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Hyperloop One Reveals Its Plans For Connecting Europe (engadget.com)
Hyperloop One has revealed its plans for connecting Europe via its Hyperloop transportation system that can move passengers/cargo at airlines speeds for a fraction of the cost of air travel. The company is currently considering nine potential routes in Europe, "running from a 90km hop to connect Estonia and Finland, through to a 1,991km pan-German route," reports Engadget. "The UK [...] gets three proposes routes: one to connect its Northern Cities, one to connect the North and South, and one to connect Scotland with Wales." From the report: Several of the routes, including ones between Estonia and Finland, Corsica to Sardinia and Spain -- Morocco, all cross bodies of water. The company has, on several occasions, spoke of its love of tunnels, and plans to use them extensively in construction. Although rather than using tunneling machines, which can be slow, submerged box tunnels or archimedes bridges may be cheaper and faster to build. CNBC notes that the proposals for Europe connect more than 75 million people in 44 cities, spanning 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles).
One assumes that all 75 million people aren't traveling from Estonia to Finland at the same time.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Get that San Francisco to LA route working and we can talk.
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Have you ever been to Estonia? It might not be safe to assume that they won't all leave at once...
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I can't see this happening in the UK unfortunately. It's notoriously difficult, time-consuming and mind-bendingly expensive to obtain the land and permissions to build any new transport infrastructure corridors in the UK. The Rail lines High-Speed Route 1 was bad enough and High Speed Route 2 is bogged down in inquiries, corruption and phenomenal cost projections. High Speed Route 2 is 400km and is sitting at a cost of 56 billion pounds which will be well south of the final bill. Whilst hyperloop may be orders of magnitude cheaper per route km the fun and games in getting the land will be the same. And no, you can't put it in the air on pylons as "air rights" belong to the land holders too. Land ownership in the UK is incredibly fragmented so even a short distance means engaging with thousands of land holders. One approach would be to piggy back down the middle of major arterial roads on pylons as most trunk roads are now owned by the Crown although that's not a hard and fast rule - many minor roads sit on land still theoretically owned by someone else.
Unlike so many previous ripoffs, this one has the "hype" right in the name!
As an Engineer, I see always see the problems....
- Thousands of sliding expansion joints that need to remain vacuum tight.
- The psychology of being subjected to movement with no visual reference (vomit tube)
- The problem of escaping people from a vacuum tube when something breaks. This would probably require uuuuge isolation valves every few km, and escape points closer than this, with emergency air infiltration systems, which then has to emergency break other pods who are then stuck in long queues with limited air, in battery powered coffins.
- Long term maintenance: esp of underground parts requiring building a tunnel in a tunnel.
- High capital cost of a complex pod requiring compressors, life support (aircon and air), batteries, recharging systems.
- Being not much faster than a bullet train of much higher capacity, and slower than an aircraft.
- Energy is becoming cheaper, so the main advantage of hyperloop is somewhat dulled.
I'm sure other can add more
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It is still impossible to go from say Vienna to Kharkov by train easily. Not even possible to buy a train ticket Vienna-Kharkov easily, - just as it was twenty years ago. A lot of talk about "European Integration", but nothing really changes on the ground.
I do not believe that the Hyperloop One is feasible with this generation of quaint leadership in Europe. They can just talk big and well about climate change, integration, etc.
Still in the 19th century there was the St. Petersburg-Wien-Nizza-Cannes-Express regular train https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , there were no visas, and not even passports were necessary for travel. WW1 destroyed it all and we are still stuck there.
It's a train in a tunnel but with air sucked out of it. So the difference between a high speed train tunnel and this is the air suckage.
So its put all the energy into keeping the air sucked out, instead of pushing the train against the air.
But the air is a known problem, in the Channel Tunnels it's handled with vents connecting the two direction tunnels, they open and close so the pressure wave from the front of one train pushed the train in the other direction from behind. Chunnel is not watertight let alone air tight.
So if you consider the costs of the Channel Tunnel GBP 9.5 billion for 31 miles of track, and the price.... the Chunnel competes with boats that are slow and expensive, a normal train has to compete with cars, coach, normal rail and flights.
So say low interest 3% government loan, so that 31 miles of track needs to return GBP 285 million profit. Eurotunnel makes only about 51 million, and that's competing only against ferries.
