MIT Team Tops Hyperloop Design Competition (google.com)

The Dallas Morning News reports that a team from MIT has topped competitors from around 100 universities around the world at a competition held on the campus of Texas A&M by presenting a workable design vision for Elon Musk's dream of a hyperloop. The hyperloop concept, mentioned several times before on Slashdot, involves rapidly shuffling passenger pods through 12-foot-wide tubes evacuated of air, and would mean terrestrial transport at speeds topping those of commercial air travel. From the Morning News article: Delft University of Technology from The Netherlands finished second, the University of Wisconsin third, Virginia Tech fourth and the University of California, Irvine, fifth. The top teams will build their pods and test them at the world's first Hyperloop Test Track, being built adjacent to SpaceX's Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters.

Comments

What were the criteria the designs judged on?

[mykepredko]

TFA is somewhat lacking in actual information.

I'd like to know what makes one design of a hyperloop capsule better than another.

Anybody have any links?

Re:Nature Abhors a Vacuum

[Rei]

What's the point of going three times as fast with less energy at a fraction of the capital costs? Yeah, I can't figure it out either.