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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."
. . . it would essentially follow major highways, such as I-75 in California.
Let the record show that TFA correctly states "I-5". Somebody in Michigan needs to watch his typos.
I think it would be a much better replacement for freight trains and trucks. I'm guessing that may be their goal but they don't want to upset the train and trucker unions just yet. I'd say Amazon should get it on this as well to speed up their shipping times and hit their same-day delivery dream.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Can these tubes also be used to carry the innernet?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
It seems like one could deter people from walking across the rails with some sort of symbolic notification device? To not reinvent the wheel, we could reuse the old inventions of "words" on a "sign":
WARNING
TRAINS GO THROUGH HERE
THEY GO REALLY FAST
IF THEY HIT YOU YOU'RE DEAD
EVEN IF YOU'RE DRUNK
or something.
We haven't roped off every cliff in the mountains, even though people die there. We've not even put warning signs on a lot of dangerous things ("WARNING: THIS IS A BEAR. DO NOT POKE IT. IT IS BIGGER THAN YOU. EVEN IF YOU'RE DRUNK.") Why do we need derp-proof railways?
All the /. experts come out of their caves to debunk a paper by a guy that brought us internet payments, commercial space travel, and luxury electric cars.
I love it when simple obvious, and in this case old, technologies blow expensive and complicated technologies out of the water. Let's see, an old pneumatic message system with cars big enough for people. Cheap, easy to build, probably dirt cheap to run and maintain. Wow.
But there is huge problem with this system. Being so cheap and simple there is little room for massive companies to lobby/sell their complicated overpriced technologies. Tubes? How long is the list of companies that could build tubes? Pylons? How long is the list of companies that can build pylons? The train cars are a bit more limited but again not being maglev that list is still pretty long. Land purchases? I suspect that a bunch of insiders had land all lined up to sell.
Then you get other technocrats who don't like that their territory is being infringed. The rail people are probably scared that this might be independently run.
And lastly you get the aviation related interests that are far larger than most people might think. You have the oil refineries who will be unhappy to sell less fuel to both planes and cars, you have taxi drivers who run people to the airports, you of course have the airlines themselves, and you have the airports who will be unhappy to have fewer landings and takeoffs. Plus the no-doubt 50 unions who run the airports among others.
A tube system like this would be pure evil as far as those people are concerned dropping people off right down-town, how dare they.
The problem I see with this is while it's nice to dream about 800 mph travel, I can't imagine that it would be feasible to construct a track or tube that could follow the terrain at that speed and still maintain passenger comfort. If you are building above-ground supports, you don't want them to be 500 ft tall as would probably be required in order to keep the tube straight enough for passenger comfort and safety.
Luckily, advancement doesn't have to wait for the average guy's imagination to catch up. Have you actually read the proposal or are you just doing the usual slashdot thing?
The guy runs two companies, one in the space business and one that makes electric cars. I'm sure he'll need to ask a construction company for advice about the pillars, etc, but is there any reason to suppose he hasn't run this past the best engineers in those two companies? I'm sure his cost estimates are off, they can only be estimates this early in a design study, but it's not like he doesn't have engineers that know aerodynamics and vehicle design.
I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until real rebuttal arrives, say from someone who can point out actual errors in the proposal.
It seems to me he has absolutely NO idea about the very real engineering challenges to something like this.
As opposed to some smartass cunt on the Internet.
By your logic we should be hand-carrying water buckets around to wash our ass with. FUCK I wish this site would go back to what it once was.
The target speed was never 4000 MPH (I think you're confusing this with ET3's proposal). For deceleration: emergency brakes and the cars have wheels for emergencies. One question that should be asked is, what is it going to crash into? Not other capsules, they're moving away from you and have a huge safety margin of distance between them. Not the station, it's a passive system that handles deceleration (no power required). If the capsule needs to decelerate themselves for some reason, you're going from a maximum of 760 MPH to 0 MPH using the capsule's mechanical emergency breaking system. At the same deceleration as the capsules would accelerate, that's about seventy seconds over roughly seven and a half miles. Which is much faster than a high-speed train can do the same thing.
The document Must posted does cover several emergency scenarios. Passenger health emergency? Best thing is to keep going to next station as scheduled, with a maximum trip length of 35 minutes it's the fastest way to get an active response, and much faster than you can get emergency services to an in-flight aircraft. Major depressurization of a car? Actuate emergency breaks on all cars and rapidly re-pressurize the entire tube. Major earthquake (beyond the ability of the pylon dampers to handle)? Emergency break all the capsules and wait it out. Power outage? The system has many times more stored battery capacity to complete all in-progress journeys. Power failure of system itself? Cars are self-powered, so can coast a decent distance themselves, and then the batteries normally used to power the turbine can be used instead to power motors on the emergency wheels to get the capsules either to the station at the end of the line or the closest emergency exit location. I'm sure there are tons of possibilities that haven't been accounted for, but many are.
It seems to me he has absolutely NO idea about the very real engineering challenges to something like this.
As opposed to some smartass cunt on the Internet.
