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New Hyperloop Cargo Company Promises Deliveries at 600 MPH (cnn.com)
Virgin Hyperloop One just announced that they're teaming with the supply-chain firm DP World to build hyperloop-enabled cargo systems.
An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Called DP World Cargospeed, the venture claims it will be able to "deliver freight at the speed of flight and close to the cost of trucking..." So far Virgin Hyperloop One's test capsule has reached speeds of 387 kmph (240 mph), but the company predicts it will send cargo at a top speed of 1,000 kmph (621 mph). In a blog post by Virgin Hyperloop One CEO Rob Lloyd, he calculated a four-day truck journey could be cut to 16 hours. While costs are estimated to run 50% higher than truck transit, Cargospeed believes it can be over five-times cheaper than air freight...
In the announcement, time-sensitive goods such as food and medical supplies were highlighted as items that could benefit from hyperloop's speed. Renders released with the announcement suggest there are plans to integrate drone delivery into the supply chain too.
Virgin Hyperloop One also released a slick video about the venture promising that they're "pushing the boundaries of innovation."
The Washington Post reports that company officials "said they hoped to start construction on a test site in India next year."
An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Called DP World Cargospeed, the venture claims it will be able to "deliver freight at the speed of flight and close to the cost of trucking..." So far Virgin Hyperloop One's test capsule has reached speeds of 387 kmph (240 mph), but the company predicts it will send cargo at a top speed of 1,000 kmph (621 mph). In a blog post by Virgin Hyperloop One CEO Rob Lloyd, he calculated a four-day truck journey could be cut to 16 hours. While costs are estimated to run 50% higher than truck transit, Cargospeed believes it can be over five-times cheaper than air freight...
In the announcement, time-sensitive goods such as food and medical supplies were highlighted as items that could benefit from hyperloop's speed. Renders released with the announcement suggest there are plans to integrate drone delivery into the supply chain too.
Virgin Hyperloop One also released a slick video about the venture promising that they're "pushing the boundaries of innovation."
The Washington Post reports that company officials "said they hoped to start construction on a test site in India next year."
Cargo generally doesn't mind sitting on a truck an extra day. It rarely complains at all. There are some exceptions, but are there enough to make it worth building a Hyperloop?
if I can deliver 200 lbs of lead at that speed, it would be ok.
Second, the unmitigated potential for absolute lethality.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I perused the first two or three paragraphs foregoing the instinctive judgement to label this submission as an advertorial.
Fortuitively, discovering they released a slick video about the venture, my fears were assuaged.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Providing no external visual reference frame in combination with acceleration is the perfect recipe for inducing nausea.
It would be very easy to display a visual acceleration reference on screens that look like windows, if needed.
Absolute legality would swiftly follow absolute lethality.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Actually this makes more sense than people moving to me - cargo is also less attractive to mess up for random idjits.
It would also take JIT inventory up a notch.
--- Mercutio was right.
normal operational condition: everyone can buy fresh fruit and vegetables delivered at a moments notice
failure mode: an uncontrolled fruit cart is about to deliver everyone in a 3 mile radius a rudely unannounced, extremely high speed pineapple.
Good people go to bed earlier.
> you drive on interstate highways because Eisenhower was Supreme Allied Commander and not the penny-dick doubt chislers
Well said. :)
I'm not too sure about hyperlink - it's an interesting idea with a lot of unknowns. Leadership is proven thing, though.
Who wanted the Internet before it existed? Who wanted New Coke? That pretty much brackets the range of possibilities.
Manufacturing is certainly a plausible use because one of the well-established ways to improve a manufacturer's profitability is to reduce the amount of capital tied up in materials inventory. That savings is limited by how quickly you can get those materials from your supplier. If getting the stuff you need to fill orders is slow and unreliable, you have no choice but to stock those materials.
Imagine maybe twenty-five years from now. Your highly automated factory in Louisville gets an order for widgets, so it places an order for sub-widgets to a supplier's automated factory in Grand Rapids, about 400 miles away. An hour or so later the sub-widgets are finished, loaded on an autonomous vehicle for delivery the Grand Rapids hyperloop terminal. Another autonomous vehicle picks them up at the Louisville terminus and delivers them to your loading dock, maybe four hours after you get the order. This enables you to fill the order the next day, but the real advantage of this system isn't speed; it's reduced parts inventory.
