First wrong assumption is that the 1st stage, which is what we're recovering, achieves orbital velocity. It doesn't. You now have to completely redo your numbers.
After following way too many 18 wheelers, and being run off the road 3 times in 1 year by big rigs changing lanes without looking (I always respond to "automated trucks" with the question, "Will they also not look when changing lanes?) I fantasize about a hyperloop big enough and powerful enough to accept an 18 wheeler, or several cars and rocket them to their next destination up to 300 miles away, thus relieving a massive amount of traffic from the interstate highway system which is in the process of failing due to overuse / undercapacity. Well, that's my dream, anyway...
The 29 minutes is the travel time, not the loading time. The loading time is to walk in and sit down. Baggage car might come after one for passengers, its not required to carry both in the same vehicle. Baggage transfer would probably be highly automated and therefore very fast.
I believe that these are tubes between 2 points, and each "point" requires getting up and changing vehicles, like hub airports. Vehicles leave whenever they are ready to leave. There should be no interleaving of vehicles running at speed on the tube and those accelerating to speed.
Yeah, it works in relatively small countries with high population densities. Notice that they're proposing this in the NE Corridor, which is geographically limited and has a high population density. This ain't for Kansas. A universal solution for the USA to mass transit is likely never happening due to the expense of building such a system and having 3 people debark at Kansas City each time a train comes thru. Therefore, using public money to build any of these things is fundamentally unfair to those in Kansas and the rest of the wide open spaces since they'll never get any benefit from it.
Build it to carry passengers, vehicles, and cargo, THEN maybe its useful in Kansas, and would be a better candidate for public money spending. That might make it more deployable.
OK, you're an EE with 35 yrs of experience, and Elon Musk is a real-world Tony Stark who builds rockets and electric cars. I choose not to underestimate Mr Musk / Stark.
C'mon, the "landing fuel" is miniscule since the great mass of the rocket at launch is the "lift fuel" which is gone after the rocket does its primary function. The thing that lands is a hollow, comparatively lightweight tube requiring a slight amount of fuel to accomplish the landing.
Echo the other response so far, great post, thanks.
What I wonder about is that the original Hyperloop white paper said "tubes mounted on pylons elevated" over things like farm fields. Now, they're digging tunnels, much more expensive. I just wonder what was wrong with tubes and pylons.
Yep, read about all those restrictions. Makes air travel impossible in some situations.
Have been contemplating building an emergency communications portable radio station. Doing it with a relatively high power radio, like 100 watts, requires a big battery that is also a lightweight battery. The only thing that looks to fill that bill is a lithium battery, but since it would be something _I_ built rather than something manufactured, it would be deemed "loose" batteries as well as being about 10X over 100 wh. Just can't fly with that at all, either carry-on or checked.
So, haven't made up my mind to do it at all yet, and if so, do it with lithium and just never fly with it - drive to the areas of the emergency like Florida and Texas this year, or forget about it. Definitely couldn't get to Puerto Rico with such a setup - can't drive the 1 KwH Li-ion batteries in the trunk of my car. Can't physically hump a lead-acid battery that big all over the place, and would cost a fortune to fly it because of the weight PLUS having it arbitrarily denied boarding on the whim of a TSA agent in Portland, Oregon for another lead-acid "sealed", "non-spillable" which means complying with the rules, but just couldn't take it "because he said so." Had to abandon it at the gate. Fortunately it wasn't very expensive. The Li-ion battery for this radio box is in the $1200 range... so no subjecting it to whims of TSA.
Flying sucks nowadays y'know? Have been driving where I want to go for the last 5 years. Sold a 3 year old Subaru WRX a couple years ago, that I used to avoid flying, with 124,000 miles on the odometer. Yep, 41,300 miles a year. What happens when your destination is often west of the Mississippi and you live in Virginia.
I have a nice, new Surface Pro 4. It has 1 USB 3 port, plus 4 more if I use the docking station. I'm trying to make it my ham radio station computer. Right now, my $300 Gateway desktop computer, one of those little things with no expandability at all, is an easier machine to work with. Why? The little Gateway has I/O. It has about 8 native USB-2 ports. It has traditional sound connectivity of speaker, mic, and line in. Attempting to connect the radio with digital communications means, for the Surface Pro, an external sound card run thru USB. For a full-sized keyboard and mouse, I use a wireless system with USB dongle. For controlling the radio directly there's a USB to RS-232 converter, and for sending digital signals out over the shortwave bands there's RS-232 control to a Rigblaster Pro that requires another USB to RS-232 converter. For the Surface Pro to load some software that comes on CDs, there's another USB requirement for the external CD/DVD/BluRay drive and burner. Then of course if I want to store more than the internal 500 Gb., and especially if I want to have it portable, there's the 1 Tb USB-3 pocket-sized hard drive that is powered thru the USB-3 connection alone.
