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Virgin Hyperloop One Shows Off New Futuristic Travel Pod (cnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the shiny-and-new dept.

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.

41 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Translation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    "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.

  2. Re:Spam in a can. by mschwanke97402 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    So, if you didn't get a windows seat, this is just like your last plane flight? Oh, except that you don't plummet 30,000 feet to a certain death when something "fucks up".

  3. Re:Spam in a can. by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1

    I always get a window seat -- I won't book the G-d damn flight if I can't reserve one.

  4. Re:Spam in a can. by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1

    (also, 30,000 ft altitude is a feature, safety-wise, not a bug. if something gets fucked, there's often enough time to un-fuck it before you encounter cumulo-granite. not so at 700+ mph 6 inches from hard objects.)

  5. Finally, they have a tube and a pod? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.)

    1. Re:Finally, they have a tube and a pod? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      But they might also save energy on aerodynamics. (You don't need full vacuum anyway in this system.) That's not to say that it's practical but I'm not sure that the energy needed is the greatest obstacle.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:Finally, they have a tube and a pod? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Just regarding the thermal expansion issues... I would have thought that when you can (or have to) have (semi)vacuum, you can also have (semi-vacuum) outside insulation and thus some thermal conditioning. I mean, that doesn't solve the cost problem, but temperature doesn't seem to be that much of an issue in a system with these levels of environmental control (relatively to the other environmental control issues you have to deal with already).

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Finally, they have a tube and a pod? by Rei · · Score: 1

      He is a little bit long winded but his math is pretty sane and logic is solid.

      No, it isn't.

      Don't get your engineering information from a chemist.

      PS the infrastructure costs are way more than any highspeed rail

      Pulling claims out of a hat is not how you budget; a budget is how you budget.

      maintenance of a vacuum

      Which is why it is a good thing that Hyperloop does not involve maintaining a vacuum. What people generally refer to as a vacuum - aka, a hard vacuum - is many orders of magnitude more difficult to achieve and maintain than the ~1mbar pressure of Hyperloop. Like on the order of 1e-9 mbar (normal air pressure is close to 1 bar)

      Thermal expansion is a huge issue.

      Except that it isn't. At all. Engineers deal with thermal expansion every day, and there are numerous ways to handle it, including increasing bend radii (not particularly practical here), expansion joints (Hyperloop Alpha involves one at each endpoint (aka, where the vehicles are moving slowly, on wheels), with the pylons allowing the entire tube to slide freely along its length), or - what HSR generally does - just simply resisting it. Thermal expansion force is just that - a force. It's not some irresistible property of nature; you can resist it with a force running counter to it. HSR generally uses pretensioned rails - that is, they lay them hot, so that when they cool they want to contract - but the contraction is resisted by heavy concrete sleepers anchored well to the ground. That would be a perfectly acceptable approach for Hyperloop as well.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
  6. Re:Spam in a can. by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

    except for the no window that is hardly any different from modern air travel. Personally anything that makes the unpleasantness over with faster I will take.

  7. kiss of death by niittyniemi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is interested in it, then I'm not.

    His track record is not good:

    • Building new city in Saudi at vast expense to attract businesses and tourists. Pitch: "If getting hanged and flogged is your bag then you're coming to the right place!"
    • Started never ending war in Yemen with resulting starvation, huge cholera epidemic and attendant death and destruction from high explosive supplied by US and UK.
    • Kidnapped Lebanon's leader and made him resign on Saudi TV.
    • Kidnapped 300 of the wealthiest and most powerful in the country and shook them down. Result: turned them into 300 slightly poorer but still powerful enemies.
    • Came to London and spunked a million quid on adverts featuring his gurning face and telling us British peasants how wonderful Saudi now is thanks to him. We may be fucking stupid but please...
    • Has invested 750 million in Virgin Galactica (aka virgin on the ridiculous) Branson's doomed "space" effort that isn't close to orbital.
    • Opening dozens of cinemas in Saudi although 'Snow White' likely to be banned. Some tart without a burkha sleeping with 7 dwarves? Are you sure?

    Tl;Dr: MbS is a moron and bellend. Hence, Virgin Hyperloop must be doomed.

    --
    The Machine stops.
    1. Re:kiss of death by quanminoan · · Score: 1

      Sounds like the Saudi Howard Hughes!

