As though it were talkinh about a moon of "Jupiter Prime".
Come to think of it, I guess it is. You could stick "Prime" after almost any proper noun in the news, and it'll mean the same thing, only it'll sound like it's happening in a sci-fi multiverse.
Meanwhile, longs keep making money and shorts keep losing their shirt, cycle after cycle of doom-and-gloom short-selling, followed by none of the doom-and-gloom panning out and the company successfully continuing on its exponential growth pace. Who exactly needs to examine their underlying assumptions here?
The average driver does not drive a 30 year old car. The average driver drives a 10 year old car. Car safety records have not improved 4-fold in the past 10 years.
You mean the financial interests I announced in my first point in this thread? You mean the financial interests that I didn't have until the shorts banking on this absurd hyperbole pushed the stock down to ~$250 last month, which was just too tempting for me to keep staying on the sidelines? In case you haven't noticed, I've been talking about Tesla on this site for a lot more than a month.
If you're so anti-Tesla and so utterly convinced it's going to fail, I assume you've shorted TSLA? If not, do you not believe your own rhetoric? If you believed your own rhetoric that Tesla is going to fail, why wouldn't you make a no-brainer investment and double your money? Surely your money won't earn that good of a return anywhere else, right? Or if you are short already, then why aren't you more transparent, like I was?
Tesla autopilot seems to require the driver's constant attention to avoid running into stationary objects that are routinely encountered on roads (gore points, fire trucks, etc...).
Welcome back to hyperbole land.
The average US car goes 80 million miles between fatal accidents. The average Tesla goes 320 million miles between fatal accidents. 1/3rd to 1/2 of all Tesla miles are on Autopilot.
Now let's say that all fatal Tesla accidents were on Autopilot. Let's ignore the fact most of the "The driver may have been on Autopilot!" crash reporting stories thusfar have ultimately turned out not to involve AP at all. Let's also ignore the fact that since AP driving is much more likely to involve highways and thus higher speeds, it would be expected to involve a higher share of the accidents. Let's just look at the numbers. Even with these assumptions, you would still be 33 to 100% safer driving a Tesla on AP than driving any other car. Acting like you take your attention off the road for a split second and it drives you into a post is just absurd.
What I'm wondering is how long this media hype train can last. I mean, no freaking duh the more vehicles Tesla makes the more people are going to die while driving one. Are they seriously going to keep breathlessly reporting on every last Tesla crash - always with the no-evidence-whatsoever speculation that AP might have been in use, and no retraction whatsoever in the cases where it wasn't? 40 thousand people die on US roads every year. 1.3 million die in them worldwide. Seeing a Tesla on the roads is no longer a 1-in-a-million event; Tesla is quickly approaching 0,1% of all US vehicles on the road (nearing 200k). Believe it or not, like all vehicles, there will sometimes be Tesla crashes. And things like it being front page news that someone rear-ended a fire truck at 60 miles an hour as if there's something horribly wrong with Tesla, when the real story should be that someone hit a fire truck at 60 miles an hour and walked away with only a broken ankle, when such an accident should normally be fatal... I'm sorry, but Musk has a serious point about unfair, lopsided media coverage.
There's not many other systems that use eye tracking, although there are a few; I'd like more specifics about what Musk was referring to. There are some weaknesses with eye tracking, like how it doesn't work with sunglasses on, but beyond that.... I just don't think periodic torquing of the wheel is enough (at least it's better than just a pressure sensor... since you can fall asleep while still putting pressure on the wheel).
On the other hand, I have trouble buying into the other claim that it was "too expensive". Given that Tesla included a selfie camera on the lower cost model, the Model 3, which could be used for eye tracking.
Yeah those Telsa haters! Reading the income statements, the cash flow statements and the balance sheet and asking, "Hey, what's going on with our money Musk?!"
I seriously doubt you're a Tesla investor. I am. And like most Tesla investors, I'm very happy with the company's management under Musk.
"Hey Musk, what about those 500,000 cars you promised to make by the end of 2018!"