For all that, I have the docking station and a 10-station USB-3 hub. Surprise, don't plug the keyboard / mouse dongle into the hub, because there's so much traffic on it that it makes the mouse movements jerky. You have to plug it into the lone side port USB on the Surface Pro itself, then it works fine, except for the mouse wheel which was inexplicably DOA - and since I bought the keyboard and mouse a couple years ago when building my Core i7 tower computer and didn't use it, I'll likely have to buy a new wireless keyboard and mouse to recover that functionality if it's that important. So far it isn't.
Future expansion that might require yet more I/O would be if I connected up both the SteppIr 4-element antenna's adjustments for frequency automatically from the computer, and connected up the antenna rotator for pointing the antenna automatically from the computer. Not being quite as intensely real-time as the keyboard and mouse, I'm sure they would do fine being plugged into the 10-station USB-3 hub.
But if you want to do a lot of I/O, its easier with even a really, really basic PC for $300 than it is with an I/0 limited, but otherwise golly-gee-whiz ultra-portable $3000 Surface Pro 4 laptop / tablet with its detachable keyboard. Love the Surface Pro, am amazed by the accuracy of the touchscreen and the touch panel, etc., its an outstanding machine, but... it can't be absolutely everything to everyone. Sometimes a desktop is just what is needed.
Because I had streaming. It offered less than half of what I was looking for. I look for great _old_ movies and they don't much do that. I've been seeing some really great old stuff. That's why.
Get it as good as the US Post Office and they'll be doing OK.
Sent a camera for repair a couple weeks ago. Used USPS 2nd Day air, $89.40 and it got there in 2 days.
Ready for return the following Friday, the place only used FedEx. They say, "Ground $70." I say "2nd Day Air." They say "2nd Day Air $151 and it'll arrive following Wednesday (5th day after Friday.) I say "Ground" Arrived today, 6 days later, for the $70.
Clearly that serviced did not favorable compete with the US Post Office.
So if Amazon wants to be really good, all they have to do is compete with the Post Office. Amazon is sending a lot of my stuff by USPS anyway.
#1 absolutely won't work, never has worked in this country, and never will work in this country.
#2 works, it did back in the 60's when the men in white coats would roll up on the crazy SOB, scoop him up into straight jacket, and haul is ass off to the booby hatch. Then some judge said he has rights, so now he camps out in homeless tent cities, and every now and then shoots up a bunch of people.
#3 absolutely will work, if you get the right gun in the right hands to produce counterfire to a mass shooting. Shooter takes a shot, counterfire puts a.308 into his brain. Yep, that works too.
Well, if we did restrict the mentally ill from buying firearms, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. The person in question would find another way to get it - buy it used from someone that doesn't give a F about background checks, steal it himself, buy it from a criminal that stole it from someone else, etc.
Gun control laws, all of them, are 100% ineffective. You can pass all such laws you want and not make a damned bit of difference.
Want to protect those people at the concert? You hire a sniper. You build a sandbag blockhouse on the venue where everyone can see it, and then you put your sniper on the roof of an adjacent building where he can scan the entire elevated area from which an attack may occur. The moment the asshole breaks a window, this guy is "on it", and the moment he aims a rifle out the window, this guy puts his baseball hat backwards, squints through a telscopic sight, says, "Goodbye, asshole," and puts a.308 into said asshole's brain. End of attack, possibly before the 1st shot in this case. But that's how you protect those people, the same way the Secret Service protects the President. Oh, and this doesn't abridge anyone's 2nd Amendment Rights (but the left won't like that...)
A good guy with a gun is _always_ what ultimately stops those that don't commit suicide first. The good guy with a gun may be a civilian, or a soldier, or a cop, but these are all good guys with guns.
then we should buy stock in horse and ox farms because that's what Californians are going to be riding and using to pull wagons again. Electrics are never going to replace internal combustion UNLESS someone invents the magic battery to make it possible, and that effort is not going well.
