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Elon Musk's 'Hyperloop': More Details Revealed
astroengine writes "Entrepreneur Elon Musk revealed details today about his concept for a high-speed transportation system he calls the Hyperloop. After tweeting that he'd pulled an all-nighter preparing for the announcement, Musk told Businessweek that the design could transport people as well as cars inside aluminum pods that move up to 800 miles per hour through a tube. The tubes would be mounted on columns 50 to 100 yards apart, not interfering with land needs because it would essentially follow major highways, such as I-75 in California."
That's actually a problem past a certain speed. At least in the U.S., they don't allow trains to travel at high speeds in populated areas because they can't usefully stop if somebody walks across the rail. They can't stop because there is very little friction possible. With a closed tube, you don't have that risk, so you can shoot through downtown L.A. doing 250 MPH.
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The one thing I did not see is what the expected magnetic field levels will be for passengers.
Many folks with implanted medical devices are told to stay away from significant RF and magnetic fields. It is possible that the pod could be magnetically shielded enough, but it would be great if he added that info.
Otherwise, I say scrap the Cali High Speed Rail and build Hyperloop instead!
(The truth is that I bet the Casinos would throw in the first billion to build one from LA to Vegas...they dumped $650 million on the Las Vegas monorail).
Consider first that sufficiently large deflection would result in the immediate emergency breaking of all capsules. There is also the consideration that earthquakes don't travel instantaneously, which means there is some advanced warning between an earthquake being detected and an earthquake reaching the hypertube. There is also the capability of the dampers on the pylons to absorb a certain amount of movement. These things combine to give sufficient time to decelerate the vehicles.
Consider this: earthquakes are a far larger problem in Japan (both in intensity and frequency), and there are similar consequences to deflecting the rail of a high speed train (the danger there is derailment). Even a stationary train can topple in an earthquake, much less of a concern on the hyperloop. Japan has never suffered a fatality on a shinkansen due to earthquakes, over the past half century. The hyperloop's emergency stopping distance would be vaguely similar to that of the shinkansen. The shinkansen emergency braking from top speed takes about 40 seconds by my math, and the *normal* deceleration from top speed of the hyperloop would take 70. If it decelerates faster than normal for emergency braking, it could potentially even stop faster than the shinkansen.
We missed the opportunity to fix this back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the railroads were pretty much all bankrupt. The fix would have been to buy the mainline trackage (everything except the maintenance yards) from the railroads and give them a 20 year free ride to help pay for the deal; then run the railroads as part of the National Highway System. Then the railroads could have become the customers rather than the vendors, and the government, which generally does infrastructure pretty well, could have made the rails a viable solution while the railroad companies, which could then compete on an equal basis, could do the business things, which they do pretty well. And new companies could enter the market to provide passenger train service on an entrpreneurial basis.
Alas, instead we had a huge bailout of railroad companies, and the creation of the bastard stepchild Amtrak, which was designed and intended to fail, but has continued to survive despite the best efforts of the government and the railroads to kill it.
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Unreliable, and any excess CO2 (not just CO is produced) would make the death physically unpleasant.
A small industrial bottle of N2. A gas humidifier (or a home-made water bong with appropriate piping). And a $2 nebuliser breathing mask. (And a "Warning! Low Oxygen! Use Breathing Apparatus" note on the door for rescuers, just in case. You don't need to seal the room, and so the gas released shouldn't completely displace oxygen, but better to err on the side of caution.) Turn on the nitrogen, put on the mask, relax and go to sleep.
(It amazes me that the US has created such bizarre over-elaborate death penalties as electrocution, cyanide gas chamber, and chemical cocktail lethal injection, when a simple bottle of nitrogen, a humidifier, and a mask is all that is required. Twist yourselves in knots to create supposedly "humane" executions, but the easiest, most painless way to die is always ignored.)
Building a hyperloop from San Francisco to Sacramento, or San Francisco to San Jose, would be useful and much shorter and cheaper.