One of those features is actually the Second engine. Grippen (not intended for Naval use), has one engine. Russia's Su-27-based and Mig-29 designs, and Dassualt Rafelle are twin-engine partly because they're carrier-capable. Eurofighter Typhoon is not, but before the French pulled out carrier capability was on the spec-sheet, so it's also twin-engine.
Fo an aircraft that's supposed to command the entire fucking Pacific you want a second engine because it can't just land on a handy highway if the one engine dies. It has to fly home (or close enough to home that a chopper can save the pilot).
And who has a decent military RADAR Early warning system besides the Russians and Chinese? Hint: they're all our allies.
Moreover who is going to retain said system after the B-2s are done with it? Hint: the answer is nobody.
Iraq had a pretty good air defense system in 1990. It died because nobody bothers buying enough air defense stuff to beat off US Air Force levels of modern, well-piloted, well-armed aircraft. They just don't have the money to buy enough air defense stuff to make a dent in the number of good (and well-piloted and well-armed) airframes $500-$700 Billion a year can throw at them.
As for it's ability to do ground support and light attack missions (B-1, B-52, and B-2 are all going to serve until the 2030s in the Heavy Bomber role, which most air forces no longer have because they can't afford them); the sheer quantity of missions 2400 of the damn things can perform has a quality all it's own.
b) None of those can fulfill the roles of any of the others.
c) They're all old designs that don't look good on a budget request.
d) Particularly a $1 Trillion request.
So we'll have a very expensive plane that does nothing particularly well, but we'll have a lot of them, and against almost any opponent we're likely to face it will be literally invincible because getting through stealth (even the Gen 1 Stealth of the F-117) is a lot harder then it looks in a Navy white paper.
Against the Russians it wouldn't be one theater. Same with the Chinese. Against almost anyone else we'd have a 10-1 advantage in airframes using only half our F-35s.
I suspect that F-35s could easily keep up the operational tempo of earlier aircraft, but for a lot more money. The USAF has no interest in reducing the number of missions it can fly, but it has plenty of interest in ensuring it's budget for those missions is maximized.
You have a plan that you think could work. The enemy also has a plane he thinks could work. Neither side is guaranteed victory in the absence of overwhelming numbers.
I doubt the Chinese plan will work for more then a day, because you can always deconnect the aircraft from it's network and reinstall the software. Which is the reason they are trying to develop some interesting hardware of their own.
The F-16 itself could be out-dog-fought by almost any plane built in the 30s, including many not intended for air-to-air missions, because Biplanes are much more maneuverable then jets. In actual combat it would be much better because it would be fast enough that none of the Biplanes could start a dogfight with an F-16. The Italian Air Force did not realize the major advantage speed gave a plane, so they emphasized maneuverability (and consequent superiority in dogfights) for years after everyone else had decided 350 M,PH was the minimum acceptable speed.
Vulnerability to RADAR is a matter of debate. The side that says they're vulnerable doesn't say they're worthless and we shouldn't buy them, it says that we need to also buy these very nice Growlers that their employer just happens to have ready for production if the money's right.
No money? Are you insane? This is America. If that particular nightmare scenario happened and it risked our boys lives Congress would order the President to buy the damn Growlers tomorow with a special appropriation.
Past due years and massively inflated costs are par for the course in government contracting. As is military conservatism pooh-pooing anything that isn't exactly like the last version with 10% more speed and/or boom. The Abrams Tank, for example, was widely derided as a ridiculous waste of money, easily detectable by the enemy due to the extremely hot exhaust plumes from it's brand new Gas Turbine (instead of Diesel) engine, and unreliable ceramic armor. The Marines refused to upgrade their M60s until the last possible minute. Then the Gulf War happened. Now the biggest reason anybody buys a non-Abrams tank is that they don't have the technology to replace said ceramic armor.
In this case the pilot's testimony should not change your opinion. Everybody knew it sucked at dogfighting already.
Keep in mind that doctrine calls for F-22s to handle dogfights, and we've got 187 of those. That's more F-22s then combat aircraft all but 27 other air-forces, 10 of those are Allies, and the Vietnamese and Ukrainians beat the F-22 by 2 and one plane respectively. So it's not quite as extreme as it was before 'Nam.
If nobody cared about civilians why are we killing less of them then in any previous campaign?