Wait, the company is half a year behind the ridiculously-aggressive schedule they set for themselves? No way! Why didn't someone tell me? This fact certainly hasn't been flooding my newsfeed with relentless hyperbole.
sudo adjust reality so that from the summit of Mt. Diablo you can see more of the Earth's surface than any place else on Earth with the sole exception of Mt Kilimanjaro.
Ah, the good 'ol days:) I also did a couple cases of software cracking, although I never distributed my cracks. I think one was Framsticks, because I was a giant nerd. Just the old fashioned stuff - look for known strings in the disassembly, look for where they're referenced, and start randomly messing with all the jump statements in the vicinity until the registration code breaks and lets you past;)
Now we're just boring adults reminiscing. How did we become our parents? :
No kidding. 14 felonies for this? As a teenager, I too phished my teacher (and much of my class) successfully for their passwords by making a mock DOS prompt that mimicked basic commands and the login program. To be fair, I didn't do anything "evil" with it - as part of my final project, I actually encoded the teacher's username and password into stereogram with a generator that I wrote;) She found it amusing. I'm sure she wouldn't have found it so amusing if I had been in there changing grades or whatnot. But 14 felones for a teenager acting up is just insane.
I'll consider these charges fair when they start charging high school bullies who beat up other students with 14 counts of assault.
Look, the Australia battery is big, but of course it's not that big;)
I'm surprised that this article didn't mention that on the Q1 call, Musk mentioned that he expects to be able to announce a ~1 GWh battery contract this summer:) Gotta love order of magnitude year-over-year growth!
BFR is designed for orbital maneuvers with long-term propellant storage, so it should be able to deploy to multiple orbits, so long as the delta-V requirements aren't too great.
That said, one needs to apply standard Musk Time correction factors to BFR's timeline. I expect F9 and FH to be what most or all of Starlink is launched with.
I do expect it to be more than just the first flight that needs to be inspected in detail. I expect them to inspect every after every single launch for the first X launches, then once every 2 launches for the next X, then 1 in 5, then finally 1 in 10, or something along those lines. I don't think customers would be happy with SpaceX if they just jumped from a single success case to "no inspections at all for 10 launches".
Maybe I'm alone in this, but what I look forward most to, concerning such low launch costs?
Mass produced probes.
If NASA comes to grips with launch costs being this cheap (something that they never seem to do in their planning, always budgeting at ULA rates), it'll become obvious that the next logical step is not to produce probes in 1s or 2s, but by the hundreds. Mass production means low unit costs. And they can let their probe mass budgets rise (aka, build them cheap rather than spending a fortune trying to shave grams off on every last part). Forget RTGs with expensive 238Pu - use cheap 90Sr or 241Am, or just huge solar arrays. Switch from "failure is not an option" to "meh, as long as 90+% of them make it..." as a guiding principle.
Over the course of our lifetimes, we can transform our solar system from a huge expanse of "unknown" with tiny spots of "known", to a huge expanse of "known" where we're just filling in ever-smaller gaps.
The capacity is going to be tiny, especially with cars (probably with a single occupant) occupying some of the vehicles.
Please go back and re-read, particularly the part up to "UberPool".
As for not being fixed routes, I think you will find that tunnels are pretty fixed
No more fixed than roads. A typical subway system may have a dozen or so intersections between lines in a city, depending on the size. This will have thousands.
and fixed routes has always been a drawback with railways, which is what this is, although I know Americans hate the word.
A railway is a transportation system based on rails. By definition. Loop has not officially announced whether it will use rails or not; both wheels on rails and wheels not on rails are under consideration.
The term for this is PRT. It's a term that's been around for decades. Use the right term.
If there are going to be numerous stations (your elevator shafts), you are going to be waiting around for some time to collect enough people going to the same destination or near it to fill a vehicle
Not to beat a dead horse, but: "Please go back and re-read, particularly the part up to "UberPool"" If you don't know what that is, google it.
During off-peak hours (most hours), people go directly to their destination (the Loop pods act like private cars, just in constant use rather than parked). During peak hours, a routing algorithm groups people together so that there's a minimum number of stops and delays to group people together between destinations.
it would be faster to take vehicles on fixed routes and change once or even twice
That's why traveling by bus is so much faster than traveling by car, right?
Conventional subways have those too.
Subways are not structured the same as highways.