So hyperloop is basically hype. They cannot deliver on any of these ideas and their costings are comedically bad.
Just like any other snake-oil salesman.
they will have to be cheap as pie between finland and estonia.
I seriously hope that finnish government doesn't put a dime towards this though. it's still unproven as fuck. they don't have a prototype. giving money towards a tunnel would be shady as fuck. furthermore, estonia - finland route is so fucking short that regular train going 200kmh would do just fine, just fine, if there was a tunnel.
and they have to be cheaper than 20 euros for a trip. which is basically cheaper than a comparable train route in finland. why? boats between finland and estonia are pretty darn cheap and will get you there in couple of hours anyways(!).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
just to add.. existing high speed train routes and the routes that would require a tunnel would be served just fine with a regular train and couldn't make a profit with a regular train.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
As an Engineer, I always see solutions to problems.
As a physicist, I know engineers are not smart enough realize how stupid they are.
The hyper loop will never be cheaper than air travel or rail.
I was watching some of the original Mission Impossible episodes recently, and recalling my thoughts on watching them when they were first aired.
Some of them required tiny TV cameras hidden in (for example) a brooch worn by the female lead, and I remember thinking at the time how preposterous that was. The technological problems of getting a videcon that small, the lenses necessary, the power supply to generate the HV necessary for the tube, all the tube or transistor amplifiers, and the dry-cell battery needed to power it for several hours - complete fantasy!
And of course nowadays these devices are on eBay for $10.
You may not see the solutions to the problems today, but you really can't predict what will be possible tomorrow.
There's a difference between physically impossible and technologically impossible.
Hyperloop One has revealed its plans for connecting Europe via its Hyperloop transportation system that can* move passengers/cargo at airlines speeds for a fraction of the cost of air travel.
*cannot
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
There's a difference between physically impossible and technologically impossible.
there's a long disconnect what physically makes sense to build and what hyperloop is proposing.
mostly materials. you see. if hyperloop could develop the materials they need, they would be better off selling them for other uses than their tube.
they don't have what their idea needs.
their idea itself is 100+ years old. seriously, the idea is as old as balls and they don't have the technology to make it as of now.
conceptually it's the same as having a flying car company that depends on some sound dampening and battery technology that doesn't yet exist and never might.
and uh tell me a little bit, but they did have transistors already invented when they made mission impossible?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They've also got their geography slightly wrong. By the time this finally eventuates, if it ever does, the UK won't be part of Europe any more.
Unless you expect hyperloop construction to take place on a geological timescale they have the geography just fine. Geographically the UK will remain part of Europe regardless of what the idiots in Westminster decide to do politically.
FTFY
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I saw one of their job offerings and applied for it (as an external contractor). In principle, just for fun, but I would certainly want to work with them in case that my proposal was accepted; basically, I said that I would deliver objective and honest assessments expected to be exclusively constrained by best engineering practices, physics and other intrinsic limitations (e.g., budget). In my application, I expressly highlighted my almost-intuitive scepticism regarding anything of this ever working as advertised.
Clarification: although I do have a BEng in mechanical engineer and some experience in the field, most of my professional career has been focused on programming and numerical analysis. On the other hand, I applied for a work mostly consisting in numerically/theoretically assessing the actual applicability of the their intentions, an aspect where I am reasonably experienced. In any case, I honestly think that they can rightfully reject my application for various reasons other than my perhaps-too-honest intentions.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Yes, linking us here in Helsinki to Tallin with a tunnel may be smart. However, using Hyperloop to do it makes no sense to me as a Finn that travels to Estonia several times a year. Why? The travel time on the fastest ferries is already down to below couple hours, and they're currently looking into the option of building a rail tunnel in between the cities. which would cut the travel time down to 45 minutes. Benefits of a rail system over something like the hyperloop at this point are enormous: first off, trains are a technology we have mastered and the project does not require maintaining a near-vacuum, second of all trains have a higher capacity than hyperloop and are very likely cheaper to maintain*.
The Hyperloop test track which was about a mile long is so far the 2nd largest vacuum chamber in the world after NASA's. The Hyperloop tech is probably on the order of decades from being commercially viable. Even the planning of a regular underwater tunnel takes years, the estimated completion time of the rail tunnel is in 2038. Infrastructure projects like this take massive amounts of time and money to plan an execute and the planning needs to be started years in advance so it's near impossible that a technology like Hyperloop in such an early stage of innovation will even be considered for the Helsinki-Tallin route. The upsides are not worth the increased risks.
