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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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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."
I understand that the investigative documentarians at SyFy already have an expose, TubeShark-aggedon, in production.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
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.
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
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.
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?
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.