Musk really believes he will be granted free city-centre land for his stations?
No. But thanks for making random assertions and attributing them to Musk.
That's one thing of many. Most focus on the cutting head speed, which is limited at present by the balance between cutting disc temperature and their wear rate. Boring Company is working to address this with more modern alloys on the cutting discs and a more elaborate cooling system for them. Wear rate also has to be minimized normally because swapping out discs requires stopping the head. Boring Company is working to make them hot swappable, so it's not as critical that they last as long. Downtime is normally also needed (roughly half of the TBM's time is spent down) for casing, since they push off the end of the casing. Boring Company is working to press off the sides of the casing rather than the ends, so that it does not need to stop for casing.
Now that necro81 provided the sarcasm, I'll add the response: when you're in the ground itself, everything moves together, and thus provides little shear force. Earthquakes are more dangerous to structures on the surface because their inertia tries to hold the top still while the base is shaken by the ground.
It's pretty short... it was 500 feet in October (so maybe double that now). He keeps drawing hockey stick growth curves for length (a few miles in a few months, 20 in the next year), but he also said Tesla was going to be cranking out 5k cars/week a year ago.
That's a rather poor analogy choice. Yes, Model 3 production is late, but it is following a hockey stick growth. Through Q4, production averaged a couple hundred per week. Through most of Q1 it was at 1k/wk. At the end of Q1 it jumped to 2k/wk. Now they're hitting 3k/wk not even half a quarter later.
General rule with Musk projects: Increase estimated timelines by roughly 20-100%, depending on the project and how far ahead you're talking; he always sets ridiculously short timelines for himself. But he generally delivers in the end.
It depends on what you mean by "this". This was their first prototype tunnel, working to develop their boring tech (the whole point of Boring Company is to get TBM speeds up and costs down by 1/2 to 1 order of magnitude). It's just a tunnel. They'll also be testing out their first Loop vehicles in it. Since it's just one leg, they'll just go from one end to the other.
Now, as mentioned, this tunnel is just a prototype. It's to be extended to form an LA Loop system, they're getting started on a NY/DC Loop system right now, bidding for a Chicago Loop system, and planning to start a LA/SF Hyperloop system later this year (confirmed by Musk last night - with the interesting addendum that they have a straightforward way to branch in and out of the Hyperloop tunnels to serve smaller cities en route).
Loop is underground PRT (Personal Rapid Transit). Relatively small vehicles take either people or cars. People generally - and cars always - go directly to their destination, rather than on fixed routes. At peak traffic times, passenger capsules get routed to optimal paths with a few stops on each end that group together people going from and to the same general areas (ala Uber Pool). Underground, the main routes are limited access (like highways); there's never any stopping or significant slowing down / speeding up in them. Feeder tunnels branch on and off (again, akin to a highway system rather than a subway system). Control is 100% automated. Access to and from the surface is from numerous small pod elevator shafts rather than fewer, larger stations; the surface footprint is 1-2 parking spaces per shaft (the surface footprint use is justified by how many vehicles it takes off the roads - even when people travel by car, as they're off all of the roads between the start and end of their journey).
Hyperloop is a low-pressure variant of Loop, designed for near-supersonic speeds (and with the potential to operate in environments with higher speeds of sound as well). Several orders of magnitude lower pressure than atmosphere, many orders of magnitude higher pressure than a hard vacuum (and thus several orders of magnitude easier to maintain the reduced pressure, per unit surface area). Some air in the tubes is essential, at least to the "true" Hyperloop proposal (Hyperloop Alpha; there are now lots of other things calling themselves "Hyperloop" that are just maglev vactrains). In the HA design, the vehicles are suspended by air bearings (like an air hockey puck or hard drive platter), which is comparable to maglev in terms of energy losses. The air bearings are fed by a battery powered, water-cooled compressor, which also shunts the air ahead of the vehicle past it (preventing it from building up a high pressure zone ahead of it). Acceleration is provided by short accelerator segments. Wheels propel the craft at low speeds (akin to Loop) and in emergencies. (And to head people off, yes, Thunderf00t the Biochemist-Pretending-To-Be-An-Engineer does not know what he's talking about)
For anyone who's curious as to what's actually proposed in Hyperloop Alpha, and what's been addressed, Link. Note that this document is several years old, so there's plenty of work that's been done since then. This predated Boring Company, so boring costs were estimated at then-current (much higher) rates, and thus boring segments were minimized. They also had to stop the route on the edges of town (like an airport) to save money, as this also predated Loop.
