry had a history of sabotaging public transport.
A quick Google search revealed this:
Behind the car is a huge and powerful car industry. In the US from the 1930s to the 1950s General Motors and other automobile manufactures bought 90% of the tram networks in 45 US cities. These were then dismantled and replaced by busses (which were manufactured by the car companies). In 1991 the auto industry in the USA spent 10 million dollars defeating legislation aimed at tougher fuel efficiency standards. The only solution often being offered is to build more roads, it's a solution that benefits industry not people. More roads into the countryside surrounding cities, leads to the growth of suburbs, which leads to more traffic (and calls for more roads). The solution leads to more problems, and it also leads to great wealth for the developers who build the suburbs and those who own the land they are built on.
Lies about crimes
OK, I stand corrected...they don't all suck. I like the Boston T, but then again, I don't travel it every day. As far as public transportation capacity figures go; I studied it in my college engineering classes, and there isn't nearly enough capacity in the world to effectively move everyone around. Maybe the solution is a matter of scale...maybe we just need more capacity and that will make the system better and more enjoyable...I honestly don't know.
As far as dumping money into roads versus public transportation networks.....you can buy a whole hell of alot of roads for the cost of a decent size train or subway line. (Unless you decide to put the road under neath Boston...that jacks up the price a little).
I guess the problem isn't public vs. private transporation, the problem is that there are too many damn people living in a small area, and they all need to get to work. I don't think there is an optimal solution.
-ted
So this is precursor to the system show in Bill and Ted's excellent adventure!!
Will the stations look like phone booths?
Sponsored by KY.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
A Trip in Time to the Year 2000 and Beyond (on my shelf across the room - I haven't opened it in years, but keep it around because it's hee-haw-larious, what with their predictions and all.)
p74-75 is titled "Tomorrow's Trains" and discusses a tube train proposed by one Dr. Robert Salter of the American Rand Corporation. Involves many ideas from the patent in question. The book was published in 1979.
When you design any system you MUST discuss all aspects of the design. It may be true that to move mass M from point A to B one would use X joules of energy in a system as described. But how many joules of energy does it take to build the system as described? And how much, when the thing is ready to be dismantled due to the next big thing. These brainiacs with all of their 'its for the public' ideas always have a next big thing. And it isn't about what costs less or what is better for the environment it is about who owns the patents and who gets to act like the king. For example fuel cell cars may release less CO2, but do they really cost less? NO. But the folks who own the patents want us all to think that CO2 is the awful awful gas that is destroying the world. If that is true then they should stop breathing because the human body releases CO2 with every breath.
And so, we have the alarmist 'green' people who jump on any bandwagon of 'less energy'. Save the world and win valuble prizes. It is too bad that people study public policy and how to sway opinion and never study good 'cradle-to-grave' engineering.
Oh, and by the way, the 'cradle-to-grave' cost analysis model was developed with money from that other entity that the lefty save-the-world and win-valuble-prizes movement typically dispises: the good-old United States Department of Defense.
So, save all of the green-house gas is killing the world hubris. One eruption of a volcano releases so much CO2 that it probably can't be measured.
remember, the real costs of every system must be measured with a cradle-to-grave cost analysis. You can't just look at an existant (and fantasy) system and say that this will use less energy and so, thus, is better. Remember, energy can niether be created or dystroyed, so how much energy isn't really the question buy as to weather it can be contained realistically and adequate amounts can be found. Energy is free for the taking. If you don't believe me, leave a cold glass of water in the sunlight.
Remember you can't change the world, you can only change yourself.
Oh well. At least I can be still the first to say:
This brings a whole new meaning to the term "pipe dream" doesn't it? (heh, heh)
Oh, I slay myself.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
Any EE or electronics guys remember what will happen when you move a metal tube past a powerful magnet at 300 miles per hour? Eddy currents crush the traincar like a soda can. (assuming rapid change in magnetic field, such as a burned out stretch of magnetic track, or worse, alternating sections of working/burned out track)
Which in turn was inspired by this even older idea.
Not bad for 1848.Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
pthtpt.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
IANAEngineer, but I think they designed the doors wrong...everyone must note that doors on current pressurized fuselages (read: aircraft and spacecraft, even pressure tanks) open inward. This is because having doors close against the inside of the frame allows for inherent sealing and latching forces (due to internal pressure).
As well, hatches in the walls of pressurized containers never have sharp corners, and they are fairly symmetrical. This is because corners and irregular edges are weak points in the structure. As well, the cuts in the fuselage wall should be as small as possible for strength.
From the diagrams, I see that the doors in the concept are HUGE, IRREGULAR PLOYGONS, SHARP-EDGED, and OUTWARDS-OPENING. More realistically, the vehicle would have very little style; round windows (if at all - strobe issues), tube structure with hemispherical ends, and small, round or rounded-edged symmetrical doors.
Anyway, that's my two cents.
In A World Out Of Time (published in the 70s, as I recall), Larry Niven described a system like this. In fact, the hero travels in just such an evacuated tube transit system but it's leaky, so the pressure in the car drops during the journey... I'll let you go find a copy of the book to see whether he survived.
To be exact, I don't recall the book mentioning anything about the propulsion system, but the principle of the evacuated tube was clear and Niven being who he is, I'm sure that he was referring to a system that was being discussed in public when he wrote the book.
Anna B
Oddly enough, a company like this can encourage innovation. Not convinced? Allow me to explain...
Full disclosure: I work for a company that generates patents. We don't build anything. We don't write any software, we don't hammer and hardware. We deal in IP; intellectual property.
