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Transport Expert Insists 'Don't Dismiss Wacky Hyperloop'
DavidGilbert99 writes "Since Elon Musk announced the details of Hyperloop earlier this week, we've seen a number of experts debunking the technology involved, but at least one is more upbeat about the possibility of 600MPH train travel. Speaking to Alistair Charlton at IBTimes UK, professor Phil Blythe from the Institute of Engineering and Technology said: 'My gut feeling is, don't dismiss it out of hand just because it sounds a bit wacky,' adding 'You're always going to have long distance travel, and if there was something that could replace air travel between cities and hubs, and is low carbon [with] low energy requirements, it make sense to explore it, it really does.'"
It is a loopy idea, but not fundementally unsound in any way.
Every aspect of it, from the induction motors, to the earthquake proofing to the aerodynamics to the solar power is all well understood.
The difficult bit is really the engineering on a large project and developing all the parts and actually building the thing. I wouldn't trust most people with it and the usual suspects for government contacting would surely make a massice hash of it and cause a 50x budget overrun.
But that's nothing to do with the project per-se. Musk does have the kind of track record showing he can pull off big, complex engineering projects which are generally regarded as difficult and expensive applications of existing tech. Not only pull them off but do them well, quickly and cheaply.
So please, don't bring up arichair engineer objections to the design without first reading that big, long document which covers most of them and actually providing some reasoning.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That project was reported to be both technically and economically feasible despite the handicap of having to tunnel all the way through granite. Apparently the project died for lack of interest and political will to see it through.
So, what people refer to as "Elon Musk's idea" really isn't new and also isn't nearly as wacky as some people seen to think. The thing that Elon Musk seems to be adding is marketing and PR. Perhaps that will make the difference.
Science Fiction and reality. I like the idea of Hyperloop, but what happens with a 600mph crash? How do you elevate tubes across thousands of miles and through Cities without A) creating curve that have g-forces too high to survive a 600mph turn or B) becoming so incredibly expensive for right of access rights that it becomes impossible? With cars holding a limited number of people, how do you address the mass populations? Jets carry hundreds and they're routinely overbooked. How does economies of scale fit in? Oh, I'm sure the realities could be vast on this idea. .. Hats off to Elon though, because there are those that do and there are those that do not. If he didn't do, we wouldn't have Tesla showing how electric cars can work.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
I don't get it.
Sure, it sounds fantastic, but isn't this pretty much the same as a system proposed way back in the 50s?
I'm pretty sure I saw that in a reprint of an ancient Popular Mechanic.
(Maybe it was Popular Science, but was that one even being printed in the 50s?)
Besides that, he's not putting any money into it, and he doesn't have blueprints or anything, just an idea. Science Fiction writers do that level of work all the time with new ideas.
On a technical note, what about shifting of the ground, especially with earthquakes and the like. It probably only has a fraction of the tolerance to that which railroads have, especially at the speeds he's mentioning.
Indeed. He's the second coming of Dean Kamen.
That way land is free and the tube can be made totally standard and mass produced. Anchor it to the sea floor at a depth of 50 meters. That would make it easy to run between LA and SF, and many other routes would become easy too.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What will he say next week to be in the news ?
Indeed. He's the second coming of Dean Kamen.
Precisely. He's like Dean Kamen, but with hookers and blackjack^W^W^Welectric cars and rockets capable of achieving orbit.
I'm pretty sure I saw that in a reprint of an ancient Popular Mechanic. (Maybe it was Popular Science, but was that one even being printed in the 50s?)
Popular Science in its modern form was first published in 1915. Popular Mechanics, 1902. In its prime, Popular Science published countless projects for the amateur scientist, radio hobbyist, model maker, craftsman and mechanic. along with some very good reporting on sciences, technologies, medicine, the military and so on.
There, I've saved you the trouble of reading the whole thread!
So why didn't you post that up at the top?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The difference is that airplane technology did not need a preexisting, massive and massively expensive infrastructure in order to make 5 decades of incremental technological and operational progress.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
What will he say next week to be in the news ?
