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Colorado Company Says It Plans To Test Hyperloop Transport System
Freshly Exhumed writes "Elon Musk's dream of a hyperloop transport system seems to be closer to reality than he anticipated. Hyperloop transportation, referred to by Musk as a "cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table", is a tubular pneumatic transport system with the theoretical capability of carrying passengers from New York to L.A. in about 30 minutes at velocities near 4,000 miles per hour, while maintaining a near-continuous G force of 1. Colorado-based company ET3 is planning to build and test its own version of such a hyperloop system, Yahoo reports." A more critical article would point out that the numbers presented seem absurdly optimistic; $100 for a 4,000mph cross country trip may be "projected," but construction of a cross-country train tube is a long way off, and so are ticket sales.
It's already 3000 AD? Time to go shopping for my Lucy Liu bot and Slurm.
of a Spruce Goose. And? Every time Musk says something we latch on to it and hype it. Besides, I'm sure the progress of 3D printing means we'll be able to 3D print ourselves at the destination. After all, the first modems only had 300 baud, look how fast they are now, therefore anything is possible. Especially when comparing two completely different things.
Let's see how fast it gets fresh salmon from Seattle to Kansas. Build a six inch wide tube or something. If that works out, then maybe think about humans.
Train accidents are bad enough already. 4000 mph? Would there even be anything left for the NTSB to sift through? What happens if the tube decompresses? Musk has some great ideas; but I think he's gone off the rails on this one.
The ET3 website looks like some kind of scam. They are offering to sell licenses for their amazing technology for only $100! I've seen it listed on several articles about Musk's plans, but I suspect that some lazy journalist just googled some shit and found that page.
Does anyone know if Musk actually has a company working on this technology?
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
credit for the invention belongs to Dr. Joseph V. Foa who was awarded US Patent 3213802 for a "train in a tube" in 1965. This was the basis for a number of years of research into the concept at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1960s.
Since when?
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
The TCR made ample use of cheap freed slave and immigrant labor
Why do you think it wouldn't be accurate robots building this thing, end-to-end?
Ezekiel 23:20
Yeah, sure. Assuming you can get the Federal Government to build the whole thing so that you only have to cover marginal operating costs instead of amortizing construction costs into the price, and each seat is filled every time, and you count in 1950's dollars ;-)
Yeah, but DC to NY is already a pretty short trip. Only 1 hour 10 in a plane, and it has rates starting from $156 (source, new Google maps). The problem with air travel is the security lines. If they could get rid of that, at least for short commuter flights, then flying would be much more enjoyable. The road trip time is 3 hours 43 minutes. Which isn't short, but easily something you could do if you needed to go there and back in the same day. A reasonable speed train (doesn't even have to be that fast) could probably do the trip in 2-3 hours if there wasn't a thousand stops. And trains don't have crazy security checks. Most of the time you can just walk right on 10 minutes before the train leaves. Something like this just isn't needed as it wouldn't take appreciably less time.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The transcontinental railway and most other railways it the USA made use of free (federally granted) land. The cost of land for a new right of way after industrial development would be enormous. You could estimate that cost by asking one of the major US rail carriers how much it would cost to buy or lease their right of ways. Buying is probably off the table entirely. They won't sell and without changes in federal law, can't be forced to sell.
While it's true the US has been losing its edge in technological development, what other countries have really stepped up and filled that space? What country has developed usable electric cars, for instance? What country has developed private spaceflight? What country developed the internet? Smartphones?
The US is definitely going down in a lot of ways, but no one else seems to be shining in technological innovation either; everyone else either does only manufacturing or continues the use and development of a highly-mature technology. I just don't see any groundbreaking innovation coming from anywhere else. When the US collapses, things aren't going to progress very quickly in technology.
They could use the NYS Thruway model. "We'll only charge tolls until the road is paid off. And then just keep raising tolls long after the road is paid off."
also getting molested by TSA
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Japanese developed usable electric cars if you define usable by affordable and available to the population, unlike the Teslas. USA gave a try earlier in our century, but it was killed by your greed and capitalist system (see the documentary "who killed the electric car").