I consider myself a leftist, but one of the things that is simply true about military policy is we don't get it. We run in at the last minute, notice a lot of death happening, and condemn the death as unprecedented Un-American evil without bothering to learn any of the precedents. We spend half our time condemning them for doing things that may or may not be stupid/evil/pointless/etc. (we really don't know), and the other half shoveling money on military retirees. And it's dumb.
But we've got a lot of Professors, so we make it sound smart. To people who can't figure out we're clueless, that is.
That's not a lot of dogfights for an operation involving hundreds of aircraft and 100k sorties. Moreover most of the Coalition aircraft involved are F-15s. The F-15 has been replaced by the F-22, which implies that a doctrine based on having one good dogfighter and everyone else works. F-35 is the everyone else replacement.
And the F-16 is such a terrible design that it only sold 4,500 units to 24 countries. Much worse then the twin-engine F-18 sales of 1,480 to 8 countries.
Moreover it's hard to do twin engine VTOL, and the Marines insisted. They probably should not have been humored (or should have been humored by being allowed to by their own, special, Marine Corps plane), but once that decision was made twin engines went out the window.
Probably pretty badly for the JSF. F-22 is supposed to be the one doing the dogfighting.
But a) they're only planning on buying 150 (and only 50 by 2020), while we already have 115 and will end up with 2,400+ and b) if the plan works dogfighting is irrelevant.
The thing that sucks about spending $1 Trillion on combat aircraft is it's a fucking lot of money you could have used for any number of other things, but the advantage is that you have a $Trillion worth of combat aircraft. At 16-to-1 odds, with better trained pilots (we typically have several hundred hours on-type, the Russians don;t have that kind of budget), you don't need a bette plane to win.
The civilian to combatant casualty ratio is lower for the drone war then for literally any other method invented.
As a non-pilot I can't tell you why those weddings were picked. I suspect there could be a number of factors -- maybe the target only leaves hiding to go to weddings, maybe the strike was considered important enough to do immediately regardless of the collateral damage, maybe this was the only time three bigwig terrorists were all going to be together, maybe some idiot fucked up the coordinates (this happens in warfare), etc. Hell maybe somebody else bombed the wedding and counted on everyone to assume it was the drone war (this kind of thing happens in Pakistan).
I can tell even those wedding strikes tend to be fairly low carnage. I was at a wedding on Saturday, and you could have killed dozens with a single grenade on the dance floor, and yet casualties from wedding strikes are almost always limited to one or two cars. Moreover there haven;t been any particularly recently. The last I could find was December of 13.
This makes for attacks that are much easier on the civilian population then normal bombing, because you can skip the night when the girl and her boyfriend are enjoying themselves, but it makes for very stressed out drone pilots.
Why?
Because they know they just made a fairly normal teenage girl a homeless orphan. If they have kids they probably sympathize with the poor guy who is being deceived by his daughter even if his day job is terrorist mastermind.
Fighter pilots and bomber pilots don't actually need to dehumanize the enemy. They simply never bother to learn that enemy is, in fact, human. Those people are lines on a targeting screen that are only occasionally even human shaped (most of the time they're tank-shaped, or house-shaped, because you don't get close enough to see make out details like people). Drone pilots have to do it 24/7.
So you're arguing that it's not going Mach 1 because it's designed to only go Mach.99868593955. Apparently you don't believe in rounding to significant digits. As for typical Jet Speeds, those are below Mach.9, and typically in the Mach 0.8 range. Mach 0.15-0.2 is a pretty significant difference.
Moreover you are talking about a different G-Force measurement then either me or the standard Musk has designed. When taking turns the relevant measure is the lateral G-Force measure, and Coasters don't go too high on that because if they did 6 Gs laterally a 200 lb dude would be exerting 1200 pounds of pressure on the side of their roller-coaster, and it probably can't handle that. They top out at 0.5 Gs lateral. Aircraft don't do a lot of lateral Gs either, partly because they have to go straight really fast or fall from the sky, partly because they have even less structural strength to resist extra pressure on the fuselage, but mostly because people start throwing the fuck up once you break 0.2 lateral. They try to stay below 0.15 laterally unless something has gone horribly wrong.
The whole plan is vintage Musk -- equal parts brilliant engineering, pooh-poohing the standards literally everyone else uses (0.2 Gs laterally is what everything in transportation, except Hyperloop, does), unwarranted financial optimism (his $700 Million tunneling budget won't get him all the way through a single mountain, and Cali has a couple ranges of the damn things), and excellent spin (for example, his planned route technically does not go from LA to San Fran, it goes from 30 miles from LA to the San Francisco Bay, which reduces his costs by roughly 75%, but nobody calls him on it). Given some development the engineering could be very interesting, but you really need a lot of that development.