I know. For those of us that go around far exceeding the action of just designing and launching a successful electric car and credible challenge to the established auto-industry and develop and produce space vehicles, including the he first privately funded liquid-fuelled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit, he is all talk.
Instead they are planning on sinking 10x the amount into high speed rail that won't compete with current airline times and prices. This is as much a call on sense of the high speed rail programme as it is the proposal itself.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Actually the whole idea is that it is a profitable venture, one that's orders of magnitude cheaper than a conventional rail link over the same distance.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
There are a lot of good ideas here, and there's no reason that this would be an engineering impossibility. The problem is just a risk ratio.
This will cost billions even if everything had been ested. there will be some ideas that work on paper but in practivce need to be re-engineered. this happened with the Space Shuttle and even the Shinkansen; where the basic technology was already well understood.
An actual transit engineer crunches the numbers here:
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/19848/musks-hyperloop-math-doesnt-add-up/
And finds that while the journey for individuals may be faster, the system as a whole would have one-tenth the capacity (i.e., the ability to move people in numbers) than the planned high-speed rail system. You could solve this problem by building 10 times as many tubes, of course, but that would eliminate the 90% cost savings Musk is touting.
The radically reduced travel times vs. HSR are also deceiving. The maps Musk released show the system travelling from the fringes of the Bay Area to the fringes of the LA area, because it's hard/expensive/impossible to get land for the straightaways you'd need for the project within densely built up urban areas. To get from San Francisco to the hyperloop station, or from the hyperloop station to downtown LA, you'd have to switch to local transit or drive, which will double or triple travel time. Not coincidentally, must of the construction and expense that adds to HSR's very high price tag will come in SF and LA urban areas, since that system goes from downtown to downtown.
What will he say next week to be in the news ?
I know. For those of us that go around far exceeding the action of just designing and launching a successful electric car and credible challenge to the established auto-industry and develop and produce space vehicles, including the he first privately funded liquid-fuelled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit, he is all talk.
but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
Sorry, were we not doing this?
nuff said
I dunno. Futurama depicts those tubes as having a very tight turn radius. That can't be good for your spine.
I'm using this as inspiration for my new transit technology: giant rubber band sling.
You do realise this is in a closed tunnel, right? I'm preeetty sure it'll be a whole heckuva lot quieter than a train, a plane or a road for that reason alone.
It's always the political, economic, and/or legal issues that kill these kinds of projects:The tech may be sound, but if you have your investment locked up in frivolous lawsuits, or bureaucratic red tape, your investors will, sooner or later, desert you: they want a return on investment, not "real soon now", but now. . . . But in the end, I suspect it's pure economics that will stop the Hyperloop, at least as initially described between San Francisco and LA. I'm not convinced there is sufficient traffic to support the costs and charges as foreseen. Most especially telling is that the load/fare estimates of 840 passengers/hour@$20/passenger. Assuning load is constant over the entire 24-hour period of the day, and there are no disruptions, you're only taking in a bit over $147 million in revenues. Maintenance, cleaning, operations all cost money, and the more likely pattern is only peak passengers during part of the business day. So I conclude, nifty idea, but economic fail. . . .
In the 1970ies when I way just a boy, I found an "old" book from the 1960ies. They already discussed the same concept together with maglev and other high speed ground based transportation systems. As of today all these high speed "trains" are very expensive and bring little benefit to populated areas. A ground based vehicle which is as fast as a plane is most likely technical possible, but the infrastructure cost would be extreme. Therefore, it would only be an option for short distances. At short distances that much speed makes no big difference.
BTW. the Chinese have developed trains with similar speeds, which are able to run that fast. If they had worked with higher precision, the trains could use that speed in a reliable way.
