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India Just Might Be Getting a Hyperloop (wired.com)
California may have produced the horrorshow traffic that prompted Elon Musk to pitch the hyperloop, but it's hardly the only place eager to ditch cars for levitating pods hurtling through tubes at speeds approaching the sound barrier. India wants in, too. From a report: Today, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, one of the companies formed to realize Musk's vision of tube travel, announced it has signed a deal with the state of Andhra Pradesh, in southeast India. Working with the state's economic development board, HTT will spend six months studying possible routes for a hyperloop connecting the cities of Vijaywada and Amaravati -- a move that would transform a 27-mile, hour-long drive into a six-minute whoosh. And then, over an undisclosed period of time, the Los Angeles-based company says it will build the thing. The India deal is just the latest for HTT, which also plans to build networks of tubes in South Korea, Slovakia, and Abu Dhabi. But to make all -- or any -- of that happen, the company's 800 engineers (most of whom have day jobs and work on this in their spare time, in exchange for stock options) must first master the practical aspects of the hyperloop. That means building and maintaining a near-vacuum state across miles of tubes, propelling levitating pods through them, getting people or cargo into and out of those pods, and much more.
Test-drive where life is cheap?
And/or where you can sweep the peasants out of the way of progress.
But exactly how do you manage to hang on to the roof of a hyperpod at 1,000 MPH?
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I think you are being far too conservative with your imagination. What is to really keep someone inside a hyperpod from doing the same?
There is always someone willing to give up their life to end other's lives.
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The designers of this system don't take into account the time it takes to park your car, walk to the station, wait in line to get on the next pod, get off at the destination station, and use some other means of transportation to get to the location your want to be. If all that takes more than 54 minutes then you really aren't saving any time.
They can force the lower castes to ride it until they get the kinks worked out.
At the moment, carrying out a terrorist attack is somewhat difficult.
No it isn't. It's really, really easy.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Commutes in and through Indian cities are as I understand presently.. painful would I think be an accurate summary. That and a developing country will not have the miles of red tape and bureaucracy that has developed over the centuries in the US.
Any city or government that's serious about it can make it happen. It's about money and will power, not having some "boy wonder" design it for you.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I suppose this explains why the Ganges is full of really interesting bacteriophages.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Underground metro systems are a tried and tested solution that have worked well since the 19th century. Using a vacuum tube and maglev instead of steel wheels on rails doesn't bring much to the table other than a high top speed, which for a metro is pretty useless anyway unless you don't plan on having intermediate stops. The ONLY thing the hyperloop brings is a windfall for construction companies and ditto for Musk if he holds the patents.
>Can someone actually confirm whether the result would be a huge loss of life?
I can't think of any way in which it would be. Either you punch a hole in the tube into which air rushes, slowing down the approaching cars inside, or worst case (probably requiring shoddy corner-cutting construction) the shock of impact causes a structural failure, and a that short section of the tube crumples.
The latter would be a danger to the next approaching car, which would have to slow down fast enough to avoid hitting the wreckage. If they failed, then you might lose everyone aboard that car - call it 10-20 people. Tragic, but not really a huge loss of life. The only way you'd have a worse problem is if the tube repressurized too slowly to stop the subsequent cars - and one would hope that the tube is wired with sensors and rapidly repressurizes in the case of any such problem.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
A lot of things are "prone to terrorism", stadiums, trains, buses, commercial air travel, large buildings, etc and yet we still build/use them. Abandoning all progress because of a 1 in 20 million chance of something happening is a little like banning all international travel/trade because "someday" a super-flu could traverse those routes as well. Simply minimize the risks where possible, prosecute those who commit/support such acts and move on with your life instead of cowering in a corner from the bogie man.
I haven't been to India for decades and there is a reason for that. The place horrifies me. Even the "nice" parts.
I am all in favor of any effort to make the country sane and habitable but I just don't see making something like the Hyperloop will help any but the top 1%
Go on youtube and look for videos to see what train rides in India are like for commuters. What trains they do have are reasonably serviceable but are way overtaxed. You have swarms of tens of thousands of people crammed onto platforms designed to max out at maybe a thousand all trying to cram themselves onto trains that are over capacity by at least 2x. And a mob waiting outside the station.
The stench of sweaty bodies must be epic. I'm happy to say I haven't experienced it myself.