Current planes are much superior at fighting World War 2, where dogfighting at speed was the norm.
For future wars it's not quite so clear. The last time we engaged in any real dogfights was Vietnam. The Iraqis, who had the planes to dogfight us in the first war, fled to Iran because they figured they'd die of massed missile fire before they got into cannon range.
The theory behind F-35 is that it's virtually impossible to detect, and we have the electronic warfare capabilities to detect anything anyone else actually has. That means that F-35 should be able to fly around at Mach 1.6 with being targeted by the enemy (who don't even know where it is), while firing off it's missiles whenever an enemy aircraft gets into range. It's more a submarine or cloaked starship then a fighter craft. If it works it'll revolutionize aerial warfare and instantly make every Air Force in the world obsolete. Especially the one belonging to Vladimir Putin.
Drone pilots more removed from the action than infantry? Hell yes.
More removed then the rest of the Air Force? Hell no.
The way a drone strike works is a drone loiters on station for weeks on end. During this time the drone's pilots figure out who is in the house when, so they can avoid blowing it up when the local equivalent of the Girl Scouts are in the living room. Which means drone pilots know when their target takes the trash out, whether the teenage daughter has a boyfriend who sneaks in sometimes, etc. This makes for attacks that are much easier on the civilian population then normal bombing, because you can skip the night when the girl and her boyfriend are enjoying themselves, but it makes for very stressed out drone pilots.
OTOH, an F-16 would only be able to loiter on target for a half-hour at a time, and the pilot would be spending his time there focussing on the attack, so he has no fucking idea that the terrorist mastermind he's about to attack has a daughter up to hijinks. He'll drop the bomb, write on his paperwork that the building was totaly destroyed, and dance the Dance of Successful Combat Missions.
Textbook case of disproving a minor point. Whether it's the speed of sound in the air around the tube, or the speed of sound from a table doesn't really change the argument.
My point is that this thing's going significantly faster then anything we let your grandma ride in today, that it's also supposed to make turns in the same radius as a car, all three dimensions (20-100 ft elevation means that you're going up and down relative to the roadbed, which itself goes up and down), etc. It's designed to have a lateral g-force of 0.5 Gs, which is comparable to roller-coasters.
This is not an idea that's likely to actually work without a whole lot more development.
Dude, the document isn't the problem. It's its relation to the real world.
In the real world there is not currently a tunnel through that mountain 20-100 ft in the air above the highway. To get through the mountain they either have to bore a completely new tunnel, 20 ft above the existing tunnel; or they have to bring the Hyperloop down to highway level. Neither is trivial.
Eyeballing the cost of the tunnel, $700 million should be enough to bore a new tunnel through the mountain, but that's about it. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_Tunnel">Eisenhowere Tunnel cost the equivalent of a half-billion$ in today's money. The H-3 in Hawaii cost $80 Million a mile. In 1980s dollars. I included a lot of viaducts and tunneling, and guess which proposal is a 354 mile viaduct interrupted by the occasional tunnel though inconvenient mountains?
And their total cost including developing a totally new mode of transportation, and buying the vehicles, etc. is $16.9 Million a mile for passengers-only, and $20 Million a mile for one wide enough to handle cars.
So I think it'll work eventually. And I think it'll be incredibly cool. But version 1 is not gonna be a 354-mile run in California for peanuts.
The banking thing is interesting, but you totally destroy your credibility with the 3.0 Gs thing.
Hyperloop is not supposed to be a mode of travel grandma can't use. 0.2G is roughly what the competition is doing, and Musk's proposed 0.5 G would actually be comparable to a roller coaster.
This is an idea that'll work great and be near or under cost at scale, but that's because people won't be in it. I am not saying it's a bad idea, or that it's not possible that we'll be zipping our way around on Hyperloops in 2100, but this is a new technology. It's not software. It is pretty much impossible for it to be all three of faster, cheaper, and better without a few more years of aggressive development.
Viaducts never save construction money. The reason is pretty simple: the road-bed you build on the viaduct has to be equivalent of the one you'd build on the dirt, which means the only way to save money is on digging the hole the road-bed would go into. And that's only cheaper if you're in a magical place with easily diggable dirt patches located precisely where you need them.