By your logic we should be hand-carrying water buckets around to wash our ass with. FUCK I wish this site would go back to what it once was.
Preach it brother! I once read the comments on a regular basis because there used to be a bit of informed comment. But the rot started to set in with the "no wirelss, less space than a Nomad, lame" episode. Now it's just a bunch of basement-dwelling know-it-alls who think they know better than the man who made a fortune on the internet, started an electric car company, and is on the edge of establishing commercial space flight for tourists! And these dickheads truly think they know better than him even though they didn't bother their sorry asses reading TFA! It beggars belief.
Kudos on your choice of language. "Smartass cunt" just about sums up the typical /. commenter these days.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Amtrak spent $80 million back in the 1980s on a plan to build a high speed rail from LA to San Diego. Every little burg between the two cities sued to stop it. They finally sold the plans to somebody for $5 million.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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.
"this will be cheaper than a high-speed rail?"
Red tape? ROW restrictions? Sound Pollution? Grade restrictions? base material restrictions? etc. High speed rail has some pretty significant drawbacks that limit its use and increase its costs. There are some pretty significant advantages to elevating the "tubeway", decreasing the size of the footprint (ROW in this case) and simplifying the "cars". Not saying its going to be a walk in the park, but with high speed rails mounting costs ($65-117 Billion and climbing) for Californians HSR project alone and ever distant completion times (2040 at the earliest) alternatives should be considered.
Obviously you didn't RTFA as a ordinary idiot. Part of the proposal is to turn that boundary layer problem into an advantage by turning it into an air bearing and having a turbo fan engine (electrically powered... another of Elon Musk's ideas he has toyed with so far as to make electrically powered airplanes) suck up the air in front of the pod and blast it out of the back of the pod.
The air itself in the tube isn't really moving. The tube is kept at a partial vacuum, but it doesn't have to be a perfect vacuum. Essentially, the pod is "flying" through the tube in a fashion similar to an airplane.
At least download the PDF file and make some intelligent comments rather than suggesting the guy is insane based upon wild ass speculation of what folks thought the concept might be prior to Musk's announcement.
Feasibility: No new technology needs to be developed. It uses no exotic technology or materials. Think about the components: steel tubing, concrete pylons, solar cells, batteries, compressors, conventional electromagnets (no superconducting or rare earth magnets). It is an engineering and system integration problem. It is no where near as hard as what SpaceX and Tesla have already done. Tesla can supply the expertise for batteries and linear motor design based on their current experience.
Economy: The claimed price is $6 billion US. The price could be off by a factor of 3 and it would still cost half as much as the existing rail proposal. More then enough room for cost overruns. Musk experienced this already on SpaceX and it did not kill the company.
Benefits: It leapfrogs all existing high speed rail technology. It's a complete game changer. A successful outcome would immediately generate a world wide demand. There is a staggering amount of money to be made. In addition, it is ecologically very sound. The worst aspect is likely the amount of energy required for the concrete pylons, and that seems less then an equivilant roadway. Plus solar power is getting cheaper, so some of the price will go down in the long run.
If the US had any real capitalists around, they would jump at this opportunity. I expect without Musk it will go nowhere, because most big capital expects automatic government guaranteed profit. Although there have been some modest examples of innovative capitalism in the last couple of decades, for the most part capitalism in the US is non-existent, except for a few lone individuals.
Why is Snark Required?
Building a hyperloop from San Francisco to Sacramento, or San Francisco to San Jose, would be useful and much shorter and cheaper.
What part of the science is not clear enough? It's a new combination of technologies, but every aspect of it is reasonably well understood physics. And what's wrong with hyping a fairly dramatic new idea that needs a lot of input and momentum to reach fruition?
This rest of my comment isn't directed at you, but so far I've seen a hundred critiques of this thing, and each one would be eliminated with reading comprehension. Expensive? Likely cheaper. Necessary? Voters already approved a more expensive, less functional system. Eminent domain? Less of an issue than current plans. G forces? Calculated. Air resistance? They cover that. Maintaining vacuum? They cover that too (or rather, they don't, because it's not a vacuum). Earthquakes? General Safety? Failure modes? They touch on each in the paper. It's a well thought out starting point for a new mode of travel. Of course it needs work - he says that right up front. But this is a hell of a kickoff. I can already hear the people who, after saying it was impossible, finally going through the paper and understanding it, jumping straight to "well it's not that amazing, it's all kind of basic". It's like people desperately need to bolster their self image by shitting on things.
Actually I'm curious to hear some intellegent criticism because it would be interesting to consider, but all the criticism so far is either a) ignorant idiocy or b) even more vague than his proposal.
For heaven's sake people, if this paper doesn't get you at least a little excited, you really ought to turn in your geek card and pick up a boring naysayer card in exchange.
The pipeline industry has been solving it for decades. There's even an oil pipeline over a fault in Alaska that moved by ten metres in an earthquake which survived because of a clever design of a couple of bends over the fault. For extreme thermal expansion problems look at power station pipework, and something like this is not so limited to materials that can withstand high temperatures and pressures. Great big compressible plastic rings are used between segments of some water pipelines for instance.