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).

Comments

Re:Wait in line

[smallfries]

Have you ever been to Estonia? It might not be safe to assume that they won't all leave at once...

progress!

[ooloorie]

Unlike so many previous ripoffs, this one has the "hype" right in the name!

Is it really practical

[labnet]

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

Cross rail, Channel Tunnel

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wait in line

[Rei]

of course musk keeps saying that somehow hyperloop would be cheaper

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