In the long-term they tend to save money as manageable grades reduce fuel consumption and the need for specialized equipment, but Hyperloop isn't in that phase yet.
See, this sentence is really the reason that I sincerely doubt any of hyperloopies has any clue how much this will cost.
To use the tunnel Hyperloop will have to a) come to the ground (which means that the Hyperloop's vacuum tube is no longer protected from car crashes by being 20 ft above them), and b) convince the government of California to give it a lane through the mountain. Neither is a trivial task. And you're just assuming they'll both happen.
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One of those features is actually the Second engine. Grippen (not intended for Naval use), has one engine. Russia's Su-27-based and Mig-29 designs, and Dassualt Rafelle are twin-engine partly because they're carrier-capable. Eurofighter Typhoon is not, but before the French pulled out carrier capability was on the spec-sheet, so it's also twin-engine.
Fo an aircraft that's supposed to command the entire fucking Pacific you want a second engine because it can't just land on a handy highway if the one engine dies. It has to fly home (or close enough to home that a chopper can save the pilot).
And who has a decent military RADAR Early warning system besides the Russians and Chinese? Hint: they're all our allies.
Moreover who is going to retain said system after the B-2s are done with it? Hint: the answer is nobody.
Iraq had a pretty good air defense system in 1990. It died because nobody bothers buying enough air defense stuff to beat off US Air Force levels of modern, well-piloted, well-armed aircraft. They just don't have the money to buy enough air defense stuff to make a dent in the number of good (and well-piloted and well-armed) airframes $500-$700 Billion a year can throw at them.
As for it's ability to do ground support and light attack missions (B-1, B-52, and B-2 are all going to serve until the 2030s in the Heavy Bomber role, which most air forces no longer have because they can't afford them); the sheer quantity of missions 2400 of the damn things can perform has a quality all it's own.
Damnit, you mentioned the B-2, which is stealth.
So a) only applies to three of the four.
a) None of those are stealth.
b) None of those can fulfill the roles of any of the others.
c) They're all old designs that don't look good on a budget request.
d) Particularly a $1 Trillion request.
So we'll have a very expensive plane that does nothing particularly well, but we'll have a lot of them, and against almost any opponent we're likely to face it will be literally invincible because getting through stealth (even the Gen 1 Stealth of the F-117) is a lot harder then it looks in a Navy white paper.
Against the Russians it wouldn't be one theater. Same with the Chinese. Against almost anyone else we'd have a 10-1 advantage in airframes using only half our F-35s.
I suspect that F-35s could easily keep up the operational tempo of earlier aircraft, but for a lot more money. The USAF has no interest in reducing the number of missions it can fly, but it has plenty of interest in ensuring it's budget for those missions is maximized.
This is the nature of military plans.
You have a plan that you think could work. The enemy also has a plane he thinks could work. Neither side is guaranteed victory in the absence of overwhelming numbers.
I doubt the Chinese plan will work for more then a day, because you can always deconnect the aircraft from it's network and reinstall the software. Which is the reason they are trying to develop some interesting hardware of their own.
The F-16 itself could be out-dog-fought by almost any plane built in the 30s, including many not intended for air-to-air missions, because Biplanes are much more maneuverable then jets. In actual combat it would be much better because it would be fast enough that none of the Biplanes could start a dogfight with an F-16. The Italian Air Force did not realize the major advantage speed gave a plane, so they emphasized maneuverability (and consequent superiority in dogfights) for years after everyone else had decided 350 M,PH was the minimum acceptable speed.
Vulnerability to RADAR is a matter of debate. The side that says they're vulnerable doesn't say they're worthless and we shouldn't buy them, it says that we need to also buy these very nice Growlers that their employer just happens to have ready for production if the money's right.
No money? Are you insane? This is America. If that particular nightmare scenario happened and it risked our boys lives Congress would order the President to buy the damn Growlers tomorow with a special appropriation.
Past due years and massively inflated costs are par for the course in government contracting. As is military conservatism pooh-pooing anything that isn't exactly like the last version with 10% more speed and/or boom. The Abrams Tank, for example, was widely derided as a ridiculous waste of money, easily detectable by the enemy due to the extremely hot exhaust plumes from it's brand new Gas Turbine (instead of Diesel) engine, and unreliable ceramic armor. The Marines refused to upgrade their M60s until the last possible minute. Then the Gulf War happened. Now the biggest reason anybody buys a non-Abrams tank is that they don't have the technology to replace said ceramic armor.