This is certainly a plausible scenario, but it's highly dependent on all the parts working. If you don't have a cheap and reliable way to get widgets to and from the hyperloop, there's not really much point in building one for manufacturing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That should be "I'm not too sure about hyperloop".
I think hyperlinks are pretty well proven now. Starting with HyperCard.
It doesn't seem to offer anything over maglev, while having many disadvantages. Maglev is proven technology, cheaper and can carry a lot more. Speed is about the same.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That savings is limited by how quickly you can get those materials from your supplier. If getting the stuff you need to fill orders is slow and unreliable, you have no choice but to stock those materials.
Or you could just order your supplies four days earlier and save on shipping charges.
I'm trying to imagine a scenario where a responsible manufacturing concern would need some necessary component in under 4 hours and would be willing to pay for this hyper loop service.
Of course, to make such deliveries worthwhile:
A) your supplier needs to me very close to a hyper loop 'station' - what good is. 4 hour delivery time if it takes 6-8 hours to get the goods to the hyper loop station?
B) their goods need to be packed in hyper loop friendly containers (like shipping containers) before you even order it - if they wait till you order the goods, that just extends the amount of time between placing an order and having it actually start moving towards it's destination.
C) your facility that needs the items needs to be very close to the hyper loop station - see A), a long truck drive in the 'last mile' eliminates the benefit of hyper loop shipping speed..
D) your inability to plan for your needs requires that your suppliers instead stockpile large amounts of their product to feed your just-in-time factory - what good is 4 hour shipping if you have to wait several days for the item to ship?
I'm at a loss to think of any product that would require such immediate transit, except for transplant organs.
Ken
I guess CNN has invented a new unit of speed measurement. I'm guessing 'kmph' would be 1000 miles per hour so 378 kmph would actually be 378,000 mph.
Cost per mile. If it work out finanically, maybe it will be tried. If not it will be like high speed rail in California between what, LA and San Fran. How is that project working out?
.like one of those great projects that work as .long as you never need to get it running and have not run out of other peoples money.
;)
Sounds
Just my 2 cents
You just saw the Sander's "(Federal) Jobs for All" thing, right? So cargo will go from say, Boise to LA. But what's left unsaid is that hundreds of new Federal Drones will now scan the package at LA, which means your package will, sure, get from Boise to LA at 600 mph. After that, though, your package will arrive in 2-3 months, so be sure someone is home to sign for it.
Hyperloop is the kind of technology that should be tried out first on cargo. If it proves successful, that will generate interest in using it for passengers.
I'm at a loss to think of any product that would require such immediate transit, except for transplant organs.
I also happen to believe the business case is weak for this but I can see there would clearly be more use for it than that.
* Much of our food travels a long distance before we eat it on slow transport, during which it degrades. You would get better food if most of it could be transported at airline speeds for rail prices.
* There are a lot of advantages for manufacturing for "Just in Time" delivery practices. In Japan many vendors must commit the specific hour of delivery and if they don't make it there is a penalty. There is a reason for that which would be too much to explain here but rest assured there is a strong commercial incentive. A cheap airline-speed service would save a ton of money in logistics for the vendors.
* The video -- which I do not find very convincing -- states that what is a novelty today will be expected tomorrow. Already online retailers led by Amazon are pushing for immediate delivery of almost anything. Next Day -> Same Day -> Same Hour. Consumer gratification is the key to their success. And you can do it much better if you have fewer and more remote distribution points as long as you have high-speed cargo between them.
* Have you seen the scale at which next-day parcel delivery services operate? Fed-Ex, UPS, USPS, DHL all spend fantastic amounts on air cargo operating their own fleets and still use charters and common carriers. (They make money doing it of course so that is why they do.) This proposal if taken at face value would cut their largest cost item to 20% of what it currently is. On this market alone of that is true it makes the business case on a no-brainer basis.
I could go on but there is clearly more to it than boutique business.