Blythe believes the long term success of Hyperloop will lie in its ability to be powered entirely by solar panels. "The compelling argument today is that the energy to run this could be generated from renewable resources, so the energy cost and the CO2 emissions are low - that probably gives it a bit more of an interesting argument whereas 15 years ago we didn't care about stuff like that.
But it far cheaper to electrify a conventional train track. And far cheaper to install just solar panels on top of all highways and rail tracks. In fact if we put a "roof" over all the highways in the northeast and install solar panels on them, the savings in snow removal costs in winter and the electricity generated in summer could pay for the whole project. Putting gables over highways and directing the snow to fall on the sides instead of on the lanes is a far cheaper project than this.
The home construction industry still reeling from the 2008 financial shock could use a shot in the arm. Regular conventional structures, gables and trusses, oriented to face the South, over I-90 between NewYork and Boston. Why not? We shoveled 800 billion dollars to the greedy banksters in just three months in 2008. A steady 10 billion dollar a year to put roof over highways is probably a better idea.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm afraid the time of Monty is coming to an end... the age of the shadow dwellers has begun.
That's not true. It's meant to be a California intercity shuttle, and he actually stated that it's not economical over distances greater than 1000 miles.
I don't think anyone has proposed a transport system between NY and LA in 30 minutes.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I expect us to think about it for ages and let the accountants pour cold water on it... It will then be forgotten for quite some time. Then China or Russia will build one... China already built a maglev. With China being #1 solar panel producers currently, the fact that land belongs to the government so they can build wherever they want (and violently force people who refuse to move) as well as billions of depreciating dollars held in reserve and engineers as their one party politicians rather than lawyers (like USA and UK)
December 17, 1903, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
You could build a commercially viable Pacific air service using flying boats. In the late thirties there was only one runaway on the east coast which could bear the weight of a transatlantic aircraft.
The point being that early aviation needed very little in the way of a supporting infrastructure.
I cannot comprehend this: all the slashdot posts (and media coverage) say, "hyperloop is way better than high speed rail!". But that's not the right comparison. I have invented the flying bus(tm). It will carry 200+ passengers at 550 MPH top speed, and get you from LA to SF in about an hour. There's wi-fi, a drink if you have a coupon, and if you book ahead it costs less than $100.
in what ways are hyperloops better than air travel? I don't see any.
The main difference seems to be fuel usage and the lack of TSA rectal examinations.
"On that train, all graphite and glitter. Undersea by rail. 90 minutes from New York to Paris, well by '76 we'll be A-Ok."
-- Donald Fagan
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
What is the point of a few professors and engineers saying it's interesting, that is not at all relevant.
The question is simple: Does it make a lot of money? If so should we or should we not further exploit current, slower, higher carbon footprint and more financially lucrative options.
Would it be a great improvement over current forms of travel? Of course.
Would it be a great way to show the world the US is actually investing in something cutting edge? Of course.
Would it eventually make its money back? Most likely.
Yet, I can assure you they will not build this Hyperloop train any time soon if ever.
We live in a society where money is everything. Advancement in technology only comes in second place when it comes to weapons in every other field we can be lucky if its importance is even in the top 10.
Ohh well.. enough evil conspiracy talk...
I hope to ride the Hyperloop train at sometime in my life and even though I expect to live at least 50 to 60 more years I somehow doubt I will even see it in action on TV.
Read the whitepaper. Musk explicitly states that airline-style security will be used.
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
Take I-80 coast to coast. The big challenge is staying awake through 1000 miles of corn, but you'll start to appreciate just how much of it we grow.
That's the beauty of 800mph travel. You only have to look at the corn for an hour and fifteen minutes, then you get a change of scenery. New York-Cleaveland-Chicago-KC-Denver would be a nice route to have, with maybe a southern spur St Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, along with a second western route from New Orleans through Houston, San Antonio, Touscon, Pheonix, to LA. Add a northern routhe Chicago-Minneapolis-Bismarck-Billings-Misoula-Spokane-Portland, hooking up to a west coast link from Vancouver to San Diego and you have a pretty well connected country. Obviously speeds would have to be slower in the rockies, barring expensive tunneling projects, but it would still beat air travel between most of those cities.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
For starters, how often to you hear of a railway-in-a-tube (ie subway) being delayed by weather? Have you ever actually been involved in a flight delay?
