Hyperloop One Announces Opening of Its First Manufacturing Plant (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Hyperloop One is today announcing the opening of its first manufacturing plant. Called Hyperloop One Metalworks, the 105,000 square-foot building in North Las Vegas will be the new professional home of many of the company's 170 employees, including engineers, machinists and welders. These folks will build and test a number of components for the DevLoop, a full-system prototype of the Hyperloop, set for testing in 2017. The project, if successful, promises a half-hour travel time between Stockholm and Helsinki, which is the equivalent of about 300 miles. The company plans to have a working prototype of the Hyperloop by 2017 thanks to this new plant."Hyperloop One Metalworks is the first Hyperloop manufacturing plant in the world," said co-founder and President of Engineering Josh Giegel in a press release. "The ability to have a world-class machine shop in-house gives us an advantage to build rapidly and develop the Hyperloop in real-time."

Comments

Translating for the rest of the world

[Edis Krad]

300 miles = 482 kilometers.
Incidentally, 482 km in 30 minutes is about 960 km/h. Not bad!

Re:Translating for the rest of the world

[Edis Krad]

European

You might want to try again

Re:Translating for the rest of the world

[Miamicanes]

"International" dates are big-endian.

British dates are little-endian.

American dates are VAX-endian.

Sorry. I've been waiting 20 years for the chance to use "VAX-endian" in a sentence. I couldn't pass it up... :-D

(for anybody who didn't major in computer science... the way VAX mainframes represented double-precision floating point internally was... er... kind of weird... I think it did something wacky like represent the mantissa as a little-endian bit sequence, followed by a big-endian exponent, so the most significant bits ended up in the middle. Or something like that. I'm not old enough to have had to personally deal with it, but I remember one of my professors mentioning it as a historical footnote during the discussion of big- vs little-endian-ness as an example of how a vendor could completely throw a monkey wrench into the usual dichotomy and make a REAL mess).

Re:Translating for the rest of the world

[Archfeld]

I worked on PDP's in my younger days. I haven't thought about that in a long time. Another oddity I deal with but never understood why is the difference between International sports hosting order and the US. In the US it Team A @ Team B, while internationally it is Team A hosting Team B. I have to remind myself of that when I am watching UEFA/BPL/La Liga, vs US football or the MLS.

Re:Translating for the rest of the world

[angel'o'sphere]

It's worse for everyday use because shit is based on 10 which doesn't divide as evenly as things like 12, 36, 5280, etc.
This is a ver dumb argument, and wrong btw, a foot is not evenly divideable by 36.
Secondly: no one cares if a measuring can be diveded evenly (I assume you actually meant: diveded by integer division without leaving a reminder?)
Thirdly: it helps you absolutely nothing that a foot is 'evenly divedeable' by 2, 3, 4, 6, 12 because 9 feet 1" e.g is undevideable by any of them, so is 9 feet 9" and plenty of others.
I for my part extremely rarely work with stuff that exactly x (unit)'s long where dividing it up leads to nice rational numbers or natural numbers even. More interestingly: the situation that I have to divide something up like that rarely occures.
In real life my meassures are odd (and have a decimal point) all the time. So are yours.

This could change everything...

[110010001000]

....just like the Segway did.

What a coincidence!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just watched this video debunking the feasibility of the Hyperloop.

Re:What a coincidence!

[Fwipp]

What a trash video. He basically says "um have they considered that you'll be going fast and that crashing is bad?"

He's not even consistent - he claims in one breath that any crash would breach the outer walls and that repressurization would be catastrophically fast, and in the next that humans couldn't possibly survive until the tube repressurized and would die nearly instantly from being exposed to vacuum.

He also doesn't really know how anything works and throws in meaningless stats constantly. Like when he compares the mass of the air in the tube about 20 minutes in - irrelevant to anything. It's like saying the water pressure in my shower is somehow increased by the mile of plumbing between me and the water tower.

Re:What a coincidence!

[guruevi]

A crash or compromise of the internal vehicle would expose the occupants to the vacuum, a crash or compromise of the outer shell would cause a rush of atmospheric air at the speed of sound to hit the vehicle. That is to say given you can even plausibly get a vacuum that large. It hasn't been done before and requires a lot of engineering including vacuum seals that don't even exist yet. The current design as marketed doesn't even account for the steel tubes expanding and contracting.

Re:What a coincidence!

[FoodOverdose]

I think you should see another educating video about effects of near vacuum on thin metal shells

Re:What a coincidence!

