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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
Sure they can! Once The Wall is built, all those job-stealing Mexicans will be stuck on the other side.
More American Jobs = More American Tax Dollars = Hyperloops to the city edges, monorails between city cores and suburbs, and flying cars for all!
Trolling is a art,
4 km/h is 2.48548 miles per hour.
#DeleteFacebook
No, it's some kind of strange temperature velocity product.
Nullius in verba
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.
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."
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?
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.
It's also ten orders of magnitude lower pressure than Hyperloop Alpha.
And no, properly designed vacuum tubes 1) are not particularly prone to accidents (you want to try to make an "accidental" hole in inch-thick steel?), and 2) do not suffer any form of "propagation" from accidents. That's why you hire engineers rather than just random guessing things.
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.
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.
But 4 Km/hr is about 2,500 mph.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
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
No.
4Km is the same as 4km.
K or k means kilo, kilo means 1000.
#DeleteFacebook
Firstly, not particularly prone is still miles away from being good enough for a transit system that will be paralyzed by vacuum failure. Secondly, we don't have vacuum tubes of the size and scope proposed by Hyperloop & al in existence, anywhere, let alone above ground or with actual high speed traffic going through them on an hourly basis, so there is in fact no way of knowing the exact failure rate of such tubes. I remind everyone that the test track built by Hyperloop for their pod-design competition earlier this year was less than a mile long and still managed to be the 2nd largest vacuum chamber in existence after NASA's.
Secondly, even if it is true that the failure rate of such tubes is almost nil, that does not account for the fact that it's still possible for anyone with malicious intent to disable the system at any times with ease. As long as it's above ground it won't take much thinking from someone to find a way to puncture the tube, so security-wise it's a nightmare. Even if it's designed safely enough (as one would hope) that vacuum failure will not cause life-threatening danger to passengers, it will certainly cripple the entire route for an extended period of time.
Even so that does not address the other issues. Some of the stuff Hyperloop has currently no answers or numbers for:
1) What is the estimated failure rate?
2) How much does the maintenance of the system cost? (the white paper on Hyperloop by SpaceX includes no maintenance cost estimates whatsoever and the actual building cost estimates themselves are pretty overly optimistic to put it mildly and are lacking on any hard data to back them up).
3) How will physical security of both the tube and the capsules be arranged?
When you consider the fact that without any kind of security the whole system is easily crippled by a single malicious actor, and that with security costs go up as does the travel time, the purported advantages when compared to flying don't seem too good.
I've quoted this article from 2 years ago before on /. when it comes to Hyperloop, but it is still relevant:
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
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.
The wall, if actually work (using geosensors and shit to detect digging), probably will benefit Mexico more than it will america as will put quite a dent on the criminal operations there.
Man, I wonder if it would be possible to get rid of the stuff that would be doing the melting and slowing down of the capsule... you know, THE FUCKEN AIR which is the whole point of the hyperloop, to operate in a vacuum?!
... 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.
Firstly, not particularly prone is still miles away from being good enough for a transit system that will be paralyzed by vacuum failure.
That was understatement, just in case you didn't recognize it.
Secondly, we don't have vacuum tubes of the size and scope proposed by Hyperloop & al in existence, anywhere, let alone above ground or with actual high speed traffic going through them on an hourly basis, so there is in fact no way of knowing the exact failure rate of such tubes. I remind everyone that the test track built by Hyperloop for their pod-design competition earlier this year was less than a mile long and still managed to be the 2nd largest vacuum chamber in existence after NASA's.
Meh. The reason there aren't larger vacuum chambers isn't because vacuum chambers are tricky or don't scale well, it's just because generally there's no need for large vacuum chambers.
Secondly, even if it is true that the failure rate of such tubes is almost nil, that does not account for the fact that it's still possible for anyone with malicious intent to disable the system at any times with ease. As long as it's above ground it won't take much thinking from someone to find a way to puncture the tube, so security-wise it's a nightmare.
It's even easier to attack automobiles on a highway. Talk about a security nightmare... except it turns out not to be that much of a problem.
As for simple punctures, I don't think they'd do much to a hyperloop track. Much like an airplane (though in the opposite direction) there will always be some amount of leakage, so you'll need regular pumps keeping the pressure down. Overengineer pumping capacity a small amount and a few punctures won't have much impact -- and such punctures won't be easy. Few rifle rounds will penetrate 1" of steel, even with armor-piercing bullets. For really big tears (which would probably require significant quantities of explosives), the tube could have pressure doors every few miles.
Some of the stuff Hyperloop has currently no answers or numbers for:
Who is "Hyperloop"?
In any case, sure, there are lots of details to work out. And it's even possible that some of them will make it infeasible, or at least more expensive than air travel. The only way to really find out is to forge ahead and try to solve the problems and work out the details. I, for one, am very glad that there are people who are wiling to put their time and resources into working on them. If everyone were like you we'd never accomplish anything new.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
Out of all the technical hurdles to vacuum-tube travel, I think CO2 scrubbing is the least of their worries.