Second, you seem to assume that the airports (and air spaces) in these cities are not already at or near capacity.
ok, what's the cost of avoiding rain delays? 6b+? and cutting a line through the state? and likely boondoggle? that seems like an overkill solution. also, what's easier, expanding capacity at the endpoints or building a second tube 400 mi to add capacity?
fuel usage is already included into the pricing. You could say, the hyperloop has the potential to be cheaper, but I would say back that ass up? $100 is already pretty cheap. It costs $200 to drive on fuel alone.
the thing is in a round tube, the centre of mass of the car is below the centre of the tube, it will always rotate such that the centre of mass is pushed to the lowest energy point, so a passenger would only feel vertical G, like sitting in a fast vertical elevator. 2G is a very tame roller coaster, or a fairly brutal elevator. You would certainly feel it, but it wouldn't be that uncomfortable, especially in those fully supportive seats.
1) Initial cost
2) Maintenance costs over time, particularly if there are economic upheavals in the USA's or the world's economies.
3) Energy costs over time. While petroleum may not be what this thing uses for fuel, I guarantee you it's what gets' the thing built, and maintained for the forseeable future. FYI, petroleum fuels, even as they temporarily dip in price with the economy, are on a long term upward trend, spiking wildly when oil price feedback hits.
4) The possibility that may not have a single, continent-spanning nation state spanning North America within the next few decades.
Cool engineering idea, but this isn't the 1950's. We didn't just win a war and have industrial overcapacity looking for something to do. We are no longer sitting on an ocean of cheap, high net energy oil (Natural gas, while nice to have, isn't really going to cut it as a substitute. Sorry), and frankly we don't have the political or national will to do this sort of thing anymore.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The whole state is nothing but flotsam that's accumulated over the ages and it's still shifting.
I kind of agree with you about the inhabitants, but what about the land?
The difficult bit is really the engineering on a large project and developing all the parts and actually building the thing.
Nope. The most difficult bit is getting the right-of-ways. Presuming the design actually works (not a trivial presumption) the construction shouldn't be terribly hard once the financing and right-of-ways are obtained. But getting those right-of-ways is a hugely difficult problem and will account for much of the cost of such a project.
So you think you can increase the capacities of both LAX and SFO to handle this additional traffic, purchase the additional planes needed, etc for less?
Ok,,train on a magnetic rail,,,that's not new by 30 years +, there was some model shown (small model) back when i was 12 years old
Ok, computer running on electricity,,,that's not new by 70 years +, there was some model shown (small model) back when i was -12 years old.
It's "low carbon", whatever that's good for.
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The cheapest way to move people intercity is steel wheel on steel rail. Any transport expert worth his salt should know that. Why, in Japan, Europe, and China, they're already moving people at over 200 mph average. Today.
But if you can ignore practical considerations (like "visionary" businessmen can do) because the people (read governments) are willing to let you externalize costs such as land, hazard insurance, accident clean-up costs, etc. then sure, hyper-my-loop away.
Levy is not dismissing it "because it sounds a bit wacky." He's dismissing it because a realistic analysis shows that it is wacky.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
Wot, no "California Department of Transportation says you must construct additional pylons " joke?!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Said someone who has no idea what kind of logistics and infrastructure it takes to support to modern jet-flying airlines.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I'll note that it's generally more efficient on fuel to fly than to drive as well. Especially the fewer passengers you'd have in the car. Stuffing so many people into a single plane makes the amount of fuel used actually fairly low, and as long as the trip is high enough, they spend much of it up high enough that air resistance is less despite the speed.
That's why you want to evacuate the tubes - lower air resistance, plus the low rolling resistance of rails(much less maglev), allows you to get the air resistance planes get, without the expense of getting to the altitude.