The Hyperloop even if the most optimistic projection helps this how? By squirting a pod of 30 people (crammed with 100 no doubt) even 10-15 minutes? Don't make me laugh.
Instead they should upgrade and add to their existing rail infrastructure. The local population is obviously willing to use it. I would bet money that 99.9% of them would prefer a 30-minute clean ride on an available comfortable seat with air conditioning as opposed to a 6-minute woosh in an over capacity system that probably would not be available to them anyway at any reasonable cost.
Show me the numbers that say HyperLoop could solve the problem they really have there rather than the Gee-Whiz space technology fantasy some geek has and I will be in favor of it. I haven't seen those numbers and I doubt they exist.
Disclosure: I am an Elon Musk fanboi.
Yeah, but they're usually aiming for more than a single small busload, and very limited options for defending against such a small risk cost-effectively.
And there's a lot more people willing to kill other people to make a statement, especially if they thing they can avoid getting caught, than are willing to kill themselves in the process.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Maybe you should watch this video.
All the problems of deep space travel, bought down to the surface of the planet, such that you can travel about the speed of a bullet within a couple of cm of a gun barrel.
If a Hyperloop ever gets built it will definitely be one of the most expensive forms of transportation available, at least if they're doing anything even remotely similar to Musk's original cocktail napkin. It seems like they might struggle on the uptake in a country with such a low median income. On the other hand, they don't have the Dubai problem where everybody already drives cars and everything is paved. There is a potential market in India, just as long as it connects some presidental suburb with the government buildings where they work so they can ignore the systemic transportation problems in the city.
I read the internet for the articles.
> And there's a lot more people willing to kill other people to make a statement, especially if they thing they can avoid getting caught, than are willing to kill themselves in the process
I think we are both correct. Have a great day!
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Elevated is generally nothing that will stop a rented trackhoe.
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Burma Shave
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The Indian government is always present in the me-too pissing contests. However, when it comes to providing basic services to the more than 600 million Indian citizens without access to them, the Indian government is consistently uninterested to become a me-too.
Power? India can't even keep the power on 24/7. I don't see how they'll be able to run a hyperloop.
So as we call it in SoCal, light traffic. I don't really see the problem that would require the huge investment in hyperloop. I've been in much worse traffic and commute. Even the good Tokyo train system it's about that speed if not worse. Crossing into SF from East Bay on the BART takes about that long during commuting hours and that's not even close to 27 miles.
Elon is the king of vaporware, even worse than Duke Nukem Forever. I don't know if you've noticed but very few of his stuff makes it to market and what does is hugely under the stated promise and over the stated cost. Tesla still doesn't have the cost, range, charge speed nor buildout of universal charging stations. SpaceX won't make it to Mars anymore, the Falcon heavy isn't even out of its design stage, the hyperloop is still an electric cart that barely makes it to the end of a tunnel even under the best of circumstances and with days of setup.
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You're woefully uninformed about vacuum tubes. Stack a car on a soda can, then make a dent in the can. See what happens. Now stack a bunch of soda cans, make a dent in one see what happens.
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HTT [...] plans to build networks of tubes [...]
Kind of like the Internet...
Trains in India are hyper something; loop is not something I would want to do here:
https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/ma...
You're overlooking one VERY major detail - there are no substantial axial forces on the Hypertube to transmit failure down it's length, only an inwards crushing force on all sides, which it is specifically designed to withstand.
Any catastophic loss of structural integrity and the sides crumple in to the middle. There's no forces to transmit down the length of the tube, so the problem won't spread far. To the nearest expansion joint at the furthest.
What will happen that could spread is that a high-speed column of inrushing air will rush down the tube in both directions, and if it builds up enough momentum that column of air could hit a dead end or obstacle like a stopped car like so many tons of bricks, rapidly building pressure until the tube explodes. So you'd need emergency pressure relief hatches Fortunately that's easy to do, and they can even double as emergency escape and/or maintenance access hatches.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Almost every gushing hyperloop article on /. will include a commenter who points to a set of Youtube critiques of the hyperloop by Thunderf00t. Watching these videos I find myself sympathetic to his position, but I recognize that I'm predisposed to suspect grand promises about what the future holds when there's no clear, demonstrable, and scalable example yet. (My father had a subscription to Popular Science when I was a kid. The main thing it taught me was an interest in science and a mistrust of vaporware. I still don't have a flying car.)