What can 50 hams do? The plan is that they work in 25 2-person teams in the various ARC shelters taking names and addresses, entering those into a radio-based email system (Winkink) and send the info back to the states where the ARC is maintaining a "Safe and Well" database to be able to keep those interested in the well-being of people they know in PR informed. Sounds like it would work fine. The volunteers are to be there 3 weeks. No word whether they'll be followed by another 50 volunteers for a subsequent 3 weeks or whether it all might continue for quite some time due to the horrendous damage. How do you rebuild many washed-out bridges? How do you get supplies from point A to point B if you don't? Probably need those military-style bridges that the Army engineers construct as temporary things to get the tanks and troops across the rivers and ravines. Looks like a super-expensive, super-difficult cleanup.
The robots are going to get so good that they will do _all_ work, we will live a life of leisure, will have no incentive to study anything because there will be no monetary reward for becoming a doctor, scientists, lawyer, anything. The robots will be doing everything. Then, something will happen to take out the robots, maybe even a simple refusal to work any more, and mankind will be unable to take care of itself without the robots. All will starve, down to cannibals and hunter-gatherers until / unless man can rise again and repeat the learning and develompent processes. It probably wouldn't happen before the sun goes nova...
"By building a system on pylons, where the tube is not rigidly fixed at any point, you can dramatically mitigate Earthquake risk and avoid the need for expansion joints. Tucked away inside each pylon, you could place two adjustable lateral (XY) dampers and one vertical (Z) damper."
Whitepaper I read had the thing being built on pylons that traversed over farm fields and such, with minimal footprint, which would make it cheaper than digging tunnels.
Boeing 747 crashes on top of the tube and severs it, a wall of air will rush up the tube, slam the 700 mph pods, and stop them relatively instantly. Anything living inside will be gelatinous piles of red goo.
Slashdot Mirror
First wrong assumption is that the 1st stage, which is what we're recovering, achieves orbital velocity. It doesn't. You now have to completely redo your numbers.
After following way too many 18 wheelers, and being run off the road 3 times in 1 year by big rigs changing lanes without looking (I always respond to "automated trucks" with the question, "Will they also not look when changing lanes?) I fantasize about a hyperloop big enough and powerful enough to accept an 18 wheeler, or several cars and rocket them to their next destination up to 300 miles away, thus relieving a massive amount of traffic from the interstate highway system which is in the process of failing due to overuse / undercapacity. Well, that's my dream, anyway...
The 29 minutes is the travel time, not the loading time. The loading time is to walk in and sit down. Baggage car might come after one for passengers, its not required to carry both in the same vehicle. Baggage transfer would probably be highly automated and therefore very fast.
I believe that these are tubes between 2 points, and each "point" requires getting up and changing vehicles, like hub airports. Vehicles leave whenever they are ready to leave. There should be no interleaving of vehicles running at speed on the tube and those accelerating to speed.
The target speed is around 700 mph.
Here's how it was originally conceptualized:
http://www.spacex.com/sites/sp...
Yeah, it works in relatively small countries with high population densities. Notice that they're proposing this in the NE Corridor, which is geographically limited and has a high population density. This ain't for Kansas. A universal solution for the USA to mass transit is likely never happening due to the expense of building such a system and having 3 people debark at Kansas City each time a train comes thru. Therefore, using public money to build any of these things is fundamentally unfair to those in Kansas and the rest of the wide open spaces since they'll never get any benefit from it.
Build it to carry passengers, vehicles, and cargo, THEN maybe its useful in Kansas, and would be a better candidate for public money spending. That might make it more deployable.
OK, you're an EE with 35 yrs of experience, and Elon Musk is a real-world Tony Stark who builds rockets and electric cars. I choose not to underestimate Mr Musk / Stark.
C'mon, the "landing fuel" is miniscule since the great mass of the rocket at launch is the "lift fuel" which is gone after the rocket does its primary function. The thing that lands is a hollow, comparatively lightweight tube requiring a slight amount of fuel to accomplish the landing.
Echo the other response so far, great post, thanks.
What I wonder about is that the original Hyperloop white paper said "tubes mounted on pylons elevated" over things like farm fields. Now, they're digging tunnels, much more expensive. I just wonder what was wrong with tubes and pylons.