    2. Re:kiss of death by Gavagai80 · · Score: 2

      His track record is not good:

      Building new city in Saudi at vast expense to attract businesses and tourists. Pitch: "If getting hanged and flogged is your bag then you're coming to the right place!"

      Saudi Arabia is actually a tourist Mecca.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
    3. Re:kiss of death by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Still a better love story than the Trump presidency.

    4. Re:kiss of death by Type44Q · · Score: 1

      A sociopath and a world-class creep, sure. A moron, no; believing that would require attributing his recent success to sheer dumb luck which would make the believer a far bigger moron. Yes, he clearly thinks the English people are morons but to paraphrase Mencken a tad, no one ever went broke underestimating their stupidity; MbS merely demonstrates his awareness of this.p Coming out on top of his recent "housecleaning" strongly suggests that he knows exactly what he's doing; others shouldn't assume they do as well.

  8. Re:Spam in a can. by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

    You can have a window seat in modern air travel, and you're not going 700 mph a hand's distance from immovable objects.

    You "can" have a window seat if you are lucky enough. I gather you also don't travel in cars or trains or any other high speed mode of transport that involves travelling at speed just a hands breadth away from death? Not saying I would enjoy travelling in a cramped box, but if it shortened the travel time by even 20% I would take that over the agony of plane travel.

  9. Re:Spam in a can. by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Cars and trains don't go at 700 mph through a near-vacuum 6" from a concrete or steel wall. Fuck that idea.

  10. Re:Spam in a can. by eclectro · · Score: 1

    But you still might crash and end up in a massive underground fire for which there is no escape.

    --
    Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
  11. So in other words by eclectro · · Score: 1

    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"
  12. Re:Spam in a can. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    An airplane can have a hole in it and you don't die.

  13. Re:Spam in a can. by baker_tony · · Score: 1

    Good for you, the vast majority of people on the pane obviously disagree.
    So do you when you have to pull the blind on the red-eye trans-Atlantic for 90% of the flight.

  14. Re:Spam in a can. by baker_tony · · Score: 1

    An airplane can also not have a hole in it and you do die.
    I'll admit, generally holes are formed in the split seconds before you die though...

  15. Re:Spam in a can. by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

    Do you get upset sitting in the park? You're going over 1000 MPH right on top of thousands of miles of hot, unstable rock.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  16. Re:Spam in a can. by SirSlud · · Score: 1

    Trains go at "you're dead if you hit it" speeds 6" from concrete walls all the time. Man, I feel like you've never been on a train.

    --
    "Old man yells at systemd"
  17. Re:Spam in a can. by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1

    If my seatmate asks me to pull the blind, my reply is "should have got a window seat." I'm a nice guy in person. :)

  18. Re:Spam in a can. by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

    I'm sure they'll keep airplanes around for people who like looking at the scenery. Also cars and bicycles. You might want to be careful about that airplane though... it has turbines spinning at more than 700 MPH a millimetre or so from the rest of the airplane. The car has some pretty fast spinny bits with tolerances much less than 6" too.

  19. Stupid idea?? by pablo_max · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Stupid idea?? by nukenerd · · Score: 1

      I think you are mixing up two different crackpot schemes that Musk has dreamed up.

      The cars on sleds scheme is the "Boring" scheme which resulted from Musk being stuck in traffic on his commute. He thought that if there were a tunnel with sleds that his car could be lifted down onto, and pop up further on, he could jump the queue - him and an other similarly rich people anyway. As you say, it could not cope with mass traffic because of the delay with the lifts [= elevators] and loading - anyone else ever been on those London Underground passneger lifts? They take ages. And if everyone jumps a queue they end up still in a queue.

      In fact Musk's latest pronouncements for the Boring sled idea is that it would be "prioritised for pedestrians and cyclists" - in other words a conventional underground train. These pronouncements were in the context of Boring bidding to build a link between Chicago airport and centre.

      The other scheme, the Hyperloop, is for foot passengers riding in sealed pods in a generally above-ground vacuum tube at 1000kph or something like that. It makes no sense for short distances and not much for long distances. It is effectively a railway inside a tube with vacuum plant and airlocks etc which its proponents claim it will be cheaper than a railway without the tube, vacuum plant and airlocks etc. In anything but flat deserts it will require spectacular civil engineering because at speeds like that you need extremely gentle curves and gradient changes. Musk also seems to think it can be built over land for free (or nearly free) because it stands on stilts, and people will welcome a 3 metre steel tube passing over their property because they would feel they are thereby rubbing shoulders with the Great Man himself. Fortunately that won't fly where I am.