Slashdot Mirror
As though it were talkinh about a moon of "Jupiter Prime".
Come to think of it, I guess it is. You could stick "Prime" after almost any proper noun in the news, and it'll mean the same thing, only it'll sound like it's happening in a sci-fi multiverse.
Meanwhile, longs keep making money and shorts keep losing their shirt, cycle after cycle of doom-and-gloom short-selling, followed by none of the doom-and-gloom panning out and the company successfully continuing on its exponential growth pace. Who exactly needs to examine their underlying assumptions here?
Also, do you not see the irony of someone criticizing someone for "transparency"... posting AC?
The average driver does not drive a 30 year old car. The average driver drives a 10 year old car. Car safety records have not improved 4-fold in the past 10 years.
You mean the financial interests I announced in my first point in this thread? You mean the financial interests that I didn't have until the shorts banking on this absurd hyperbole pushed the stock down to ~$250 last month, which was just too tempting for me to keep staying on the sidelines? In case you haven't noticed, I've been talking about Tesla on this site for a lot more than a month.
If you're so anti-Tesla and so utterly convinced it's going to fail, I assume you've shorted TSLA? If not, do you not believe your own rhetoric? If you believed your own rhetoric that Tesla is going to fail, why wouldn't you make a no-brainer investment and double your money? Surely your money won't earn that good of a return anywhere else, right? Or if you are short already, then why aren't you more transparent, like I was?
Welcome back to hyperbole land.
The average US car goes 80 million miles between fatal accidents.
The average Tesla goes 320 million miles between fatal accidents.
1/3rd to 1/2 of all Tesla miles are on Autopilot.
Now let's say that all fatal Tesla accidents were on Autopilot. Let's ignore the fact most of the "The driver may have been on Autopilot!" crash reporting stories thusfar have ultimately turned out not to involve AP at all. Let's also ignore the fact that since AP driving is much more likely to involve highways and thus higher speeds, it would be expected to involve a higher share of the accidents. Let's just look at the numbers. Even with these assumptions, you would still be 33 to 100% safer driving a Tesla on AP than driving any other car. Acting like you take your attention off the road for a split second and it drives you into a post is just absurd.
What I'm wondering is how long this media hype train can last. I mean, no freaking duh the more vehicles Tesla makes the more people are going to die while driving one. Are they seriously going to keep breathlessly reporting on every last Tesla crash - always with the no-evidence-whatsoever speculation that AP might have been in use, and no retraction whatsoever in the cases where it wasn't? 40 thousand people die on US roads every year. 1.3 million die in them worldwide. Seeing a Tesla on the roads is no longer a 1-in-a-million event; Tesla is quickly approaching 0,1% of all US vehicles on the road (nearing 200k). Believe it or not, like all vehicles, there will sometimes be Tesla crashes. And things like it being front page news that someone rear-ended a fire truck at 60 miles an hour as if there's something horribly wrong with Tesla, when the real story should be that someone hit a fire truck at 60 miles an hour and walked away with only a broken ankle, when such an accident should normally be fatal... I'm sorry, but Musk has a serious point about unfair, lopsided media coverage.
There's not many other systems that use eye tracking, although there are a few; I'd like more specifics about what Musk was referring to. There are some weaknesses with eye tracking, like how it doesn't work with sunglasses on, but beyond that.... I just don't think periodic torquing of the wheel is enough (at least it's better than just a pressure sensor... since you can fall asleep while still putting pressure on the wheel).
On the other hand, I have trouble buying into the other claim that it was "too expensive". Given that Tesla included a selfie camera on the lower cost model, the Model 3, which could be used for eye tracking.
I seriously doubt you're a Tesla investor. I am. And like most Tesla investors, I'm very happy with the company's management under Musk.