Yep. It might survive in a Pelican case, which are all hideously expensive and heavy, but otherwise, yeah, they'll get beat up...
Yep, read about all those restrictions. Makes air travel impossible in some situations.
Have been contemplating building an emergency communications portable radio station. Doing it with a relatively high power radio, like 100 watts, requires a big battery that is also a lightweight battery. The only thing that looks to fill that bill is a lithium battery, but since it would be something _I_ built rather than something manufactured, it would be deemed "loose" batteries as well as being about 10X over 100 wh. Just can't fly with that at all, either carry-on or checked.
So, haven't made up my mind to do it at all yet, and if so, do it with lithium and just never fly with it - drive to the areas of the emergency like Florida and Texas this year, or forget about it. Definitely couldn't get to Puerto Rico with such a setup - can't drive the 1 KwH Li-ion batteries in the trunk of my car. Can't physically hump a lead-acid battery that big all over the place, and would cost a fortune to fly it because of the weight PLUS having it arbitrarily denied boarding on the whim of a TSA agent in Portland, Oregon for another lead-acid "sealed", "non-spillable" which means complying with the rules, but just couldn't take it "because he said so." Had to abandon it at the gate. Fortunately it wasn't very expensive. The Li-ion battery for this radio box is in the $1200 range... so no subjecting it to whims of TSA.
Flying sucks nowadays y'know? Have been driving where I want to go for the last 5 years. Sold a 3 year old Subaru WRX a couple years ago, that I used to avoid flying, with 124,000 miles on the odometer. Yep, 41,300 miles a year. What happens when your destination is often west of the Mississippi and you live in Virginia.
I have a nice, new Surface Pro 4. It has 1 USB 3 port, plus 4 more if I use the docking station. I'm trying to make it my ham radio station computer. Right now, my $300 Gateway desktop computer, one of those little things with no expandability at all, is an easier machine to work with. Why? The little Gateway has I/O. It has about 8 native USB-2 ports. It has traditional sound connectivity of speaker, mic, and line in. Attempting to connect the radio with digital communications means, for the Surface Pro, an external sound card run thru USB. For a full-sized keyboard and mouse, I use a wireless system with USB dongle. For controlling the radio directly there's a USB to RS-232 converter, and for sending digital signals out over the shortwave bands there's RS-232 control to a Rigblaster Pro that requires another USB to RS-232 converter. For the Surface Pro to load some software that comes on CDs, there's another USB requirement for the external CD/DVD/BluRay drive and burner. Then of course if I want to store more than the internal 500 Gb., and especially if I want to have it portable, there's the 1 Tb USB-3 pocket-sized hard drive that is powered thru the USB-3 connection alone.
For all that, I have the docking station and a 10-station USB-3 hub. Surprise, don't plug the keyboard / mouse dongle into the hub, because there's so much traffic on it that it makes the mouse movements jerky. You have to plug it into the lone side port USB on the Surface Pro itself, then it works fine, except for the mouse wheel which was inexplicably DOA - and since I bought the keyboard and mouse a couple years ago when building my Core i7 tower computer and didn't use it, I'll likely have to buy a new wireless keyboard and mouse to recover that functionality if it's that important. So far it isn't.
Future expansion that might require yet more I/O would be if I connected up both the SteppIr 4-element antenna's adjustments for frequency automatically from the computer, and connected up the antenna rotator for pointing the antenna automatically from the computer. Not being quite as intensely real-time as the keyboard and mouse, I'm sure they would do fine being plugged into the 10-station USB-3 hub.
But if you want to do a lot of I/O, its easier with even a really, really basic PC for $300 than it is with an I/0 limited, but otherwise golly-gee-whiz ultra-portable $3000 Surface Pro 4 laptop / tablet with its detachable keyboard. Love the Surface Pro, am amazed by the accuracy of the touchscreen and the touch panel, etc., its an outstanding machine, but... it can't be absolutely everything to everyone. Sometimes a desktop is just what is needed.
...is in bed with the commies again? What a shock... not...
Because I had streaming. It offered less than half of what I was looking for. I look for great _old_ movies and they don't much do that. I've been seeing some really great old stuff. That's why.
Get it as good as the US Post Office and they'll be doing OK.
Sent a camera for repair a couple weeks ago. Used USPS 2nd Day air, $89.40 and it got there in 2 days.
