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Virgin Hyperloop One Shows Off New Futuristic Travel Pod (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: It's an interesting time for Virgin Hyperloop One, which saw one of its board members arrested on fraud and embezzlement charges in Russia last week and three other high-profile directors departing the board, according to Bloomberg. But that hasn't stopped the futuristic-transport startup from showing off its latest pod prototype, first for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and now for the rest of us via the video above. The charges faced by Russian billionaire and board member Ziyavudin Magomedov are reportedly unrelated to Virgin Hyperloop One, and he is appealing the arrest. The video from Virgin above appears to show a full-size pod prototype on an enclosed test track at the company's test facility in Nevada. How fast it's going is hard to say. So far we've seen the company achieve speeds of 240 miles per hour in tests, or roughly a third of the speed it hopes to eventually achieve.
Virgin
I ain't getting in the thing
"saw one of its board members arrested on fraud and embezzlement charges in Russia"
Either wouldn't pay the bribe or wouldn't give the contract to the right people or wouldn't give a seat on the board to a rich man's idiot son.
Travel like "SPAM in a can."
Packed into a windowless pod surrounded by near vacuum with no means of escape if something fucks up. Claustrophobia city, even if there are nice flatscreens to "view" the outside world. If this is the future, then bugger the future with a turbocharged chainsaw.
It's minimizing the number of deaths at a possible lethal accident.
Speed++ implies Deaths++.
I discovered some new this week: ÂViva la revoluciÃn lingüistica!
I'm still waiting for my mile high club membership, now I have to go underground!
The real breakthrough is to run the pod in vacuum at high speed safely. All others are just copying the existing products. They made a pod and filmed a cheeky video to show the world? I am not impressed.
I don't think hyperloop is a good business case because the running cost would be on par with the airplane with much higher infrastructure cost. Yes, you need less fuel to run the pods in the vac. But to maintain the vac, you need energy, a lot of energy. The infrastructure cost would be as high as the normal cost of a high-speed railway (not the CA high-speed railway, which is utterly ridiculous. It's a project for politicians, civil servants, and their business friends to suck tax payer's money. That's why it would take twice as long and cost twice as much to build. Better to have longer and more lucrative contracts for the bloodsuckers.)
If the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is interested in it, then I'm not.
His track record is not good:
Tl;Dr: MbS is a moron and bellend. Hence, Virgin Hyperloop must be doomed.
The Machine stops.
They have an underground train at this point.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Seriously, just build a mobile PVC extruder and extrude a big long tube.. Make the mobile extruder sit on a computer controlled magnetic cushion, on long poles large wheels. This can provide smooth elevation changes with sub-millimeter precision over very diverse terrain. The extruder will require a large tank of PVC resin, a plasticizer, heating element, and extrude likely about 1 to 1 and half inch thick walls. It should probably drive and power by a common liquid fuel, such as diesel.
As for stability, you could just lay in on the ground. Extrude a ridge on the sides and drive piers through it and into the ground every so often as it extrudes.
As for the carriage, make sure it is self-powered (probably battery electric). It just needs to suck in the front and blow in the back... For safety, it should have redundant laser range finders on front and back and emergency oxygen/nitrogen tanks, and a radio, just in case..
To make it more profitable, you could lease space for cell and other radio antenna at points. You could also extrude the top in such a shape as to have a bicycle path and raised gardens on both sides, for farming potential.
Matthew
Perhaps someone here can educate me in case I am mistaken. From what I have seen from CGI videos and presentations, the hyperloop seems to be an incredibly impracticable idea.
All the videos show cars driving onto some kind of platform for sled, then lowering down on an elevator and taking off down the tube? How can anyone possibly think that would work?
Are there 50 lanes in the tube so lowering elevators don't block the traffic flow?
Is the elevator in a side tube that connects to the main tube?
Best case, a car could drive on the sled, get oriented, drop down the elevator, launch the sled and the elevator goes back up in let's say, 1 minute. Likely way more.. but let's be optimistic.
They want to put this system in heavily populated areas, which means a lot of users.
So, 60 cars for one elevator on a given morning would be reasonable. Though, the on-ramp to the 405 near to where I lived in SoCal supported many hundreds a day.
So, if you have a line of 60 cars, the guy at the end needs to wait an hour before he can get in the tube. Then, he needs to wait likely far more than an hour inside the tube waiting for his turn at an elevator.
It seems like a comically stupid idea and vastly slower than just driving on a surface road.
I hear those things are awfully loud.
... take to Planet Express....
Has anyone else noticed how the historical trend lately is normalizing kings? Its like we are slipping backwards in time.
I'm not just talking about the latest Saudi PR blitz but:
Familial political dynasties (bushes, clintons, treadeaus)
Heads of multi national corporations dictating policy (bezos and his ilk are acting like the lords of the middle ages)
and then there is the PR blitz by the saudis, how can any democratic society even consider working with a country like that. unless democracy is a scam and it is nothing more than power hungry people who want their spot in the kings seat.... even if we have only limited the maximum time they can sit there to 8 years.
Also a convenient coffin, should the HyperLoop crash and burn. Short of that it is like a de-spiked Iron Maiden for the poor, hapless traveler!
It certainly won't be claustrophobic, poorly ventilated, short of space, or lacking in windows/views of anything worth looking at. It's going to be great because Musk/HyperLoop/Pods.
Tide Pods!!