When your grandchildren 3D-printtheir children and the printer produces flesh-eating Communists because its firmware got hacked and you get devoured alive while jacked-into VR in your nursing home... something something
Maglev is proven technology
Hardly. There are only a handful of working Maglev systems, and they are all heavily subsidized and uneconomical. I have taken the Pudong-Shanghai Maglev, and it was a fast and smooth ride, but it was also nearly empty since it is twenty times the cost of the bus, while only shaving 30 minutes off the trip time.
cheaper
Total hogwash.
* Have you seen the scale at which next-day parcel delivery services operate? Fed-Ex, UPS, USPS, DHL all spend fantastic amounts on air cargo
Indeed. FedEx had revenues of $60 Billion last year, and has a fleet of 650 aircraft.
There is enormous demand for fast delivery. Replacing aircraft with a series of tubes could be a big cost saver and a big win for the environment.
Everything is expensive if you have no need to build it in quantities. Economies of scale are your friend.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
A common theme throughout all the Hyperloop news in the recent years, is that Hyperloop is obviously a solution looking for a problem.
There are high-speed rails running in Europe, Japan, and more recently China. Thousands of miles of it, carrying millions of people around every day. In the past few years, when all you get from Hyperloop is talk of what it "promises", China had built thousands of miles of HSR tracks around the country.
These real world HSR only need the laying of tracks and overhead power cables. Fresh food and medical supplies simply didn't have enough the volume to support the extra cost to build the airtight enclosure.
If Hyperloop really made good economic sense, then *somewhere* in the world would have built one already.
Oliver.
Virgin - because none of their stuff goes all the way.
At the bottom of the
So we now have a pie in the sky delivery service to go along with the pie in the sky tube train...
*sigh*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
My guess would be "anything you're already using air freight for, but don't want to pay air freight prices for."
Which equates to "anything going air freight where this service is available."
Seems fairly obvious to me.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Virgin have a long history of announcing big splashy projects that never come to pass. Tom Bower's "Branson : the man behind the mask" reveals a lot of the detail about how they operate.
The most egregious example is Virgin Galactic. Branson soaked a ton of public money (another common feature of Virgin projects - someone else is always footing the bill, and more often than not they're taxpayers) and has regularly promised that space travel would be open soon to fare-paying passengers, yet has consistently failed to deliver.
He's made other claims, such as this one about working on an electric car which we can be sure is almost certainly rubbish as Virgin haven't a clue about carmaking or manufacturing in general, much less the capital to even try. Or the claim made about reduced-carbon jet fuel. You'll note a typical pattern - it's claimed to work and pass all the tests, yet mysteriously nobody appears to be buying it, and when you google it the only thing you can find are the usual smattering of breathless press releases.
The pattern here is familiar. Outside investors have been sucked in and Branson is already claiming that it is in the "early stages of commercialisation". I'll bet a bottle of Virgin premium vodka that within 12 months the press attention here is the last we'll hear of this project, and within 12-18 months it will quietly disappear.
You know that subways exist, right? They manage to accelerate without having to mop out gallons of vomit after each trip. External visual references, or "windows with lights in the tube" are solved problems. Even the Gemini capsule had windows while being exposed to much harsher conditions - why couldn't this? Plus, the need probably isn't as dire as you think it is - thousands of people are in middle seats on wide-body airliners every day, nowhere near windows, looking straight ahead and don't turn into gurgling vomit fountains.
Why can't the tube have pressure sensors, that when a segment is seen to have higher pressure than it's supposed to, the oncoming vehicle slows down in order to not hit a wall of air and "obliterate" itself? This thing isn't a total vacuum - it's reduced pressure. That kind of basic design would be included in making something "fail-safe".
The good news is that absolutely nobody working on this is going to read anything you wrote and say "damn, we didn't think of that. Oh well, better give up now instead of trying to create something that could revolutionize high speed travel and logistics."
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Comes complete with a bridge in Brooklyn.
Why do you think this would be cheaper than air freight?
I've never seen "kmph" before, but "kph" seems to be an Americanism. Kilometres per hour is abbreviated to "km/h" in countries that use metric units.
And somehow a hyper-loop over the same distance will be cheaper?