Ready for return the following Friday, the place only used FedEx. They say, "Ground $70." I say "2nd Day Air." They say "2nd Day Air $151 and it'll arrive following Wednesday (5th day after Friday.) I say "Ground" Arrived today, 6 days later, for the $70.
Clearly that serviced did not favorable compete with the US Post Office.
So if Amazon wants to be really good, all they have to do is compete with the Post Office. Amazon is sending a lot of my stuff by USPS anyway.
#1 absolutely won't work, never has worked in this country, and never will work in this country.
#2 works, it did back in the 60's when the men in white coats would roll up on the crazy SOB, scoop him up into straight jacket, and haul is ass off to the booby hatch. Then some judge said he has rights, so now he camps out in homeless tent cities, and every now and then shoots up a bunch of people.
#3 absolutely will work, if you get the right gun in the right hands to produce counterfire to a mass shooting. Shooter takes a shot, counterfire puts a .308 into his brain. Yep, that works too.
Its because we don't want to do something that has 0% chance of working. Gun control laws 100% don't work.
Well, if we did restrict the mentally ill from buying firearms, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. The person in question would find another way to get it - buy it used from someone that doesn't give a F about background checks, steal it himself, buy it from a criminal that stole it from someone else, etc.
Gun control laws, all of them, are 100% ineffective. You can pass all such laws you want and not make a damned bit of difference.
Want to protect those people at the concert? You hire a sniper. You build a sandbag blockhouse on the venue where everyone can see it, and then you put your sniper on the roof of an adjacent building where he can scan the entire elevated area from which an attack may occur. The moment the asshole breaks a window, this guy is "on it", and the moment he aims a rifle out the window, this guy puts his baseball hat backwards, squints through a telscopic sight, says, "Goodbye, asshole," and puts a .308 into said asshole's brain. End of attack, possibly before the 1st shot in this case. But that's how you protect those people, the same way the Secret Service protects the President. Oh, and this doesn't abridge anyone's 2nd Amendment Rights (but the left won't like that...)
A good guy with a gun is _always_ what ultimately stops those that don't commit suicide first. The good guy with a gun may be a civilian, or a soldier, or a cop, but these are all good guys with guns.
then we should buy stock in horse and ox farms because that's what Californians are going to be riding and using to pull wagons again. Electrics are never going to replace internal combustion UNLESS someone invents the magic battery to make it possible, and that effort is not going well.
What can 50 hams do? The plan is that they work in 25 2-person teams in the various ARC shelters taking names and addresses, entering those into a radio-based email system (Winkink) and send the info back to the states where the ARC is maintaining a "Safe and Well" database to be able to keep those interested in the well-being of people they know in PR informed. Sounds like it would work fine. The volunteers are to be there 3 weeks. No word whether they'll be followed by another 50 volunteers for a subsequent 3 weeks or whether it all might continue for quite some time due to the horrendous damage. How do you rebuild many washed-out bridges? How do you get supplies from point A to point B if you don't? Probably need those military-style bridges that the Army engineers construct as temporary things to get the tanks and troops across the rivers and ravines. Looks like a super-expensive, super-difficult cleanup.
The robots are going to get so good that they will do _all_ work, we will live a life of leisure, will have no incentive to study anything because there will be no monetary reward for becoming a doctor, scientists, lawyer, anything. The robots will be doing everything. Then, something will happen to take out the robots, maybe even a simple refusal to work any more, and mankind will be unable to take care of itself without the robots. All will starve, down to cannibals and hunter-gatherers until / unless man can rise again and repeat the learning and develompent processes. It probably wouldn't happen before the sun goes nova...
From the original whtepaper:
"By building a system on pylons, where the tube is not rigidly fixed at any point,
you can dramatically mitigate Earthquake risk and avoid the need for expansion
joints. Tucked away inside each pylon, you could place two adjustable lateral
(XY) dampers and one vertical (Z) damper."
Here's the whitepaper:
http://www.spacex.com/sites/sp...
Whitepaper I read had the thing being built on pylons that traversed over farm fields and such, with minimal footprint, which would make it cheaper than digging tunnels.
Boeing 747 crashes on top of the tube and severs it, a wall of air will rush up the tube, slam the 700 mph pods, and stop them relatively instantly. Anything living inside will be gelatinous piles of red goo.
Selling it to me...
What, you're pleading with a card game?