Even the rail tunnel is not a certainty due to the cost factors involved. At 92 kilometers - nearly twice the English channel tunnel - It'd be the longest rail tunnel in the world and underwater, making it extremely expensive (current estimates are in the ballpark of 13 billion euros). With the ferry traffic being cheap (you can get tickets for less than 10 euros), plentiful and fast it may well be the case that the tunnel is never implemented. Not to mention that the ferry companies are major players in the baltic regional economy, and this wield significant political lobbying power both here and in Estonia. Tallink-Silja is one of the largest companies in the Baltics, coming 2nd or 3rd behind only banks.
So to summarize: would it make sense to establish a faster connection between Helsinki and Tallinn? Possibly, I'll wait for more info before saying that for sure. If it is done, what are the chances of hyperloop being used to do it? Practically zero.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
so guess what the result of those negotiations is going to be? exact same as it is now.
Except that now UK isn't part of the EU and doesn't have anything to say anymore about its politics.
UK went from a full blown EU member, to probably the same status as Switzerland and Norway, two countries who were never members of the EU to begin with, and just sign treaties to be able to participate anyway.
Basically, UK just lost its voice at the EU table - its share of sovereignty.
Which sounds ironic, when a good chunk of the campaign's argument was something along the lines of "we want to be in charge of our own".
--
Or, UK could decide to go bonkers, completely sever ties with EU, and apply a request to be accepted as the 51st state of the USA. :-)
Airstrip One.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
He does not seem to know much about the UK either. A Hyperloop between Wales and Scotland? Very little traffic there. I live in one of the more populated areas of Wales and I've never come across anyone around here who travels to Scotland on any regular basis. It would be even less so if Scotland gets independence.
I have nothing against Scotland and Wales; however, I've never heard of the demand being that great for people in either country to get to the other and with the lack of available opportunities in both countries, I'm not really understanding the purpose of this...
Since it's been proposed, perhaps someone could enlighten me as to what they intend to accomplish? I feel like I am missing something.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Go and look at their youtube channel. There is no content from engineering or production, it is all marketing and sales hype.
You know, you could actually RTFM (in this case, TFM = Hyperloop Alpha) rather than being bewildered as to why.
The short of it: it's basically a pipeline, so you start with base pipeline costs for the given diameter. Compared to a pipeline:
Advantages:
* Far lower mass loadings
* Does not carry things that could "leak" and contaminate the ground (much easier environmental permitting, less NIMBY)
* Simpler thermal management
* Much lower pumping requirements (just to head this off: it's a mild vacuum, not a hard vacuum. The energy required (and pump sizes) to pump fluids through a pipeline is far more than is required to simply maintain a mild vacuum)
* Usually periodic branch points
Disadvantages:
* Far greater straightness requirements
* Requires an internal orbital polisher
* Periodic emergency exits
Both share infrastructure requirements at their endpoints, just of different kinds, both require a leak detection process, both require regular sensors, both require earthquake protection, etc. In general, however, pipeline construction is not very expensive, even at large diameters, relative to rail construction. The ready-made pipe segments are brought to the site and an orbital welder connects them together.
Versus rail, Hyperloop offers far lower peak mass loadings. This is because (and feel free to do the math yourself, I have) in both cases, the "track" - whether continuously-welded steel rails or orbital-welded pipe, is well lighter than the vehicles on them, but Hyperloop vehicles - being small with frequent launches rather than heavy with infrequent launches - provide far lower mass loadings. The cost of elevating a structure is directly proportional to its peak mass loadings, and hence the order of magnitude lower peak mass loadings translates to an order of magnitude lower elevation cost, as well as smaller cross section pylons which are easier to locate in tight spaces.
This in turn enables the practical location of it in road medians (with proper crash barriers as needed), if you have government buy-in to the concept. Hyperloop Alpha assumes that you will. I have to concur, it's hugely to the advantage of the government to do so, as the government has to spend huge amounts of public money building transportation infrastructure regardless. Road medians are already permitted for far more onerous environmental and noise conditions (road traffic) than Hyperloop would provide, which should make permitting much easier; the only new thing you're introducing is visual, which you have to introduce for any transportation system construction.