Private spaceflight occurs mainly in Russia. They were also the first to have a usable space station up there (skylab was a bad joke). NASA are experts in developing and sending probes and robots, I give you that. But again, greed and paranoia impedes NASA and I don't see much space development in the near future of the USA. Which is sad, really, because competition from the USA would drive Russia or China big time to improve its presence in space, maybe even getting another space race?
The USA developed the basics of the Internet backbone, but look at the current customer situation (which is all that matters, really), you can have 100mbps symmetrical in Japan, Slovakia, Estonia for 10-15$/month. In the USA you can have 10mbps with a 300GB cap for 40$/month. Again, your greed impedes innovation. A lot, most, of the optic fiber dropped in the oceans are operated by foreign countries.
The problem with innovation is that it is driven by passion or competition. Since passion is limited by a small budget, most of the time, only competition can bring up things. Companies do it either to improve their countrie's image (see HTC) or to be the richest company(See Samsung), it doesn't matter. If one country does something innovative, other countries will follow and try to beat them. See the smartphone market, for example.
I understand that the investigative documentarians at SyFy already have an expose, TubeShark-aggedon, in production.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Yes, true, underground. But of course there is maintenance. And maintenance access ways. And roads to get to those maintenance access ways. And buildings with security perimeters around those access ways. All of which are above ground. You don't think for a minute that there wouldn't be access hatches for maintenance at a minimum of every ten miles do you? BTW, this type of "hyperloop" is sort of a silly name for something postulated and described in Robert Heinlein's fiction many many years ago as a ballistic tube.
Yeah, it means even more expensive.
Nearly 3000 miles of travel, at up to 4000 mph, in 30 minutes?
It's a fast 4000 mph, not a normal 4000 mph.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Yes, installing a new cross country underground tube should be no problem at all to get done right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline
Oh wait...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
property rights in many places extend underground and would still require a lot of above ground infrastructure and access ways for maintenance purposes.
Private spaceflight occurs mainly in Russia.
I thought Russia's industry was a state-owned company that was spun off into a private entity. That's not exactly the same as a private company building itself up from nothing. They're also having a lot of problems.
The USA developed the basics of the Internet backbone, but look at the current customer situation (which is all that matters, really), you can have 100mbps symmetrical in Japan, Slovakia, Estonia for 10-15$/month. In the USA you can have 10mbps with a 300GB cap for 40$/month. Again, your greed impedes innovation. A lot, most, of the optic fiber dropped in the oceans are operated by foreign countries.
This is all totally irrelevant: we're talking about technical innovation here, not business plans and operations. I could go start my own ISP, but that doesn't make me an innovator, it makes me someone who bought some off-the-shelf equipment and put it into use. It's great those other countries are providing internet service so cheaply, and I wish our ISP situation here wasn't so fucked up, but they're not innovators, just like your local car mechanic is not an innovator in the realm of automotive engineering. The innovators are the people/companies who designed and engineered the equipment those ISPs use, and while a lot of that has moved to Asia in recent years, much of the original design work (such as the Ethernet standards) was done by American companies. Dropping an optical cable into the ocean doesn't take innovation, it just requires buying an optical cable from someone and renting a boat. Laying transoceanic cables is a mature technology (they've been doing that for many decades now), and you're not an innovator of optical cables when all you do is buy it from someone else.
As far as HTC and Samsung, there's not all that much innovation going on there; they make Android (and Windows) phones, so they're getting their software from someone else, namely Google and MS, both American companies, and all the ICs they use are mostly designed by American companies.
Original 1972 paper here: http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/2008/P4874.pdf
For a track designed to handle these speeds, automated construction systems could be the only thing accurate and reliable enough to build it. Also, I don't see how unions would ever enter into the equation providing that you don't hire the blue collars into your new company in the first place.
Ezekiel 23:20
A new transportation system that would cost billions to build, would be completely uneconomical for patrons to use, and has a high risk of death with even the slightest malfunction at 4,000 MPH
This sounds like someone complaining about the airplane in 1905. Part of progress is failure, and since we just dropped three to five trillion dollars on the Iraq War, let's hear a little bit less how expensive government subsidies for science are.