Something ground based that's fast enough to compete with air travel on speed, that allows you to shift more people between hubs without using aircraft would take a lot of strain off of the hub airports.
I don't read AC A human right
The point being that early aviation needed very little in the way of a supporting infrastructure.
That's IMHO very short-sighted. Yes, it needed very little except that it was in the times when the landscape was littered with machine shops, material depots and people capable of actually making things out of said material. A lot of this is mostly gone nowadays, replaced by dedicated logistical chains that are not in the spotlight, but are huge, critical operations. Airlines need lots, lots of support, it's just not the very visible tracks, roads and runways kind of infrastructure.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I take it seriously enough to be concerned about safety.
Terrorists like to pick high profile targets, like airplanes, so that a LOT of people know what they did. This leads to people questioning why they did that, which, hopefully (to them) will lead to political support.
A super expensive, super modern bullet train traveling at super high speeds, generating a lot of energy is a JUICY target.
Especially since all a terrorist has to do is to sabotage one piece of track to send that train flying. It may not be practical to monitor every single mile of track.
Given that this system rides on 1mm thick air bearings inside of a smooth tube, I don't think that noise pollution is much of a concern on the outside of the tube. The air inside the tube is at roughly 1/1000 of atmospheric pressure, so the sound doesn't propagate all that efficiently inside of the tube. The only sources of acoustic noise is the vibration of the intake compressor at the front of the pod, transmitted through the thin air bearing cushion. This is relatively easy to mitigate, since rotating machinery running at a constant speed is about the easiest thing to deal with in terms of NVH (noise, vibration, harshness). An internal combustion engine is way harder to tame, and even that has been pulled off successfully :)
The tube/pylon system will of course be subject to excitation from the radial forces by the passing capsules. So far, the significant modes are around 2-4Hz, so that's not a big problem. There will be dampers between the pylon and the tube, those will keep the number of cycles of oscillation "low" (ideally: it'll be critically damped).
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Even better: it's an evacuated closed tunnel, kept at 0.001 bar.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Not even close. The friction losses on having a 500 mile long column of air going at 700 mph would be crazy. Scaling matters. Just because you can have it work in a bank or a big box store, or even in a downtown financial district, doesn't mean that you can willy-nilly both speed things up and increase the distance, by a factor of 100 no less.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
That was hilarious. Even better were all the other Google hits of media (traditional and blogs) saying he blasted the hyperloop concept.
Not that it would matter if he was... comedians aren't really people you want to be taking engineering advice from.
You should buy this Toyota. I'll sell it to you for only $100,000. Expensive you say? That's cheap! A 747 costs 350 million!
Yes, your post is a variant of the Wookiee defence.
Discount airlines can offer $100 IF they cram you in tight, fill the plane on every flight, and operate on a razor thin margin. The hyperloop as described is operating unscheduled. Imagine how much a plane ticket would be if you showed up at the airport whenever you wanted, hailed a plane, told the pilot where you wanted to go and he took you.
The hyperloop is a speculative concept that might or might not be practical, but high speed trains ARE cheaper than airplanes, and will only become more so as fuel costs rise.
how often to you hear of a railway-in-a-tube (ie subway) being delayed by weather?
A few years ago, the London subway system was completely shut down by a snowstorm. I have no idea how they managed that.
It costs $200 to drive on fuel alone.
It's about 400 miles. If it costs you $200, you might want to trade in your bus, RV or 18 wheeler for a more economical vehicle. Maybe you meant round trip, but I don't think the airline ticket was round trip.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
(400mi / 25 mpg) * $4/gal = ...$64? Maybe I was wrong. But the IRS rate for total vehicle costs is 54 cents per mile, so if I shift my metric then my number is still correct. Ahh, engineering! :)
But the IRS rate for total vehicle costs is 54 cents per mile,
It was 55.5 cents from 2011 until 2012. For 2013 it's 56.5 cents per mile.
fuel usage is already included into the pricing. You could say, the hyperloop has the potential to be cheaper, but I would say back that ass up? $100 is already pretty cheap. It costs $200 to drive on fuel alone.