Is there a reason why both of them want to stop at around 4000 km/h?
Good question. This is also applicable to the original Hyperloop: why 700 km/h and not 1000 or more? Changing the numbers in their advertisement and making a video showing 2x/3x that speed don't seem too difficult. They should also be able to keep increasing the speed in their ridiculous saying-absolutely-nothing tests with tiny vehicles, short stretches and extremely favourable conditions without any problem. One test every few months showing slight improvements and increasingly faster speeds might be more than enough to keep this going for some years.
In fact, I don't know the answer to your question. I have never been in that position myself. I am just a practical engineer who will never take part in the promotion of such unrealistic expectations as technically doable. You should ask the marketing-oriented people with low-to-no common sense and knowledge (and/or principles) who firstly thought that all this would be a good idea. On the other hand, the most logical reason for having even started is that there is an actual market of (gullible, ignorant, extremely unpractical and rich) suckers willing to lose their (or others') money there. So, perhaps you should also ask those potential "clients" about the upper limit making all this nonsense still attractive to them.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
UNIT-RELATED NOTE FOR THE EDITORS: I personally don't care about you using metric-like (because km/h isn't exactly SI, nowadays metric system, as far as hours isn't part of the metric/SI/CGS systems) or imperial/USCS/whatever other system relies on miles-like (for the same reason); this is just to let you know that kph is as good as mph. Technically speaking, the most correct approach is to use the fractional versions (mi/h and km/h) though.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
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!
No. 4Km is the same as 4km. K or k means kilo, kilo means 1000.
No. Km means kelvin meter. Kilo is always represented with "k". You might use "K" to denote kilo within a random text if it isn't confusing (e.g., year 2K); but when talking about measurement units, where lower/upper caps matter, you should use the proper symbols. A different story is dealing with short forms or acronyms like kph/KPH where there is no possible confusion.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
The speed limit is because it's not a hard vacuum, it's just low pressure and the cars stay under the speed of sound in it so there is no sonic boom or excessive heating.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And these assertions are based on an analysis of the operational performance of the existing 100,000-km human-scale vacuum tube network? It is very difficult to point to the success (or failure) rate of something that doesn't exist yet.
under the speed of sound in it so there is no sonic boom or excessive heating.
So, you are saying that reason for choosing what seems a quite arbitrary target (notably higher than the conventional values under similar enough conditions like trains and, as such, what our current technology seems to indicate as the actual upper limit) is pretty much to be the highest safe-enough value before reaching what, a priori, seems as quite problematic conditions, at around 1200 km/h. Basically, just thinking about what might the best result, assuming that it might be reachable and building all your remaining ideas over that ultimate truth!
This is not precisely how (reasonable, reliable and actually-accomplishing-something) engineering is supposed to work but what can I say? There are lots of things here which don't follow conventional, sensible, likely-to-output-anything-worthy proceedings. I guess that these Chinese people thought that the sound barrier wasn't too problematic and simply applied your approach to a different (arbitrary) upper limit. What is impossibility anymore, right? All what you have to do now is to think about a big enough whatever, wrap it up nicely, put some money in and just wait for the next revolution. I see.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Hint: One failed project doesn't mean every project from the same country won't work. We know this by looking at failures in every country which still produces things of worth. I know it's all fun and cheeky to make a joke like that, but it doesn't really reflect too well on your logical prowess.
Hint: This isn't a serious story. Your inability to comprehend that a Chinese company's bid for state funding on a project to one-up the Americans that isn't credible doesn't reflect very well on your logical prowess.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Alright, but it still doesn't explain mrsquid0's "4 Kelvin-meter per hour is about 2500 mph" math.
#DeleteFacebook
Alright, but it still doesn't explain mrsquid0's "4 Kelvin-meter per hour is about 2500 mph" math
Sure. I didn't even read that other comment, just focused on correcting your Km = km.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
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.
The only people who will benefit from the wall will be the ones who are paid to build and operate the wall.
The reason there aren't larger vacuum chambers isn't because vacuum chambers are tricky or don't scale well, it's just because generally there's no need for large vacuum chambers.
It occurs to me that we could get SpinalTap on this. They could then have an amp with warm tones that goes up to 10^11.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I hope you realize that most of that energy spent getting to 30k is recovered when they come back down.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
As long as it's above ground it won't take much thinking from someone to find a way to puncture the tube, so security-wise it's a nightmare.
Kind of like how I could derail a train today with nothing more that a crowbar? Just go pull some nails in a turn. Or how about welding a piece of the crowbar to a spot on the track?
I could also take down an airplane with a handful of nails. Just toss them out near the end of the runway.
I could take out the substation near your house with a .22 rifle. I actually got off work one night due to that happening.
Building against terrorist attack isn't done anywhere today. Why would we do it for any sort of hyper loop?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Yup, you're right. That's what happens when I post without the benefit of coffee or other recreational substances. Sorry about the mistake.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
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.
The stuff in the LHC goes at 99.999999% the speed of light. Nobody's in that much of a hurry.