Providing no external visual reference frame in combination with acceleration is the perfect recipe for inducing nausea
Not a problem, provided that the acceleration is smooth and constant.
Thanks for the explanation - that a Hyperloop executive believes it will be five times cheaper. No further discussion is needed.
I assume you were after "Funny" mods.
I'm thinking of the new maglev shinkansen. It's reasonably priced, fully expected to be profitable and not going to cost much more than the current ones to ride. They expect it to hit 1000kph in due course too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Actually this makes more sense than people moving to me
It is called an outbreak of common sense. A similar is happening with Boring - initially it was to provide an underground railway* with "sleds" carrying cars lowered from the surface. A moments thought will reveal that the traffic jams at street level to get onto the ride would make it impractical unless it were restricted to a few billionaires like Musk himself. So Musk has now added that it would be for pedestrians and cyclists too - in other words a conventional underground railway.
* "Subway" in the US I believe.
I'm not using any parcel service ever again unless they deliver directly from the source to my house with no stops or transfers and have plastic bottles to piss in.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Direct high speed transport can be effective like many of Japan and Euros high speed trains, but these share infrastructure with lower speed rail.
No high speed trains don't generally don't share infrastructure, but can when it is advantageous like getting into city centres instead of unloading miles away like airports do. In many cases the high speed routes are entirely new, in other cases there are quadruple (or more) tracks, two for lower speed trains and two for higher speed trains.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Energy my boy.
This Hyperloop thing running in near-vacuum requires a lot less energy than an aircraft.
And that equates directly to less cost but at least as important indirectly to a much smaller carbon foot print, something that is outside of Trumpworld a BIG thing.
Also, because the Hyperloop, like a train, does not need to carry its own fuel or power it can easily be powered by alternative sources.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
It doesn't take much engineering acumen to understand a Hyperloop requires a lot less energy than a plane.
Especially the motion itself is near frictionless, making the tube vacuum is a one time investment that only requires maintenance.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Indeed.
But these measures like refrigeration and conservation all have a price that is influenced by the duration expected.
When you can make this delivery much faster your associated conservation costs are going down and the quality of the produce goes up.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Also, mixing the Greek k for kilo with American miles is odd, Americans would/should use the Latin m for mille (=1000).
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
All it needs is a dedicated bit of space the size of a highway spanning large amounts of area. At least with aircraft you don't need to build a new road every time you change destinations - just a runway. Even Elon has had to make up some new Tom Swift like concept to push this further (at least they're tubes). Sure, it won't need much energy. Just gobs and gobs of cheap, easy to obtain real estate.
Right.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The exact same question can be said for planes. Aren't boats, trains and cars fast enough for you?
#DeleteFacebook
I thought the future would be that your highly automated factory in Louisville could 3D-print all the parts they need?
#DeleteFacebook
Where did you get the 'rail prices'? From the backers of this entertaining notion?
Every land owner in the country is planning on giving away nice clear parcels for this endeavor? Or are we going to bore holes underground (always an easy thing to do on continental distance scales)? Rip up the rails? The Interstate?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
What this technology is missing is a tie-in to blockchain. If they can find that, it will close the hype loop.
You (and Cargospeed) are leaving out capital expenditures, my friend. A US hyperloop network will cost trillions to build. The last time I checked California would be money ahead if it just bought airplane tickets for all the hyperloop passengers for the rest of the century instead of actually building a hyperloop. If cargospeed is forced to pay a significant share of the infrastructure cost then the savings disappear.
Maybe the trick is not to extend hyperloop into cities. Locate the terminals in the suburbs or boonies, the way newer airports are. Then buy up all the rail companies so that you have access to all of their existing right of way. Then buy senators/congresscritters/governors so that you can get approval for converting the rail right of way to dual use with hyperloop.
Sorry, was thinking of the budget for California's High Speed Rail plan. I'm not sure what the cost for hyperloop would actually be (though it certainly won't be as cheap as Musk claimed)
The shockwave from a tube rupture...
Oh yes, that shockwave propagating through a near vacuum exactly how? You do realize that other than E&M waves, waves need a medium to propagate through.