Musk's estimate (in the paper that nobody bothered to read, yet addresses most of the wild speculation people throw out here) is that tickets would be $20 per passenger.
His proposal is that it will be mostly self-powered, using the area of the loop itself to capture solar power. His proposal seems to be more for mid-range traveling where the costs associated with take-off and landing make air travel less efficient.
See John Oliver's take on it.
(He actually pokes fun at the media coverage rather than at Teh Loop itself.)
Sure, I saw it. It was strings of jokes that were criticizing the idea based on the headlines and sound bytes regarding the idea, rather than the idea itself. It was a disappointingly shallow assessment of the idea.
Maybe it sounds crazy, but a lot of revolutionary ideas sounded crazy to everyone before they became common.
How about Steampower and the famous Napoleon quote, "Would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense."
Slashdot Experts Insist "Dismiss Wacky Transport "Expert""
Your move, professor in the UK who just wanted to latch onto the "Hyperloop" story to get his name out there.
Well, you have to admit, the current long-distance transport system externalizes the hell out of a lot of effective costs. How much land was condemned to build airports? How much pollution do we basically ignore?
We should extend any future technologies the same courtesy, lest we erect an unjustifed barrier to market entry. Or else impose full cost-bearing on current market holders. In the interests of leveling the playing field, of course.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
sure, whatever. the point is, it costs ~$200.
that's the point - airport expansions and new planes pay for themselves because it's a mature profitable (near break even) industry. hyperloop requres 6b of new cash from some unnamed source, implied that it's the govt. also, there's several airports. in bay area, SF, OAK, SJC. In LA region, LAX, SNA, Burbank (what's the code?).
Right now it costs $24 to take the train, one way, from Irvine to San Diego, about 80 miles..... Somehow i doubt LA to SF at high speed is going to be cheap.
Good-bye
You don't have to increase the airport capacity. Airport capacity is measured in takeoffs and landings per day. You just increase the average airplane size. They could run 747/777s where they are currently running puddle jumpers.
It would decrease problems with turbulence. That problem happens when little planes and big ones share the same airspace. Get the bugs out of the pattern.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A vehicle traveling at hundreds of miles per hour with hundreds on board will most definitely fall under the TSA at some point. Just because it is in a tube doesn't mean that the occupants will be any less dead if a bomb goes of in it...
Theoretically speaking, sure, just like you said.
But in this case, land is far less cheap today (no Native Americans to take it from, for starters). Railways were the enabling technology upon which the US was built then, now they hyperthingie just gets people from A to B - no freight, nothing radically new added to the transportation options already available. It would be a great make-work project, except there are millions of much better such projects available - crumbling bridges, for instance.
And really, is this a viable future technology, let alone a "futuristic" one?
The main issue is how to secure it. It's only feasible if it's medium distance to very long distance. Which means it has to connect densely populated areas while going through sparsely populated areas. The level of security that it would require would be much higher than train tracks because the high air pressure requirement makes it less stable. Securing highly pressurized tubes over hundreds of miles of sparsely populated area might make the whole project less feasible.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Umm, unscheduled? Look again. His proposed plan is tightly scheduled - one train every two minutes on average. No, you won't have to buy your ticket weeks ahead of time, but like a bus or commuter train it will run at regular times, they'll just be so regular you won't have to worry about it - you won't buy tickets for a specific train, you just buy your ticket and get on the next one leaving. Since it's a point-to-point system the logistics are simple - like a roller coaster it's "everybody on" and "everybody off". The train is full? Don't worry the next one is already loading. Or maybe you add some flex - adjust train frequency based on passenger load: You show up at the terminal, buy your ticket, then take your seat and wait 0-10 minutes until the train is full and they launch you off toward the other end. You'll still be likely wasting more time in bad traffic driving to the station than waiting for the train to fill. Heck, there'll probably be at least a few trains that leave the station just in the time it takes you to buy a ticket and get through security.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
LHC pumps 9000 m^3 to ~10^-9 atm to insulate their cryomagnets. That's the volume of a 2.4 km stretch of the passenger-only hyper-loop, at a million times deeper vacuum. Now, that they're doing that at CERN doesn't mean in any way it's easy or cheap. And the hyper-loop is still a volume a few hundreds of times bigger, without any compartmentalization.
