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China Plans 600 MPH Train To Rival Elon Musk's Hyperloop (shanghaiist.com)
In addition to relaunching the world's fastest bullet train, China is working on developing technology similar to Elon Musk's Hyperloop, which will allow passengers to travel at speeds up to 4,000 km/h (~2,500 mph). The first stage of the company's plan, however, will be to create a network of these "flying trains" operating at 1,000 km/h (~600 mph). Shanghaiist reports: Earlier today, the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), one of the nation's major space contractors, announced that it had begun research and development into a new, futuristic type of transport which would operate via supersonic "near ground flight." The system would presumably be similar to that of the Hyperloop, proposed earlier this decade by Elon Musk, in which capsules would fly at ultrafast speeds down reduced-pressure tubes, dramatically reducing travel times. Of course, the CASIC isn't looking to reach speeds of 4,000 km/h right away. The first stage of the company's plan will be to create an intercity network of these "flying trains" operating at 1,000 km/h. In the second phase, this network would be extended and the max speed of the pods increased to 2,000 km/h. Finally, in the third stage, the speed would be boosted all the way up to 4,000 km/h -- five times the speed of civil aviation aircraft today.
An hour after exiting the train, you'll want to ride it again.
Trolling is a art,
Just spend the money on regular trains/trams. No ego contests comparable to having the tallest building. Overly fast trains are too easy to sabotage anyhow. Would you rather be in a train crashing at 600mph or 60mph?
Table-ized A.I.
America can't afford anything of its kind
4Km/hr on a train? What could possibly go wrong???...
That's less than 10 minutes to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. That's less time than going through through the TSA line at an airport plus their pat down process.
The first stage of the company's plan, however, will be to create a network of these "flying trains" operating at 1,000 km/h (~600 mph).
How funny. We already have a huge network of 1,000 km/h (~600 mph) "flying trains" that travel all over the world. They're called airplanes, and have existed for several decades.
They use a lot of fuel per passenger-mile traveled for mass transit, and because they fly, that fuel has to be carried in some energy-dense form: fossil fuels. This is bad if you're not a Trumper.
The question is whether this Chinese system is more efficient.
The difference is that China will actually build theirs.
...it will reach 8000 km/hour.
The problem with these things is not the speed : we can get to high speed with mag-lev, it'll obviously be faster with less/no air resistance. The problem is the reliable manufacturing and resilience to accidents of huge vacuum tubes that transport vital cargo like human lives.
I think that LHC was the largest, it was far from easy and it's only 27 Km.
From https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...
Musk decided not to pursue the Hyperloop as a business venture, but SpaceX began holding competitions for third-party teams to show off their engineering skills. The competitions have proved hugely popular.
So while Musk may have come up with the original idea* he really isn't doing anything other than holding competitions for things that look and work totally unlike his original concept.
* And even that is debatable for various values of "Train running in a (near) vacuum"
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
From what I've read, people are rightfully afraid of riding on the bullet train. Do you think they'll want to ride on an even faster and less safe version?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Strictly enforced by physics
The real selling point of Musk's plan was not the speed, but the plan to eliminate wait times and the first/last mile. Especially for short-haul mass transit, there's not much benefit to traveling at 1 billion KPH when you have to wait for 15-30 minutes to catch a train. An optimal system allows you to:
* Ride from your house to a local transit hub in your small electric pod
* Get bundled into a meta-pod and zipped off to your destination transit hub with low delay
* Ride (or walk) a short distance from the destination hub to your final destination
Creating a train that goes 600 MPH is a small part of this.
The question is whether anyone can build a cost effective system vacuum tubes hundreds or thousands of miles long. It fascinates me that Elon Musk has started by building a crappy propulsion system. Why? That is the part we already know how to build, you can contract it out to to the Japanese and get it done quickly.
So where is the plan to build cost effective vacuum tunnels? Maybe China can do it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This should be as successful as their Road Straddling Bus".
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Forget blowing it wide open or toppling a pylon - if you just put a hole in it, wouldn't the train slamming into a wall of air at 4000 km / hr at the least kill everyone inside from the sudden g-force and likely either smash the train or create a concussive blast that would blow the tube apart?
TYpical AMerican bullshit, no where in the article does it imply any detail of the new trains except possible speeds. No where does it mention tunnels, vaccuums etc. THere are many ways to go faster, hyperloop may just be one of many.
