Hyperloop Testing Starts Next Year

neanderslob writes: In 2013, Elon Musk told us about a theoretical transportation system he'd been thinking about for a while. It was called "hyperloop," and it was a tube-based system capable of sending people and things at speeds of up to 800mph. Now, a company called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies plans to start construction on an actual hyperloop next year. The idea is to build it to serve Quay Valley (a proposed 75,000-resident solar power city in Kings County, California). The project will be paid for with $100 million the company expects to raise through a direct public offering in the third quarter of this year. The track itself will be a 5-mile loop and won't reach anywhere close to the 800mph Musk proposed in his white paper — but it's a start.

Comments

This isn't new

[g0bshiTe]

It's not new and it's not his idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I had a toy that back in the late 70's that was essentially the same thing.

Re:It's almost like the Concord verses the 747 aga

[serviscope_minor]

High speed railway is *phenomenally* expensive. It requires massive earthworks because of the very limited turning radius and limited climb angle of high speed trains. It requires very specialised rails that have to be laid under very high tension and welded so that the result is seamless and can withstand large temperature variations. It's also much more expensive to ballast because normal ballast doesn't cusion things well above certain speeds and turns into nasty pebbles instead of spikey lumps of rock. The result is big and heavy which means it needs its own strip of dedicated land. Finally, the air resistance for high speed rail grows quickly. On the very high speed test trains it gets comparable to aircraft. Despite having a smaller frontal area per passenger mile, the trains go fast in the thick lower atmosphere. The costs of those things add up a lot.

The hyperloop system claims to solve some of them and long, large airtight pipes are also well established technology in the oil industry for pipelines.

Whether or not the hyperloop claims are valid, I don't know, but it's not as wild as it first seems.

Re:proposed hyperloop goes to proposed city

[wildsurf]

"Existing elevated rail" is not a valid comparison. The Hyperloop infrastructure needs to support about 1/10th the weight per meter as traditional rail, therefore it can be done with 1/10th the materials. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline is 36 inches in diameter; the Hyperloop would be about 100 inches, but hollow and empty most of the time. Oil pipelines are full of oil, therefore quite heavy relative to diameter. In practice the total weight per linear meter of oil pipeline vs Hyperloop is about the same; 1 metric ton per meter. Traditional elevated rail is about 10 metric tons per meter.