Given that we have a patent filing on a good idea, we then go and find the best placed company to exploit that idea. They license the patent from us and in return they get to build the best possible implementation they can and they benefit from the protection that the patent gives.
Without the protection that patents give, ideas companies such as ours are extremely vulnerable. Try going to one of the big companies with an idea and no protection; they'll shake your hand, give you a coffee and then when you leave they'll rip you off without a second thought. Without patents, there is little effective protection for small guys, like us, who come up with innovative ideas.
Filing and carrying through a patent application costs. We also have to run the company and pay for people to sit around generating ideas. 90% of all ideas are crap. 90% of the non-crap ideas either have no commercial validity or have been done. The remaining ideas can be turned into patents.
Note that this is dramatically different from an IP company who patent an idea and then wait for someone to infringe. That's parasitic.
Anna B
Logan's Run, the book not the movie, describes a world-wide series of subsurface vacuum transport tunnels called Mazeways. Small 2-4 person capsules offers extremely high-speed transport from any part of the world to another from stations located everywhere. ~20 minute transcontinental travel times make is possible to dash off to Paris like we currently pop out to the mall.
Logan's Run was written by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. The movie was made in 1976. The original novel was published in 1967, which clearly makes this "invention" prior art unless it significantly adds something to the implementation.
"You have liberated me from thought."
Although massively underwritten by the government originally -- and perhaps currently, I don't know -- you can get from point to point in Japan very reliably, whether the points are airports, train stations, or what is effectively a rice paddy at each end. Usually you'll depart and arrive within 1-3 minutes of your desired time without having to walk more than about a quarter kilometer. The schedules are published well in advance and worked out well enough that most of them haven't had to be changed in years. The transit is safe enough for children that they don't even need a separate school bus system. And, get this -- the system has been operating reliably for at least 25 years now, probably more, integrating buses, ferries, regular rail, and high speed (bullet train or "shinkansen") as the travel backbone through the whole country. In fact, 80% of the traffic on the major highways is small, highly efficient diesel trucks.
So why hasn't a similar system been developed in the US? Mainly for three reasons: the more expensive and difficult (but not impossible) to plan part being the scale of the system -- Japan has 120 million plus people in an area about the size of the state of California, the US about 2-1/2 times that -- in an area probably 25 times bigger (?)(not counting Alaska and Hawaii). The second reason? [BTW not the oil companies, who can't control what the people want or do nearly as well as most cranks think they can.] The structure of government in the US is very ineffective and dominated by special interests. Such that in the local areas, political machines try to design expensive "alternate" transportation systems such as light rail instead of "integrated rail corridors", within state governments where other spending priorities always manage to come first, and then nationally, where big government and big labor usually combine to promote an ineffecient status quo (preserves jobs, they say...), and special interest (pork barrel politics) projects take more precedence in the minds of Congress than the national interest -- even in case of emergency. Oh, and lest we forgot -- there's always a turf and money war between the municipalities, counties, states, and the fed for who gets to spend our hard earned money (taxes) and for what.
The final reason? a combination of necessity because for most non-mega urban and rural areas whatever mass transit exists is usually poorly connected and unreliable in terms of schedule, and consumer laziness. It's easier to get up and just drive to work than it is to arrange a car pool, park and ride, or efficient route plan where buses or buses/light rail etc. could actually do the job. So (at least in the mid - large city where I live, 86% of the vehicles during the rush hour periods are driving +15 miles each way with exactly one passenger (AKA the driver), while the mass transit are 70% empty.
Of which I am one, guilty as charged, but I don't have two hours to go 12 miles (buses only here) because of the bad connection, and my attempts to find or set up a car pool (3-4 people would work fine) have thus far gone nowhere.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I was in Houston Texas a couple of weeks ago, all those huge SUV's and pick-up trucks are a lamentables spectacle (specially considering that are mostly a one-perosn vehicles. Most wasteful).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Didn't Larry Niven already suggest something like this in "A World Out of Time". I seem to remember continent spanning evacuuated tubes in that book.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
If the tubes are barren of air, bearings on wheels will definately be constantly replaced. What the hell are you going to do when a bearing siezes in the middle of a tube causing your awesome airless tube system to completely shut down for one burnt out bearing. Even if you use maglev style support, how many coils are you willing to burn up because they are unable to disappate heat?
:P
Maintence would royally suck (pun intended). Will the maintence workers have to wear ev suits in order to apply lubes, replace coils or will the system be willing to shut down the entire line barring they dont install fully sealed doors every section of tube. How in the world are you going to keep the airlock systems running without failure?
I belive It would be better to design a pnumatic style, high speed turbines that intterconnect inside or outside of turns as a unreachable spur to the cars, use pitch changing blades so that you could spin up the turbines to a very high speed (flywheel mode) and then when suckion is needed for a nearby car, pitch the blades to provide the suckion. Never spin down the turbines, just zero the pitch and let it continue like a flywheel add power just before it's needed again and pitch to provide more suction. You will need air bypasses around station stops so that a stopped car does not stop the efficency of the entire circular line.
Maybe cancel the thought of a circular line, run parallel tubes and make intake and exaughst of turbines be between separate tubes. The lines wont have to be circular if you cut the circle shorter. This will be better than a spur turbine. Though you will have to time the turbine useages between cars so that you dont end up blowing a car backwards
DRACO-
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
(1) Alexander the Great was a great general.
(2) Great generals are forewarned.
(3) Forewarned is forearmed.
(4) Four is an even number.
(5) Four is certainly an odd number of arms for a man to have.
(6) The only number that is both even and odd is infinity.
Therefore, all horses are black.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...