I am sure that Musk has ZERO intentions of going 4000 km/hr.
Of course, right now, he is outdoing ALL OF THE WORLD, on Solar, EVs, Space, and heading towards hyper loop combined with underground tunneling.
So, I am quite sure that China will outdo him.
LOL.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well, it won't be cost effective. It's apparently maglev. So unless they have some maglev breakthrough to make it cheaper, their system won't be cheap.
The interesting thing about Hyperloop Alpha wasn't that it was in a tube, it's that it was based around compressors (so the pressure in the tube didn't have to be a hard vacuum, which is expensive) feeding air bearings (so they didn't need to use maglev, which is expensive). But now "Hyperloop" has transformed into a synonym for "any sort of craft moving in a tube", including from some of the companies that have adopted the Hyperloop moniker that use technologies not at all related to those in Hyperloop Alpha. Many of them are just good old fashioned maglev vactrains.
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.
there would not be a speed limit.
They want to have a large passenger capsule that can go faster than a bullet and not melt!!!
We tell you which train to ride, how long to ride it, and what places you are allowed to go to.
But I'll be issuing extra junk bonds to cover additional advertising just in case.
China Plans 600 MPH Train To Rival Elon Musk's Hyperloop
You mean the Hyperloop that does not exist?
And will never exist. Sorry, but expecting to maintain near vacuum in 350 miles of 3-meter diameter tubing is not going to happen. Temperature induced contraction and expansion, earthquakes, vandalism, and sabotage. There're your problems.
And when it does fail, what happens? The entire system goes down as it loses vacuum. Assuming you could get someone to whatever remote location is required in a timely manner to repair the fault, how long will it take to put the whole system under vacuum again? All 350 miles of it? Assuming you weren't pulped when your carriage travelling at 1200kph suddenly went from operating in a vacuum to operating at standard PSI.
The question is whether this Chinese system is more efficient.
Engineering 101: the design that isn't implemented always beats the one that is.
Of course it'll be more efficient. They claim it's efficient because they'll cover the tube w/ solar panels. Okay, well, you can put solar panels along any train track.
Hyperloop One is not at all connected with Musk. If anything, they're a competitor.
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.
No, it would slow down, relatively smoothly.
And that is assuming that the leak wasn't detected nice and early and the system throttled down,because, you know, pressure sensors dont exist.
You do realise that a 'wall of air' is kind of hard to keep in one place, right? it tends to leak in to the low pressure area right next to it.
Of course, blasting or injecting a deformity/object in front of the 'train'? that would be very very bad. Rescue efforts would be very difficult also.
Drilling in to it and leaving the drill stick down in the tube, nicely sealed, would be much MUCH worse than letting air in.
But no, and air leak is not a major.
Political prisoners get the first ride
The last time I checked, the idea of a near-vacuum transport system was old. It's nice that Elon is recycling the idea, but please enough brown nosing. The concept was used in several science fiction books, movies, cartoons and tv shows. Elon should get credit for reviving an old idea and helping "some" people think outside the gas guzzling cars. Discovery channel even had a show about a trans-atlantic train system that used near-vacuum tubes years before Elon revisited the idea.
Overly fast trains are too easy to sabotage anyhow. Would you rather be in a train crashing at 600mph or 60mph?
These trains are designed to compete with planes, not other trains. However, even then they would be a lot more difficult to sabotage than today's high speed trains which run at 1-200mph, not 60 mph, above ground on open tracks which are accessible by just about anyone at any time. Trains in tunnels are far better protected than other trains and even compared to an aircraft which could be targetted by anti-aircraft missiles as happened in Ukraine a few years ago.
The other advantage is that failures of the train are likely to be more survivable than aircraft failures since they can carry more weight for protection and a power failure should not mean automatic disaster (although when going 600mph through a tube it clearly is a possibility).
At those speeds it won't take much to derail those trains and kill lots of people.
// our reality sucks
/// why would anyone want to derail a train, or shoot a schoolyard, or whatever.
/ sad but true
Blaine is a pain. ...and that's the truth.
they can cut safety to make it cheaper
Unless it has QC standards like an iPhone, this will not end well.
... I've been saying that Hyperloop is either a huge scam, or something else I'm still having a hard time to imagine.