Thermal expansion is also interesting. Back-of-the-envelope:
1.5*10-5 (thermal expansion coef stainless steel) * 40K (guesstimate max delta-T day/night) * 563*10^3m
= 338m thermal expansion/contraction, or 169m at each end.
They'll want to insulate it or at least shield it from direct sunlight -- which the solar panels will partially do.
The Washington DC subway was shut down by just a few inches of snow this year, but then it is run by bozos.
Japan, Europe, and China have vastly different population densities than the US.
The bit of the US that is like Japan and Europe -- the Northeast Corridor -- already does that. There is a rather nice train that runs from Washington DC up to Boston (roughly), with quite a few trains per day. It's quite a bit like European trains.
But most of the US isn't like that: short of the NEC, most of the US is a land of cities separated by vast stretches of farmland and wilderness. Atlanta to Tucson, to pick two random cities in the rest of the country, is 1750 miles (roughly the distance from Paris to Moscow), without all that many people in between (the only cities of any appreciable size along the route are San Antonio, Houston, El Paso, and New Orleans). It just doesn't make sense to take a train from Atlanta to Tucson.
Said someone who apparently can't read:
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Well, it really won't be up to him, but I would expect the TSA to jump at the chance to fondle more people.
What surprises me is that Al-Qaeda hasn't been able to convince anybody to become an "ass-bomber", which would require everyone to receive a rectal exam.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
A evacuated steel tube. It will have resonances and will ring. Likely at a harmonic of the linear motor frequency.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Linear motor, steel tube. You are ignoring an excitation force.
Critically dampening a 3/16 steel plate (thickness pulled from a dark place) is an engineering challenge. That's a fucking strong spring. Better plan on wrapping it in a foot of 'crete.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Whoops, you're right. I misread the article. San Fran is a whole lot closer to LA than is NY heh
...
My concern is the pylons. His drawings show them as passive entities. That simply won't work in California where the land shifts continually. Sometimes it's gradual as in fractions of inches each year and sometimes its catastrophic as in 27 feet in a few minutes...
Page 5 of the proposal: "Tucked away inside each pylon, you could place two adjustable lateral (XY) dampers and one vertical (Z) damper. These would absorb the small length changes between pylons due to thermal changes, as well as long form subtle height changes. As land slowly settles to a new position over time, the damper neutral position can be adjusted accordingly".
Please read the darn proposal before claiming to see flaws in it.
In case of a major earthquake the system would have to shut down until they can be checked out, like other commuter rails systems (BART, etc.) have to.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Sort of. The DC metro only shuts down above ground stations due to weather and usually it has to be more than a half a foot. The whole system shutdowns periodically due to a variety of other factors because it is in fact run by bozos. The roads shutdown because people here are bad drivers and have zero ability to deal with snow despite it being a roughly annual occurrence. The whole fucking city shuts down because congress doesn't like to do work and act like if you gave 5th graders the power to decide when the school gets to take snow days.
Because not every track is under the ground. If there is a hold-up somewhere, it delays everything.
This is blinging
Way to take a joke...
I wonder how air travel compares to rail when you also factor in the cost of the required infrastructure. Trains are much more fuel efficient, but laying massive amounts of rail is not cheap.
END COMMUNICATION
This is true -- they only shut down the above-ground stations during the "snowquester" this year (but it was substantially less than half a foot).