Wait, the company is half a year behind the ridiculously-aggressive schedule they set for themselves? No way! Why didn't someone tell me? This fact certainly hasn't been flooding my newsfeed with relentless hyperbole.
sudo adjust reality so that from the summit of Mt. Diablo you can see more of the Earth's surface than any place else on Earth with the sole exception of Mt Kilimanjaro.
Ah, the good 'ol days :) I also did a couple cases of software cracking, although I never distributed my cracks. I think one was Framsticks, because I was a giant nerd. Just the old fashioned stuff - look for known strings in the disassembly, look for where they're referenced, and start randomly messing with all the jump statements in the vicinity until the registration code breaks and lets you past ;)
Now we're just boring adults reminiscing. How did we become our parents? :
No kidding. 14 felonies for this? As a teenager, I too phished my teacher (and much of my class) successfully for their passwords by making a mock DOS prompt that mimicked basic commands and the login program. To be fair, I didn't do anything "evil" with it - as part of my final project, I actually encoded the teacher's username and password into stereogram with a generator that I wrote ;) She found it amusing. I'm sure she wouldn't have found it so amusing if I had been in there changing grades or whatnot. But 14 felones for a teenager acting up is just insane.
I'll consider these charges fair when they start charging high school bullies who beat up other students with 14 counts of assault.
Look, the Australia battery is big, but of course it's not that big ;)
I'm surprised that this article didn't mention that on the Q1 call, Musk mentioned that he expects to be able to announce a ~1 GWh battery contract this summer :) Gotta love order of magnitude year-over-year growth!
Bankwupt! SpaceX is going bankwupt, I tell you! ;)
(does that work? ;) )
BFR is designed for orbital maneuvers with long-term propellant storage, so it should be able to deploy to multiple orbits, so long as the delta-V requirements aren't too great.
That said, one needs to apply standard Musk Time correction factors to BFR's timeline. I expect F9 and FH to be what most or all of Starlink is launched with.
I do expect it to be more than just the first flight that needs to be inspected in detail. I expect them to inspect every after every single launch for the first X launches, then once every 2 launches for the next X, then 1 in 5, then finally 1 in 10, or something along those lines. I don't think customers would be happy with SpaceX if they just jumped from a single success case to "no inspections at all for 10 launches".
Maybe I'm alone in this, but what I look forward most to, concerning such low launch costs?
Mass produced probes.
If NASA comes to grips with launch costs being this cheap (something that they never seem to do in their planning, always budgeting at ULA rates), it'll become obvious that the next logical step is not to produce probes in 1s or 2s, but by the hundreds. Mass production means low unit costs. And they can let their probe mass budgets rise (aka, build them cheap rather than spending a fortune trying to shave grams off on every last part). Forget RTGs with expensive 238Pu - use cheap 90Sr or 241Am, or just huge solar arrays. Switch from "failure is not an option" to "meh, as long as 90+% of them make it..." as a guiding principle.
Over the course of our lifetimes, we can transform our solar system from a huge expanse of "unknown" with tiny spots of "known", to a huge expanse of "known" where we're just filling in ever-smaller gaps.
Wow, I forgot all about SpaceShipTwo. They're still working on that thing?
If by "few", you mean "tens of thousands", with several thousand more per week, then sure.
Hard vacuum is not "zero matter".
Please go back and re-read, particularly the part up to "UberPool".
No more fixed than roads. A typical subway system may have a dozen or so intersections between lines in a city, depending on the size. This will have thousands.
A railway is a transportation system based on rails. By definition. Loop has not officially announced whether it will use rails or not; both wheels on rails and wheels not on rails are under consideration.
The term for this is PRT. It's a term that's been around for decades. Use the right term.
Not to beat a dead horse, but: "Please go back and re-read, particularly the part up to "UberPool"" If you don't know what that is, google it.
During off-peak hours (most hours), people go directly to their destination (the Loop pods act like private cars, just in constant use rather than parked). During peak hours, a routing algorithm groups people together so that there's a minimum number of stops and delays to group people together between destinations.
That's why traveling by bus is so much faster than traveling by car, right?
Subways are not structured the same as highways.
No. But thanks for making random assertions and attributing them to Musk.
Wrong, and wrong. There are no subsidies for Loop; it's entirely privately funded.