If you had said capsules slamming into the wall of air due to a rupture, you might have at least been somewhere in the realm of reality. Even then, however, I'm not sure how realistic that is. Air isn't going to propagate down the tube like a piston. Typical flow patterns in pipes are highest in the middle, dropping off towards zero next to the walls. While some of the capsule might experience a pretty good blast of air, it doesn't seem like something that can't be designed around.
Everyone thinks this is some dramatic pressure difference, but it's really not. Like the ISS, the pressure differential between the atmospheric pressure side and the low vacuum side is like 15PSI. Go down 50' in water and you have a substantially higher pressure differential.
We have a pretty firm grasp on fluid dynamics and aerodynamics at this point in time, and a lot of good modeling software. I'm pretty sure that if we can design submarines and spaceships, we can design a pod that can survive a tube rupture.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
If you imagine a small shop, sure it's hard to see. But the thing is as businesses get larger the principle of get the customer's money soon and hang on to it as long as possible starts to get pushed to what the layman appears ridiculous lengths. With enough volume, pennies per unit in time value of money add up to significant amounts.
It's like my old school friend who became an automotive engineer, and was astonished by how engineers sweat bullets over $0.50 on e $30,000 vehicle. If it's an F-150 pickup you're adding up that $0.50 over almost a million units annually.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It takes a massive amount of energy to maintain the vacuum.
"Nature abhors a Hyperloop." -Aristotle
So you think that tube is seriously leaking?
I don't like your style of engineering, period.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
So you would build a leaking tube?
Realise this tube is only near-vacuum, that makes a differential pressure of about 1 bar (14.5 psi).
Around the world there are many thousands of miles of high pressure gas distribution lines with typically a pressure in the area of 60-80 bar (900-1000 psi) and they don't leak.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
14.5 PSI is the change in pressure which each 33 feet (10 m) of depth.
The tires on most cars have about twice that pressure in them.
It takes a massive amount of energy to maintain vacuum, but a lot less energy and effort to maintain diminished pressure. This is not a vactrain after all.
Ezekiel 23:20
Wow, I never thought about it that way !
That was the most important shortcoming I perceived, and I've never realized that we pretty much already had the technology !
(Hopefully the higher stresses due to moving wagons will be low compared to the additional 59-79 bars of pressure the gas pipelines are used to.)
P.S.: A *perfect* vacuum would _still_ have a differential pressure of about 1 bar...
This will be especially good for the bulk transportation of liquids. Simply remove all the air from the "loop" and fill it with a high value liquid like oil.
Nullius in verba
I've never seen "kmph" before, but "kph" seems to be an Americanism. Kilometres per hour is abbreviated to "km/h" in countries that use metric units.
Your post made me wonder - how come the "Metricites" never re-defined time in decimal ten units? you would think that minutes, hours, days & so on would drive them nuts.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
It doesn't take much engineering acumen to understand a Hyperloop requires a lot less energy than a plane.
Propulsion energy is only a small part of the cost of most transport systems. The capital required to build Hyperloops, and the cost of maintenance, will be enormous.
Sorry, was thinking of the budget for California's High Speed Rail plan. I'm not sure what the cost for hyperloop would actually be
You answered that in your first post - trillions.
Hyperloop transport is not going to be like vacuum tubes - it will resemble train travel - it will be folly to think a chef in Texas can decide to feature Jersey Tomatoes on their dinner menu and be able to order them in the morning and have them for dinner that night, fresh from Jersey.
To meet a manufacturer's Just In Time needs, their supplier needs to be the warehouse.
Ken
Well, that's not the operational profile Musk is pitching. He's pitching greater scheduling flexibility than trains, allowing traffic to be added on a flexible ad hoc basis up to the carrying capacity of the tubes.
But he hasn't proved he can make the concept physically work yet, much less operate it economically. Assuming that it is physically feasible with near-term technology, economic feasibility depends on it carrying enough traffic to recoup the fabulous investment costs. And to me, that's the biggest uncertainty. If there's not enough traffic, the cost per trip goes way up, which leaves you with a Catch-22.
The farm-to-table tomato scenario is obviously far-fetched, but a farm to wholesaler scenario might be possible for a system with high use rates. Tomatoes shipped across country can be six weeks old by the time they're put up for sale, which is why they are picked green and artificially "ripened" near the point of sale with ethylene gas.