Due to the straightness requirements, the system cannot just stay within road medians. Varying bend radii depending on the speed planned for the segment require various deviations from medians. This requires private land acquisition - budgeted at typical rail rates for private land acquisition - and various tall pylons and/or short tunnel segments (budgeted at typical pipeline tunneling rates) where the landscape dictates it in order to maximize curve radii. And yes, they are typical rates, I've crosschecked the numbers in the document, and encourage you to as well.
Now as for the rest as to why it's so much cheaper than rail, they do cheat on that. There's three main ways. The first is simple: it doesn't carry as many people as California's HSR (it's roughly halfway between HSR and air travel on a logarithmic scale in terms of passenger capacity). That's not really a cheat on the per-passenger cost, but it is a cheat on th
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Wow, I have a tribute band. Cool! :)
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Advantages: * Far lower mass loadings * Does not carry things that could "leak" and contaminate the ground (much easier environmental permitting, less NIMBY) * Simpler thermal management * Much lower pumping requirements (just to head this off: it's a mild vacuum, not a hard vacuum. The energy required (and pump sizes) to pump fluids through a pipeline is far more than is required to simply maintain a mild vacuum) * Usually periodic branch points
So, you are basically saying that building a standard piping system to conduct fluids is more difficult than one hosting the very fast transportation of persons except for these points? Even by ignoring diameter/length aspects, I am afraid that such a claim is very far away from being truth.
The points which you are referring aren’t even too relevant IMO:
* Far lower mass loadings -> I guess that you make that assumption by focusing your analysis on eminently theoretical aspects (considering just mass/volume/density inside the pipes) and by completely ignoring more practical ones like what is provoked by the associated momentum (e.g., stress/pressure variations). The resilience requirements of a container dealing with a fluid are far lower than the ones associated with a relatively big/heavy solid moving at high speeds inside that fluid.
* Does not carry things that could "leak" and contaminate the ground -> when dealing with vacuum, leaks are certainly a concern; they might not contaminate the environment, but their consequences might be much more dangerous. Additionally, dealing with human lives is usually seen as a much bigger problem than environmental contamination and, consequently, your "easier environmental permitting" really means "having to comply with the much stricter safety regulations dealing with people transportation".
* Simpler thermal management -> again, dealing with human lives is always orders of magnitude more problematic than doing it with lifeless fluids. With persons, the main problem isn't just the external isolation, but also the internal temperature ranges.
* Much lower pumping requirements -> this might be right theoretically, but not so sure practically. One of the biggest problems of this vacuum-based transportation is people going inside/outside (+ associated pumping out/in). Even by forgetting about emergency situations and by assuming long trips with no stops, the adding/removing vacuum + all the associated actions required to ensure all the passengers to be completely safe during these processes are likely to be much more problematic and expensive than the ones in the version for fluids.
* Usually periodic branch points -> not completely sure what you mean with that, but if it refers to a more discrete structure (understood as formed by more parts/variations) it would be a drawback. A straight plain pipeline will always be much cheaper than a more intrincate one including many joints, different materials, section variations, etc.
Sorry to burst your bubble but the transition from abstract theory to actually-functional complex system, mainly if it deals with something as important as human lives, is way much more complex than what you are trying to suggest. Your initial "so you start with base pipeline costs for the given diameter" is as unrealistic as trying to build a car by starting from "let's just make this toy car bigger". Starting any analysis of a complex system which deals with human lives (also with the extremely important issue of a reasonably big and heavy object running at a huge speed) by mostly caring about what the dealing-with-fluids equivalence does is also extremely naïve and unrealistic.
In any case, I think that your post describes an appealing-to-Hyperloop scenario: build a scaled-down version which emulates existing piping structures and completely ignores the very-problematic-human-lives issue and prove that your ideas work. Design, build and operate this Hyperloop for gods. Prove that
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
A transient (89ms) mass loading (short enough not to allow for any meaningful deflection**) of far lower peak magnitude versus a permanent mass loading of far greater peak magnitude - there is no contest, the latter is much more expensive to build (all else being equal). As for any knock-on effects from variations, the pylons incorporate 3-axis dampers (needed for earthquake protection and maintaining alignment). Note that the pylons are a separate cost line item.