The responses I've seen to such on /. have been disappointing to say the least. On more than one occasion, I've seen Thunderf00t's critique dismissed with a wave of the hand and a reference to his credentials as a biochemist rather than, say, an engineer. That is not an argument. At best, it's an appeal to authority. The worst I've seen so far has been a lazy claim that to the effect of 'don't worry, smart people have already worked all this stuff out.' This kind of thing is tiresome on Youtube; it should be well-nigh unforgiveable on /.
So I'm interested in hearing from critics of Thunderf00t's critique. Can you point me to an article or video that will serve as a response to his position? And to proponents I would ask whether there are responses to Thunderf00t's critics. Many thanks in advance.
Yet another gullible government fooled by the monorail scam.
I haven't seen any design yet beyond a single tube however the problem I wanted to demonstrate are not necessarily axial forces, the problem is that ANY failure of ANY portion will cause cascading failures. Even if you suddenly collapse a single tube due to loss of integrity of that tube (eg. metal fatigue or a puncture) the force, regardless of how it propagates (eg. you say inwards so let's go with that) will rip off the expansion joint which would cause major damage to the next tube which in turn collapses etc.
For a failure to stop propagating you would have to pressurize the ENTIRE tube to atmospheric pressure BEFORE the cascading failure reaches the next tube. However pressurizing that fast, as you correctly observed, will cause a giant pressure wave to hit every car and accelerate them down the tube until the forces hit equilibrium (or a wall for that matter) and the pressure wave from air rushing in uncontrollably (which would be very, very cold, instantly freezing every tube it passes - a quick change from baking in the hot California sun all day) would come from the other end eventually those two waves would be hitting each other somewhere in the middle unless, again, you can get rid of all that energy somewhere in between.
A little pressure relief/escape hatch isn't going to work, everyone in the tunnel while it is still under vacuum would either freeze to death from the inrushing air or just fly away, most likely, the pressure relief valves would freeze themselves - a problem often observed in ... high pressure environments. MRI's have the same kind of problem although somewhat inverted, when an MRI fails, the huge pressure wave from the expanding Helium gasses, force down every door, freeze the room and even though huge pressure relief valves are present, they generally freeze before they even full open.
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Axial forces are the only thing that are going to cause cascading failure in a tube. And they aren't present, so there will be no cascading failures.
If the tube collapses radially inwards, it still won't shorten substantially. At worst it rips free of the expansion joints, at which point damage stops - the expansion joints are there *precisely* to isolate the immense axial forces that would otherwise be created as the tubes change length through thermal expansion and contraction. Even if the collapse of one section was extremely violent, the give in the expansion joints would prevent any sudden shocks from being transmitted to the next tube over.
And even that ignores the fact that the tubes almost certainly would *not* collapse when damaged in the first place. They're designed *specifically* to avoid such a result - that's their entire reason for existing. May as well shoot the bottom of a skyscraper and expect it to collapse.
Try this - put a garden hose under vacuum (fill it partway with water, seal it tightly, then raise one end) . Then squeeze a section to get it to collapse. The collapse may spread a short distance, but nowhere near the length of the hose. Or do the opposite - a soda can at room temperature is at roughly 1.5 atmospheres above ambient pressure. Poke a hole in it and it should explode, right? Or shoot a hole in an air tank pressurized to only 14psi - you'll get a lovely air jet, but no catasrophic failure.
And your comments on the wind are just ridiculous - unless the air is freezing, nobody is going to freeze. Wind chill is a perceptual thing, not a real one, it doesn't show up on a thermometer, it won't kill you, it just speeds up energy transfer by disrupting the envelope of warmer air near your skin. Your helium example is unrelated - it's already insanely cold because it's a liquid being used as a coolant for the superconducting magnet coils, and is stored as a liquid at close to absolute zero (helium boils at 4*K, -452.2*F), and absorbs an *immense* amount of heat as it boils (just like water at 100*C takes 5x as much energy to turn into steam as it does to heat it from 0*C t 100*C). It's rather fun to play with (I did some superconducter research in college), but extremely dangerous.
A better example is to go into any shop with air tools, borrow a blower attachment, and blow some air across your hand. That air is probably stored at over 100psi, so about 7 atmospheres above ambient, a far more dramatic pressure difference than between ambient and vacuum. And it might feel be a little chilly. Probably no worse than standing in front of a powerful fan.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Can a 3rd world country afford Hyperloop?
Casteism