If we had spent just one third of what we wasted in Iraq on something like a national rail transportation, we could have created hundreds of thousands of jobs that trained people in high-level construction and engineering, strengthened our air transportation system by focusing on longer haul routes and going to fewer but larger planes (which are safer and more fuel efficient), and perhaps even reintroduced more freight service to more areas to reduce long-haul trucking, which reduces smog, traffic, and wear on our bridge infrastructure.
Besides, if Elon Musk were the new Steve Jobs, he'd be fussing over pixels on a touch device. We already have plenty of people doing that. I'm ready for some actual innovation, thanks.
People who have something better to do with their lives than digging ditches.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
What exactly is the problem with paying for good infrastructure?
Nothing. What I object to is paying for it several times over.
Nearly every car can reach 3Gs without a problem - just apply the brakes.
Here are some guys doing actual measurements on hi-end Porsches. Less than 1.5G's tops.
http://forums.rennlist.com/rennforums/997-gt2-gt3-forum/715560-deceleration-g-force-readings.html
I feel I should point out that maintaining 1G constantly (or anything near it) to get that distance in 30 minutes and reach that speed is completely impossible. The math just isn't there.
The drunken captain, bad as that was, wasn't the cause of the accident. He was asleep in his bunk, and the ship was being piloted by someone who was qualified. The drunken captain bit was played up to distract from Exxon's culpability, like choosing not to fix a radar that was broken for a year, in order to save a few bucks. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill#Identified_causes
Why do you think it wouldn't be accurate robots building this thing, end-to-end?
Adjusted for inflation, the $110 second-class trans-continental rail fare of 1870 would cost $1970 today. In 1880 land grants to the railroads were valued at $391 million, a breath-taking sum for the day. Construction on this scale does not come cheap even labor costs are low.
doh, forgot 6000 KPH conversion So that's 1700 meters per second. 0.5 * 200000 * 1700^2 = 3 * 10^11, so yes a mere 75 tons of TNT. how do we stop that train on a dime though?
NY-to-LA at 4000mph for a fortunate few at inconceivably-enormous cost? That may have appeal for the self-appointed "job-creators", but strays laughably far from any possible reality.
In a local transit scenario, this technology will rule. Support infrastructure is very lightweight. The path of individual tube "cars" under computer control means NON-MASS transit with highly-individualized trajectories for everyone, right down to the sub-neighborhood level. No engines, no fuel, no batteries, just huge centralized (and thus greatly efficient) vacuum generators powered with *whatever*. Vacuum-powered "switches" so simple that (apart from seal maintenance) there's nothing to fail. Acceleration and braking through sectorized control of pressures.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Doesn't anybody read the old masters of science fiction anymore? Slashdot, of all places, should already be familiar with all the details of subsurface evacuated tube transportation. This idea has been around for at least half a century, and has been electrically and mechanically feasible for decades. Financially is another story, which is why the whole thing is the pipe dream so cleverly pointed out by another poster.
But let's talk about the real concept, instead of all the (bad) guesswork.
An absolutely straight tube would be quite bad, especially for that distance. What you want is a great circle arc, and the only way to achieve one that's perfect enough and stable enough is to bury it and bury it deep, to avoid mountains, valleys, cities, etc.
It's not pneumatic. That's just silly. It's electromagnetic. You use coils at either end, accelerating with them on the way out and decelerating (and incidentally storing a great deal of the initial launch energy to be reused) at the end. Your vehicle is ballistic in the middle, in free fall. Helluva way to travel, but very cheap, energy-wise, assuming you build giant ring capacitors at each end to store the recovered energy each time the vehicle arrives. Then you only have to make up the losses in the system, which is reasonable to do. The tube is evacuated to vacuum to eliminate air resistance losses, which is so high at useful speeds that it prevents the whole system from working at all, never mind cost effectively.
And no, you don't switch. The tubes are point to point, and there's only one large vehicle per tube, going back and forth between each end. Of course, while you're at it, you might as well build two parallel tubes, 'cause the marginal cost of boring another hole isn't too bad. Still, the system has a hard capacity limit for each route. It's a very high limit if you build a large enough vehicle, but it's also a very hard limit. Once you hit it, the only way to expand capacity, beyond making the vehicle longer (a process with strictly diminishing returns with its own hard limit) is to bore another hole. Time-consuming and energy-intensive, at best.