The length of a Hyperloop capsule's worth of a 1g/cc liquid is well over 100 tonnes, vs. 3,1 tonnes for a Hyperloop capsule (plus ~2 tonnes for passengers / luggage). That's a huge difference. And this is ignoring that the bulk of the tube at any given point in time only bears its own weight. A pipeline bears vastly more weight.
** - Re, deflection: even if a pipe segment (nearly an inch thick steel) didn't resist deflection at all, and the segment was essentially in free-fall during the period there was a vehicle moving through it, it would still only deflect by 3,8 centimeters.
Then this isn't a rebuttal at all to this point, now is it? The point was about environmental effects - which most definitely is a major impactor of construction costs. The issue of leaks testing/fixing on costs was addressed in an entirely separate point. And is an issue common to them both. But only one type of leak (fluid pipelines) contaminates its environment.
Yes, if you live in a cartoon where an inch thick steel peels back like a banana because of a pinhole. Or in a world where there's absolutely no pressure sensors whatsoever, and air has no viscosity. Also in a world where people don't already work extensively with vacuums in industry and are already well aware of how to handle them. I can promise you, for a refinery with a VDU and with a hydrocracker, workers have a lot more fear of the hydrogen lines than the vacuum lines. Vacuum leaks are an inconvenience, not a threat. An inconvenience that you usually don't even need to deal with immediately, and can postpone until the next maintenance period. They don't spill anything, they don't compromise system integrity, they just mean that you have to run your pumps more than you'd like. VDUs and long vacuum lines use reinforcing rings, generally as the joins between pipe segments. You could shoot one with a cannon and it wouldn't collapse, all you'd do is make a hole in the side.
Preventing collapse in vacuum systems is not magic, it's well-understood engineering. Any engineer worth their salt can readily calculate wall thickness vs. segment length vs. ring diameter in order to make a vacuum system safe against implosion. You may have noticed that Hyperloop One has reinforcing rings. Do you think they just guessed at all of their dimensions? Of course not, they use whatever the engineering specs say makes for a safe vacuum line. You don't make a pipeline by guesswork.
Right, because transporting flammable (
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I have no clue what you mean by "resistance requirements". If you mean "mass loading", of course you can. Even the loading distribution is roughly the same - greatest at the bottom, less on the sides, little on top. And the towers are indifferent to where the loadings come from, it's just mass transferred from the dampers.
Huh? Do you think mass loadings are about pressurized fluids (aka, ? We're talking the simple mass of the contents of the tube. Mass loadings. A Hyperloop capsule is far less dense than a typical liquid, as most of its volume is air.
I'm bewildered by this argument from you. A gun experiences several hundred megapascals of pressure (several thousand atmospheres). A toy watergun experiences a small fraction of one atmosphere. It has nothing to do with mass loadings, the difference between them is about fluid pressures. What fluid pressures are you picturing here - let alone ones exerted at hundreds of megapascals?
And actually, your gun example illustrates the benefit of transient stresses perfectly. To actually contain hundreds of MPa / thousands of atmosphere with the same internal diameter would require a pressure vessel far larger than a gun barrel. A scuba tank is only rated for around 20MPa; that's also around the pressure that hydraulic cylinders operate at, and typical "high pressure" industrial processes (such as the Haber process). The highest-strength hydrogen tanks on the market are around 70MPa. Hundreds of MPa is crazy pressure to actually contain. But as a transient, it's not a problem.
The same is the case with Hyperloop. Not only are the peak mass loadings far lower than pipelines and HSR, they're also only very brief transients.
Well okay then. Thanks for taking the time to let me know. ;)
Huh? No, we're talking about transporting a flammable fluid that is always passing near humans, and explosions of which can and do kill people.
In normal usage, neither kill people. In extreme failure scenarios, both kill people. The number of people at risk in a severe failure is not grossly disproportionate between the two.
Really, you think the pipeline industry isn't covered by a crazy-intensive permitting process that takes years to complete, and one of the large portions of that being safety risks to people?
Where on Earth did you get the concept that part of the design involves chilling the capsules (and thus the passengers) to absolute zero? Not that that would even affect the above point about the capsule existing within a nearly-zero convection environment, but .... what on Earth?
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