Totally with you on the bad drivers. Arizona drivers handle snow better, in the fucking cactus capital of the world. And the city just is generally run by derps -- I mean, Marion Barry? *Still* one of the most powerful men in the city?
What joke are you referring to?
It's a hell of a lot easier to get the land for an airport as opposed to right-of-way lines that extend all across a state. I'd wager it's one of the primary reasons the costs for California's high-speed raid have ballooned by billions and billions of dollars.
Correction: The FBI hasn't been able to coax anyone into posing as an Al-Qaeda Assbomber, so they could then swoop in and Save The Day.
Only on
That's not what unscheduled means. Unscheduled means you catch one when you want it. As you point out, there's one every two minutes. Not like a plane, where there might be a flight every few hours, or maybe just one, at eight am on alternate Tuesdays.
Laying rail is pretty cheap. Buying land sometimes isn't, but putting a bunch of steel rails down end to end is pretty much the cheapest kind of transportation infrastructure you can build. It's possible sidewalks are cheaper.
Airports are extremely expensive, both to build and to operate. So is air traffic control, aircraft maintenance, inspection, fuel infrastructure, parts infrastructure....
I have friends who fly privately. Even for small planes, the purchase price of the aircraft is about the cheapest part of the whole enterprise.
Ah, that must be my new contextual vocabulary usage for the day.
Still, I don't see any reason why that's an issue - you don't have the option of choosing where to go as it exclusively travels one high traffic route, so as long as there's a steady flow of customers every train will be filled as fast as they arrive, with empty seats only occurring during off-peak hours when you can't muster 28 people within your acceptable delay window. Add some decent public transportation hubs and zipcar lots at the stations and you're good to go.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There are no linear motors. Well, um, yes, there are linear motors, if you look for them with a very good flashlight, that is. They cover about 1-2% of the length of the track. The words used in the fine description of the system are used for a reason. It's a mostly passive capsule, an almost ballistic system, with a compressor in the front of the capsule to provide compressed air to the air bearings and to bypass the plunger-in-a-syringe effect in a cheaper way than merely throwing a bigger tube at the problem. The linear motors reboost the capsule periodically. It will be coasting for about 29 out of 30 minutes. They also apply a force that doesn't give big reactions in the direction of easy to excite modes of the tube walls. After all, the motors push the capsule forward (or pull it backward); they should be symmetrically arranged so that there is no net pitching moment. Thus there is, to a first order at least, no excitation of the serious modes of the tube.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Only if the said motor is acting in the direction of deflection of the important modes. It so happens, it won't. I'd like not to have to remind everyone that there are, like, um, engineers working on that thing. Presumably with some, like, structural experience with things that are notoriously difficult. Especially aerospace is kinda notoriously difficult, with good, quiet cars not far behind.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Said incremental progress brought it to a point where keeping the jets flying is much harder than actually flying them.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Based on the energy comparison chart, it seems to me that the hyperloop would require energy costs to rise for the investment to become economically worthwhile. Low energy usage is it's main advantage.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Back to electric fields for you.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You really don't get it?
There's already a lot of HSR in europe, but there's also a need for faster trains, better rail freight handling and roll-on-roll-off HSR (people drive long distances mainly so they don't have to rent at the far end) and HSR is already going about as fast as is practical (the limit is air resistance, not the rails - and most of the air resistance encountered on a high speed train is along the sides, not at the front.). Practical HSR needs entirely new trackways so Hyperloop isn't as disadvantaged economically as one might think and there strong arguments for keeping longhaul rail optimised for freight operations.
It's been said that if there was rail transport between spain and morocco, perishable transport operations would go faster and use significantly less carbon than the current airfrieghting operations - as well as bringing economic benefits to most of subsaharan africa. Hyperloop might well extend itself to this kind of work using freight pods.
Overall, the Hyperloop concept is good, but given the amount of systemic corruption in the american political system, it's unlikely to have legs in our lifetimes. I personally doubt the claims about self-sustaining operations off solar but I'd love to be proven wrong.