      A Hyperloop or two will be built, probably one in Arabia, bank-rolled by an Arab Sheikh, and one possibly from LA to Las Vegas as a tourist novelty. Then that will be all.

    2. Re:Stupid idea?? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Not sure what videos you've been watching but let me clear a few things up:

      You sound like you're talking about videos from the Boring company. This is Virgin Hyperloop One we are talking about, it's no different to a train.
      But let's talk about what you saw:

      - You saw something outdated. No one is planning on using the elevator concept to an underground transport system for cars anymore, not even Musk.
      - Yes there was an elevator off the side in several of the original videos as well. It makes no sense to drop something into a traffic flow.
      - No it won't be a 50 lane highway, don't apply highway thinking to public transport. There's a whole different level of infrastructure utilization, even in built up areas.
      - The idea of driving on a surface road would make much more sense if there was still space on that surface road. The entire premise of not doing something on the surface is that you can't. Otherwise it would be cheaper and faster to just do something on the surface.

    3. Re:Stupid idea?? by pots · · Score: 1

      people will welcome a 3 metre steel tube passing over their property

      One of the selling points of the hyperloop proposal was that most of it would be built over the expressway, with the support pillars in the median strip, which would drastically simplify that problem. It was originally suggested as an alternative to the high speed rail that California is currently building, which is going to cost something like $60 billion because it can't be built over the expressway and is suffering from the issue that you're talking about.

  20. Re:Spam in a can. by Gavagai80 · · Score: 1

    b0s0z0ku is probably American. Our passenger trains are lucky if they get up to 40 MPH.

    --
    This space intentionally left blank
  21. Re:Spam in a can. by thegarbz · · Score: 1

    If this is the future, then bugger the future with a turbocharged chainsaw.

    You remind me of the people who say flying is a bad experience. You're being whisked away at incredible speeds to a different place using a system which priorities your time and your ability to get to the destination. That is orders of magnitude better than being stuck in traffic. The future can't come fast enough!

  22. Hyperloop huh? by gijoel · · Score: 1

    I hear those things are awfully loud.

    1. Re:Hyperloop huh? by Rei · · Score: 1

      The funny thing is, I was reading a conversation a couple weeks ago, and a person suggested a monorail as an alternative to Loop (not Hyperloop). So I started quoting from the monorail song to him. Except he'd apparently never heard it before and kept making serious replies to each of the "questioner" lines in the song. I couldn't stop laughing. Unfortunately he stopped responding once I asked him if he was sent here by the devil. ;)

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
  23. Re: Spam in a can. by baker_tony · · Score: 1

    Iâ(TM)m guessing you havenâ(TM)t flown any red eyes before. The person next to you wonâ(TM)t be asking, itâ(TM)s the Air hostess.

  24. Re: Spam in a can. by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1

    open it by 25% after the air waitress walks by...

  25. Re:Spam in a can. by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1

    fuck both flying and the hyperloop. I like trains. nice big windows, fast speeds, pretty views.

  26. Re:Spam in a can. by Type44Q · · Score: 1

    also, 30,000 ft altitude is a feature, safety-wise, not a bug

    Damn, you're really on a roll, aren't you?? Do you take the time to even think before you type? To be fair, I admit I don't, either... but I also don't come up with gems like the one above.

    Eat more fish, perhaps??

  27. Re:Spam in a can. by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1

    Yeah. I actually think. Separation from immovable objects is actually a safety feature and allows addressing of failures in a timely manner. Commercial aviation is extremely safe.

  28. Re:Spam in a can. by apoc.famine · · Score: 1

    Absolutely! Because of the near vacuum, the fire will explode into giant fireballs! Fueled by the thousands of gallons of jet fuel on board!

    HOLY SHIT, THE HYPERLOOP IS A TERRIBLE IDEA!!!!! ECLECTRO, YOU'VE SAVED US ALL!

    --
    Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
  29. Re:Spam in a can. by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

    yeah that window makes all the difference and makes that sudden stop in an accident that much more survivable!

  30. Re:Spam in a can. by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1

    It makes the trip more enjoyable -- Hyperloop is efficient travel with what little joy is left in modern travel sucked out of it.