[Grishnakh]

Citation needed. Everything I've read states that it'll be a mild vacuum. There's no such thing as a "complete vacuum" on earth.

Wherefore art thou Slashdot?

[Areyoukiddingme]

Three different people posting the same Youtube link to the same babbling jackass.

You people do realize that Elon Musk had actual rocket scientists working on the original Hyperloop paper, right? Whether or not Mr. Musk's own physics degree is worth anything or not, the degrees of his employees definitely are, or SpaceX rockets wouldn't fly. They did modeling of vacuum evacuation of the tube. They did modeling of stresses on a basic pylon, using the same software they use to model the stresses on SpaceX rockets. They did modeling of the capsule. The math and engineering have been vetted pretty seriously. At least, the original version.

Whether or not Hyperloop One's version has enjoyed the same degree of scrutiny by people who have been demonstrated not to drop a decimal place I don't know, but regardless, you can stop linking to the babbling fool.

The fundamental flaws of Hyperloop are political, not physical. The link proposed between SF and LA will never be built because it would have followed the highway, which would deny the Right People the opportunity to get rich off of real estate speculation, the way the Not Very High Speed Rail project is allowing.

Re:Wherefore art thou Slashdot?

[FoodOverdose]

Elon Musk is entrepreneur in visionary, and his recent statements makes you reconsider adequacy of his vision.

Re:Wherefore art thou Slashdot?

[Kiuas]

You people do realize that Elon Musk had actual rocket scientists working on the original Hyperloop paper, right? Whether or not Mr. Musk's own physics degree is worth anything or not, the degrees of his employees definitely are, or SpaceX rockets wouldn't fly. They did modeling of vacuum evacuation of the tube. They did modeling of stresses on a basic pylon, using the same software they use to model the stresses on SpaceX rockets. They did modeling of the capsule. The math and engineering have been vetted pretty seriously.

I think you slightly miss the overall point of the video. The math is one thing, and surely no-one's claiming it's impossible to build a system that works with enough effort, however the real question is whether or not such a system will be worth the advantage, which, as the video explains, will not be much more than an hour cut from the travel time when you take into consideration that the system will likely have to have close to airport-level security anyway.

The cost calculations they've been showing thus far are vastly understated, they assume no maintenance costs whatsoever, and the costs for the building of the thing are sketchy at best.

Overall the whole project of HyperLoop One as it's been thus far presented is heavy on hype and light on facts and doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence because of that. For example as mentioned in the video, they currently waive the challenges caused by thermal expansion of by saying they can have a moving tube at the endpoint, that is, that they'll just allow the whole thing to expand few hundred meters and just move the station with it, but it should be obvious that you can't have 600 miles of solid steel tubing without any expansion joints and assume that this thing won't buckle at all and cause issues... I'm no engineer but this still seems very sloppy if they want their project to be taken seriously.

Simulating these things is one thing since in simulations you can simply assume a working system (ie. a working 600 miles long vacuum-tube), the video is talking about the difficulties of actually building/maintaining such a system using current technology while keeping the costs sensible.

This is not to say some version of the hyperloop is physically impossible, just that given all the challenges present in actually building and maintaining one, it looks to me at the moment like it's not really worth it.

As this article well put is:

The biggest issues are speed and scale. The Hyperloop was pitched as faster and cheaper than alternatives like cars and trains, but even small shifts in those numbers can dramatically change how it stacks up. It's easy to imagine safety concerns limiting Hyperloop speeds to just a fraction of its theoretical top speed or right-of-way issues keeping stations far from urban centers. Would we still be excited about the Hyperloop if a 30-minute trek became a three-hour one? What if it cost $60 billion instead the promised $6 billion? After enough setbacks, it might not be worth developing the technology at all. Those deployment details are life-or-death issues for the Hyperloop, but as long as the tests are focused on small-scale loops, it's not clear we'll ever get answers to them.

SpaceX's latest round of tests doesn't seem likely to change that. The test track is only 5 miles, nowhere near the distance it would take to reach 700 miles per hour. Another test track built by Hyperloop Test Technologies will have the same problem, aiming at a 200mph top speed. For the same reason, these test tracks can’t address the unique safety issues that come with near-supersonic travel. The result is just a tube-powered version of conventional transportation tech like maglev and rail. That doesn't mean that useful work can't be done on this round of test tracks, but it means the central question of the Hyperloop — whether it