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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,
The difference is that China will actually build theirs.
Strictly enforced by physics
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.
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?
That's going to depend a whole lot on how many serious accidents the train suffers in its first months/years of use.
I don't think I'd want to be one of the initial passengers, but in a country of 1.3 billion people, there will be plenty of people willing to ride it; and if it works, more people will deem it "safe enough".
Keep in mind that China is a really large country, with lots of social displacement -- there are millions of people who feel socially obligated to make 24-hour (or longer) train trips every year so that they can celebrate the holidays with their families that live thousands of miles away from where they work. If you offer them something that significantly cuts that travel time and isn't a complete death-trap, they are likely to jump at it.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
The entire train is encased in a vacuum tight tube mostly underground. You'd need to wear a space suit, have access to an air lock, and disrupt the magnetic field of the 'track' that the train hovers above.
Not saying it's impossible but it would be much easier to put a bomb in some luggage and send it on its way.
There will certainly be non-terror disasters along the way to 2000mph in the form of learning opportunities, much like air disasters are learning opportunities for safer aircraft.
Transportation has never been without human sacrifice. Until a race of highly advanced aliens transmits all of their knowledge to us we will have to pay the price.
Do you ever stop and think that at any given time of the day there are 5000+ commercial aircraft in the sky and how rare accidents actually are? We got this far with air travel, I see no reason we cannot do the same with hypertrains.
Next time, fact check instead of spreading FUD. The bullet train in Japan is extremely safe. Here is the reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Over the Shinkansen's 50-plus year history, carrying over 10 billion passengers, there have been no passenger fatalities due to derailments or collisions,[19] despite frequent earthquakes and typhoons. Injuries and a single fatality have been caused by doors closing on passengers or their belongings; attendants are employed at platforms to prevent such accidents. There have, however, been suicides by passengers jumping both from and in front of moving trains.[20] On 30 June 2015, a passenger committed suicide on board a Shinkansen train by setting himself on fire, killing another passenger and seriously injuring seven other people.[21]
There have been two derailments of Shinkansen trains in passenger service. The first one occurred during the Chetsu earthquake on 23 October 2004. Eight of ten cars of the Toki No. 325 train on the Jetsu Shinkansen derailed near Nagaoka Station in Nagaoka, Niigata. There were no casualties among the 154 passengers.[22]
Another derailment happened on 2 March 2013 on the Akita Shinkansen when the Komachi No. 25 train derailed in blizzard conditions in Daisen, Akita. No passengers were injured.[23]
In the event of an earthquake, an earthquake detection system can bring the train to a stop very quickly. A new anti-derailment device was installed after detailed analysis of the Jetsu derailment.
-snip-
I believe the safety of these trains are in part due to the absolute professionalism of all people involved with its operation.
They are not going to travel at high speed in a blizzard or hurricaine, and not at all if mafiosos put concrete blocks on the tracks. But there is a lot of safety through high tech, redundancy and humans.
I am not sure this level of professionalism is possible in the U.S. or especially China, considering the current state of their trains, unless a totally new kind of cadre is created. The military mindset might be close, though what is really needed is intelligence, professionalism, empathy, and big bucks for the long haul.
The U.S., China and other countries the size of California and up will gain amazing returns from these trains. The only downsides of which I am aware (and they are not downsides to me) are that they drive down the price of air tickets and also get you used to such comfort that you wonder why you stick yourself in a flying can with miniscule leg room.
... 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.
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.