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The Race To Create a Hyperloop Heats Up (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader writes: When Elon Musk unveiled his idea for the "Hyperloop" transportation system based on capsules zipping through depressurized tubes, much was made about the enormous technical challenges the system would face in development. However, that didn't stop a number of companies and organizations from starting to work on it. Several companies are pushing the development work hard, and it's shaping up like a race to a workable prototype. University teams are only increasing their efforts as well. "The Illinois team enters the SpaceX contest with a strong competitive edge. This is its fourth Hyperloop design project, the first dating to fall 2013, and the Hyperloop is now a part of the MechSE curriculum. The team has assembled an interdisciplinary network of faculty from aeronautical engineering, thermal dynamics, mechanical engineering, electronic engineering and software, and two of the team members have interned at SpaceX."
"The pod has been pressurized to minimize the G forces effects on a passenger."
Really? How is that little trick performed?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
they should bury it so it can be a straight line tube cutting into the earth's curvature. Then you can just "fall" from Los Angeles to SF with no propulsion needed. The theoretical transit time, ignoring the friction, is 43 minutes. the energy you need to supply is to overcome the friction. Since gravity will be both accelerating this and decelerating this there's no need for a complex propulsion system, decelleration system with energy reclamation. Less to go wrong, and less abrupt acceleration of the passengers, and probably greater safety.
Of course the hard part of this is you have to tunnel underground to make a straight line cutting in to the earth. Since LA to SF is about 400 miles along the surface and the earth's circumference is about 25000 miles this means arc length is about 0.016 radians. thus 25000/2/pi*(1-cos(0.016/2)) = 0.127 miles.
so the center of this would be roughly 1/8th of a mile buried or 672 feet at the deepest point (ignoring the mountains). This doesn't seem radically crazy as a depth for boring a hole.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
1. the majority of americans outside a handful of cities still consider public transportation to be a mark of poverty and avoid it at all costs. others cant be bothered to even consider a greyhound to the next state, let alone a train, and once they arrive the local public transit infrastructure based on their destination is either so poor as to be unusable or nonexistent through legislative fiat.
2. We cant keep up. our bridges, roads, highways and railroads are crumbling further into the dirt each year, and neither body of legislation seems capable of passing meaningful funding. the hyperloop would surely face the same fate as a majority invested government project that eventually turned into public private, then abandoned once the payout wasnt suitable for corporations, and finally maintained at about a quarter of its original capacity.
3. the initial projection for this works project (and, it would be a works project) is six billion dollars. America cant manage to keep its government running for more than 2 years at a time in this foul year of our lord 2015. It wont fund education, its states wont fund healthcare, and its been cutting federal public transit funding for 35 years. the only way a hyperloop is getting built is if it somehow includes a rider to invade a neighbouring country.
the only real reason companies even thought of doing work with the hyperloop is to do what companies do: suckle at the taxpayer teat. You start by investing in a renewable effort, secure grants and loans, develop a few proof of concept ideas, sell out to a capital management firm, and then declare bankruptcy.
Good people go to bed earlier.