Of course, it will never happen. Quite aside from property rights problems (land ownership extends right to the center of the Earth), the time and energy required to bore a hole long enough to be useful is extreme. It took 6 years to build the 50km long Channel Tunnel. At that rate, New York to LA would only take 579 years. (Admittedly the actual boring time wasn't anything like 6 years, but still... The project has all the same problems, magnified.)
We'll all be riding in self-driving all-electric vehicles long before anybody bores a transcontinental train tunnel.
People who have something better to do with their lives than digging ditches.
Actually a backhoe operator makes pretty good money.
There is very little demand for manual ditch digging anymore. Even if you could find workers willing to accept minimum wage it isn't cost effective compared to a backhoe.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Is there a documentary I could watch that will give me some idea of the absurd disaster scenarios somebody has invented for this technology?
Yes, there was. Sort of. The show called Extreme Engineering has gone through a couple of completely different incarnations. The current one has a host on-camera. The show's original version was just a documentary with a narrator, normally Greg Stebner if I remember right. Stebner's version was vastly superior to the whiny current version. Not sure why they even bother to call the shows by the same name. They are nothing alike.
Anyway, the original,show did an episode on things like a transcontinental super train which was theorized to operate at supersonic speed in tunnels held at vacuum. So naturally there were examples of what would happen if the seal failed or there was an earthquake or other events. So it's not exactly like the domestic US concept but close enough.
No idea where you can find this old show. Discovery is fixated on rerunning the current version when they show it at all.
Sig for hire.
"Sir! The tornado breached the mag-lev pneumatic tube in Los Angeles and now the sharks are heading to Des Moines at 4,000 MPH!"
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Because the high speed train can stop much quicker. At 4000 mph even an emergency stop is going to cover a far greater distance than a 200 mph high speed train will (400 times as much in fact), so the chance of running into a dislocation is much higher. On Japan's high speed lines there are earthquake signals that turn red on tremors.
Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
Most of the time you can just walk right on 10 minutes before the train leaves.
I don't know about the US (except that most people there seem scarcely to have heard of trains), but in the UK you can board most trains seconds before they leave. At a main terminus such as London Paddington it may be a minute because there is such a high throughput that they want the train to be ready to go immediately it gets the green light.
What is the ten minutes for?
Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
I'm really curious about what details you happen to know about this hyperloop system. Are you a SpaceX or Tesla employee that has had a couple of cool ones with the boss to get him to spill his guts about the idea?
Otherwise, I don't think anybody but Musk has a bloody clue about how his system works. I've seen the interviews and public statements about the idea, but frankly neither this particular article nor any other shows anything other than another high-speed transport system. I'll agree that vacuum tube transport systems seem to fit the concept of hyperloops from the perspective of "this is the best thing that fits the idea", but all of that is pure guess work. There are other possibilities too, but the real point is that nobody has a clue.
It seems, based on some statements by Musk, that some actual engineering R&D work has gone into the idea (aka there might be some people at either Tesla and/or SpaceX that have helped Elon with some calculations and fleshing out the concept) but he certainly has made no public statements about the concept in any level of detail.... including even if there will be vacuum tubes involved in any part of the system. When asked explicitly if it was an underground vacuum tube system, Elon Musk even said "No".
In other words, this whole article is just a bunch of BS.
[Nukenerd] Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
[Teancum] I'm really curious about what details you happen to know about this hyperloop system. Are you a SpaceX or Tesla employee that has had a couple of cool ones with the boss to get him to spill his guts about the idea?
No. But some of the links I followed (eg www.businessinsider.com/what-is-elon-musks-hyperloop-2013-5) referred to an evacuated tunnel.
[Teancum] Otherwise, I don't think anybody but Musk has a bloody clue about how his system works. When asked explicitly if it was an underground vacuum tube system, Elon Musk even said "No".
I am a former London Undergound railway engineer and I can tell you that the air resistance in a tunnel is higher than in the open, and that there is no way that 4000 mph is going to be possible in a tunnel unless it is evacuated. The train would melt otherwise, even if you could give it the power.
[Teancum] In other words, this whole article is just a bunch of BS.
Agreed.