Let's be clear here: The current company that has the most advanced Hyperloop version (Hyperloop One) which is obviously still in very early prototype stages basically stole maglev propulsion system and slapped it into some poorly designed vacuum tunnel to see if it could make whatever Musk scribbled in some napkin. In fact, the first public test Hyperloop One made was just a maglev propulsion system similar to that employed in several other countries that are currently already running actual train test lines (like Japan), or have actual completed train lines (like China and South Korea).
Almost everything one could point out as Hyperloop prototypes being "successful" can be single handedly attributed to maglev tech. There hasn't been a single significant technological contribution that I know of so far coming from Hyperloop companies, and I still didn't hear a proper explanation on how the heck these companies are planning to build entire tunnels over large stretches of land that would make it any more feasible or more economical over regular train tracks or maglev train tracks.
The entire idea of Hyperloop puts a whole ton of disadvantages, extra costs, potential problems, among several other things on top of a maglev train to get some theorical speed advantage that's even further into the future and more infeasible than actually making a single working short route from one city to another. It loses flexibility, you need to spend exponentially more (because of the tunnels operating in near vacuum), you are limited to pods of limited sizes, the entire infrastructure becomes far more succeptible to stuff like earthquakes, terrorist attacks, and just plain wear and tear, it'll be mostly point A to B with no stops for efficiency, plus a ton of other stuff to worry about which maglev trains don't have to deal with in their current operational status.
Yet, for some reason (money laundering, Simpsons monorail style scam, major spec stealing of foreign technology, or who knows what), some European countries plus US and UAE are investing on this. It makes no straight faced sense.
And I've been saying this in all my comments on the matter: maglev trains are still evolving, getting faster, more robust and better overall - as shown by this article. People joke about it being China and whatnot, but overall, maglev trains are plenty secure.
Hyperloop might be theoretically faster because it's basically maglev train cars inside a near vacuum tube, but that's only for the theoretical top speeds, which makes investing on it based only on that as much sense as investing on a F1 car prototype for consumers. Just because it theoretically can reach such speeds doesn't mean that it ever will, or even should.
You wanna see how riding a Hyperloop could potentially be in the future? Go to China, Japan, South Korea or some other country with maglev trains, ride one, but keep seated the entire way and close the blinds. At least if we are to take Musk's designs and Hyperloop One designs seriously. Also imagine being cramped in a far tighter space, and paying a whole lot more for the priviledge - because the costs of building the whole thing up will have to come from somewhere.
The more I hear about it, the more it sounds like Concorde elevated to exponential and surreal levels of unfeasibility.
This reminds me of Reagan's fake star wars program that helped end the soviet union. The Chinese are chasing something that doesn't exist, and may never exist, with a commitment to billions of dollars worth of infrastructure spending that may never pay off.
Perhaps the trains will have to go that fast so that the passengers don't asphyxiate from CO2 build-up... or do they have some plan to scrub the air during journeys of more than a few minutes?
Actually it will be cost-effective, its going to be driven by all those 10,000mAh 18650's you can buy on Aliexpress, more than three times the capacity of any cells that non-Chinese vendors can produce.
In terms of efficiency, these ground based systems don't have to waste energy lifting everything to 30,000'. In the case of planes, they also have to expend energy accelerating and lifting the fuel for the whole journey. This is one of the reasons they spend huge amounts of money electrifying popular rail routes, because it does pay back.
Is there a reason why both of them want to stop at around 4000 km/h?
5 times as fast as today's commercial aircraft.
2 times as fast as yesterday's commercial aircraft.
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
It's not the first time people dream about hyper fast train in low pression tube.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro
"Based on high-speed maglev trains travelling in low-pressure tunnels (approximately 100 millibar)[3][4] the speeds would have been about 500 kilometres per hour."
But as always, infrastructure cost a lot.
Yep, this pretty much shows what's going to happen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIe5h_L480Y
Oh, and while you're at it: look for "Railroad vacuum implosion" too and then think about a 500 mile vacuum tube, too. One shot from powerful gun and you will have to clean up the mess and start over again.
The interesting thing about hyperloop was it generated hype from a very old idea that have had a lot of people tinkering with models and designs. Nothing more, nothing less.
I don't think anybody have ever contemplated making a high-speed train within tubes with a high vacuum - most designs doesn't use vacuum as such just low pressure. Why? Because it is _good_enough_ given the other limitations on speed (a main one being safety) and being realistic rather than a pipe dream.
I hope you realize that most of that energy spent getting to 30k is recovered when they come back down.
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