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We can just ignore capital costs because they're 'one time'?
Back to Engineering school for you, you lack acumen. Do you even 'present value'?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They leak. You just don't hear about it unless it burns down a neighborhood or incenerates a train full of vacationing children. (both have happened)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm thinking of the new maglev shinkansen.
Since it isn't working yet, I wouldn't call it "proven technology".
And somehow a hyper-loop over the same distance will be cheaper?
What's your point? That maglev makes sense because there is something else that is even stupider?
It's doomed, but not a bad idea. All publicity is good.
Just don't put any money in it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
No need to rip up the interstates, just tunnel beneath them. Or get the railroads involved - they're already in the business and already have miles and miles of fairly straight routes available.
Of course, this might not be all that feasible with today's tunneling technology. Maybe a new company could find an opportunity here . . .
[I know - that answer is Boring.]
Yes, but the leaks are fairly small - and a similarly small leak in a hyperloop can pretty easily be pumped out.
They don't need perfection or a hard vacuum. The point is to greatly reduce air friction, not try to eliminate it entirely. That last percent would cost more than the previous 99%.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
I'm not sure it will fit the conventional subway - the hyperloop does better at high speed trips over longer distances. Going 0.5 - 1 miles as is typical for a NYC or London subway stop is not efficient for something like this.
Putting and airport 20-50 (or more) miles outside a major city is typical but then you have a 1-2 hour commute to where you want to be. A hyperloop could cut that down to 5-10.
Similarly, medium size cities in an area could now share a single, larger airport and have more flights for people. It would change the models...because you could have more people and cities within 20-30 minutes of an airport than an airport could handle.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Autonomous trucking with human last-leg is the future for long-haul trucking. Let a truck run highway-only between major points with hand-offs to human drivers for last-mile deliveries. This will be cheaper than current trucking and up to 2x faster due to the now-enforced 10hr driving periods. Once that is in place, I don't see a market for enough volume needing the extra speed to pay for the infrastructure.
Leaks come in all sizes. Lunatics regularly shoot pipelines with rifles. In Nigeria they drill holes into them and scoop up gasoline with buckets then run, the slow ones get incinerated. People are generally assholes.
The last % is impossible without a diffusion pump.
If they ever build one, most of the air 'leaks' will come from airlocking to let people and cargo in/out. Important details like tube switching and loading/unloading haven't been worked out, just hand waved away.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Tungsten carbide core bullets exist. Pipelines are punctured, somewhat regularly. Also: expansion joints?
There would be a strong economic incentive to make those tubes as thin as possible. If one is ever actually built (not some stubby test run), expect thinner tube walls, perhaps some sort of concrete with steel liner. They will have all sorts of chances to optimize the economics, over proposed thousands of miles, you'd have different designs, pylon, tunnel, berm. Each optimized for 'cheap but good'. They will likely all have some sort of vulnerability, even the tunnels will need pump stations.
But 'assholes' won't be the main problem. They haven't even discovered the practical issues yet. Anybody built a switch that works? Anybody have a design? Station design? How about a switch that works at speed?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I've ridden it, it works great. 600kph, no problem. It's as ultra smooth as the wheeled ones.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I recommend it to "a select few" of people I know. Mostly people I really don't want to know any longer.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
He's pitching trains without engineers, as small as a single car/container - got it. But loads less than a single container will wait until there is a container full of cargo for that destination, delaying delivery. If course, he could implement a system that resembles truck traffic with smaller loads being aggregated at distribution centers, but that will require touching the loads several times before it arrives at it's destination.
What he is proposing is a system that is as geographically limited as current trains, but managed the way modern truck freight is routed/scheduled, except the trucks will follow their assigned routes at 400 MPH.
Ken
Switches for high speed are going to be a challenge, at low speed near a terminal they should be easy to negotiate.
Yes a concrete shell with a relatively thin inner (steel) tube would be the most likely solution, only the inner tube needs to be perfectly straight.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
train networks use trucks. lots and lots of trucks. and we've been building rail for a century and a half. getting coast to coast hyperloop with the hubs like Chicago is going to take just a wee little bit of time......