That's one thing of many. Most focus on the cutting head speed, which is limited at present by the balance between cutting disc temperature and their wear rate. Boring Company is working to address this with more modern alloys on the cutting discs and a more elaborate cooling system for them. Wear rate also has to be minimized normally because swapping out discs requires stopping the head. Boring Company is working to make them hot swappable, so it's not as critical that they last as long. Downtime is normally also needed (roughly half of the TBM's time is spent down) for casing, since they push off the end of the casing. Boring Company is working to press off the sides of the casing rather than the ends, so that it does not need to stop for casing.
Now that necro81 provided the sarcasm, I'll add the response: when you're in the ground itself, everything moves together, and thus provides little shear force. Earthquakes are more dangerous to structures on the surface because their inertia tries to hold the top still while the base is shaken by the ground.
That's a rather poor analogy choice. Yes, Model 3 production is late, but it is following a hockey stick growth. Through Q4, production averaged a couple hundred per week. Through most of Q1 it was at 1k/wk. At the end of Q1 it jumped to 2k/wk. Now they're hitting 3k/wk not even half a quarter later.
General rule with Musk projects: Increase estimated timelines by roughly 20-100%, depending on the project and how far ahead you're talking; he always sets ridiculously short timelines for himself. But he generally delivers in the end.
It depends on what you mean by "this". This was their first prototype tunnel, working to develop their boring tech (the whole point of Boring Company is to get TBM speeds up and costs down by 1/2 to 1 order of magnitude). It's just a tunnel. They'll also be testing out their first Loop vehicles in it. Since it's just one leg, they'll just go from one end to the other.
Now, as mentioned, this tunnel is just a prototype. It's to be extended to form an LA Loop system, they're getting started on a NY/DC Loop system right now, bidding for a Chicago Loop system, and planning to start a LA/SF Hyperloop system later this year (confirmed by Musk last night - with the interesting addendum that they have a straightforward way to branch in and out of the Hyperloop tunnels to serve smaller cities en route).
Loop is underground PRT (Personal Rapid Transit). Relatively small vehicles take either people or cars. People generally - and cars always - go directly to their destination, rather than on fixed routes. At peak traffic times, passenger capsules get routed to optimal paths with a few stops on each end that group together people going from and to the same general areas (ala Uber Pool). Underground, the main routes are limited access (like highways); there's never any stopping or significant slowing down / speeding up in them. Feeder tunnels branch on and off (again, akin to a highway system rather than a subway system). Control is 100% automated. Access to and from the surface is from numerous small pod elevator shafts rather than fewer, larger stations; the surface footprint is 1-2 parking spaces per shaft (the surface footprint use is justified by how many vehicles it takes off the roads - even when people travel by car, as they're off all of the roads between the start and end of their journey).
Hyperloop is a low-pressure variant of Loop, designed for near-supersonic speeds (and with the potential to operate in environments with higher speeds of sound as well). Several orders of magnitude lower pressure than atmosphere, many orders of magnitude higher pressure than a hard vacuum (and thus several orders of magnitude easier to maintain the reduced pressure, per unit surface area). Some air in the tubes is essential, at least to the "true" Hyperloop proposal (Hyperloop Alpha; there are now lots of other things calling themselves "Hyperloop" that are just maglev vactrains). In the HA design, the vehicles are suspended by air bearings (like an air hockey puck or hard drive platter), which is comparable to maglev in terms of energy losses. The air bearings are fed by a battery powered, water-cooled compressor, which also shunts the air ahead of the vehicle past it (preventing it from building up a high pressure zone ahead of it). Acceleration is provided by short accelerator segments. Wheels propel the craft at low speeds (akin to Loop) and in emergencies. (And to head people off, yes, Thunderf00t the Biochemist-Pretending-To-Be-An-Engineer does not know what he's talking about)
For anyone who's curious as to what's actually proposed in Hyperloop Alpha, and what's been addressed, Link. Note that this document is several years old, so there's plenty of work that's been done since then. This predated Boring Company, so boring costs were estimated at then-current (much higher) rates, and thus boring segments were minimized. They also had to stop the route on the edges of town (like an airport) to save money, as this also predated Loop.