In this case the pilot's testimony should not change your opinion. Everybody knew it sucked at dogfighting already.
Keep in mind that doctrine calls for F-22s to handle dogfights, and we've got 187 of those. That's more F-22s then combat aircraft all but 27 other air-forces, 10 of those are Allies, and the Vietnamese and Ukrainians beat the F-22 by 2 and one plane respectively. So it's not quite as extreme as it was before 'Nam.
If nobody cared about civilians why are we killing less of them then in any previous campaign?
I consider myself a leftist, but one of the things that is simply true about military policy is we don't get it. We run in at the last minute, notice a lot of death happening, and condemn the death as unprecedented Un-American evil without bothering to learn any of the precedents. We spend half our time condemning them for doing things that may or may not be stupid/evil/pointless/etc. (we really don't know), and the other half shoveling money on military retirees. And it's dumb.
But we've got a lot of Professors, so we make it sound smart. To people who can't figure out we're clueless, that is.
That's not a lot of dogfights for an operation involving hundreds of aircraft and 100k sorties. Moreover most of the Coalition aircraft involved are F-15s. The F-15 has been replaced by the F-22, which implies that a doctrine based on having one good dogfighter and everyone else works. F-35 is the everyone else replacement.
And the F-16 is such a terrible design that it only sold 4,500 units to 24 countries. Much worse then the twin-engine F-18 sales of 1,480 to 8 countries.
Moreover it's hard to do twin engine VTOL, and the Marines insisted. They probably should not have been humored (or should have been humored by being allowed to by their own, special, Marine Corps plane), but once that decision was made twin engines went out the window.
Good luck detecting it at 30,000 feet with your eyeballs. Particularly in bad weather.
If the electronic warfare suite they have works like they're planning, then they'll have blown you up before you get into position.
Probably pretty badly for the JSF. F-22 is supposed to be the one doing the dogfighting.
But a) they're only planning on buying 150 (and only 50 by 2020), while we already have 115 and will end up with 2,400+ and b) if the plan works dogfighting is irrelevant.
The thing that sucks about spending $1 Trillion on combat aircraft is it's a fucking lot of money you could have used for any number of other things, but the advantage is that you have a $Trillion worth of combat aircraft. At 16-to-1 odds, with better trained pilots (we typically have several hundred hours on-type, the Russians don;t have that kind of budget), you don't need a bette plane to win.
The civilian to combatant casualty ratio is lower for the drone war then for literally any other method invented.
As a non-pilot I can't tell you why those weddings were picked. I suspect there could be a number of factors -- maybe the target only leaves hiding to go to weddings, maybe the strike was considered important enough to do immediately regardless of the collateral damage, maybe this was the only time three bigwig terrorists were all going to be together, maybe some idiot fucked up the coordinates (this happens in warfare), etc. Hell maybe somebody else bombed the wedding and counted on everyone to assume it was the drone war (this kind of thing happens in Pakistan).
I can tell even those wedding strikes tend to be fairly low carnage. I was at a wedding on Saturday, and you could have killed dozens with a single grenade on the dance floor, and yet casualties from wedding strikes are almost always limited to one or two cars. Moreover there haven;t been any particularly recently. The last I could find was December of 13.
This makes for attacks that are much easier on the civilian population then normal bombing, because you can skip the night when the girl and her boyfriend are enjoying themselves, but it makes for very stressed out drone pilots.
Why?
Because they know they just made a fairly normal teenage girl a homeless orphan. If they have kids they probably sympathize with the poor guy who is being deceived by his daughter even if his day job is terrorist mastermind.
Fighter pilots and bomber pilots don't actually need to dehumanize the enemy. They simply never bother to learn that enemy is, in fact, human. Those people are lines on a targeting screen that are only occasionally even human shaped (most of the time they're tank-shaped, or house-shaped, because you don't get close enough to see make out details like people). Drone pilots have to do it 24/7.
So you're arguing that it's not going Mach 1 because it's designed to only go Mach .99868593955. Apparently you don't believe in rounding to significant digits. As for typical Jet Speeds, those are below Mach .9, and typically in the Mach 0.8 range. Mach 0.15-0.2 is a pretty significant difference.
Moreover you are talking about a different G-Force measurement then either me or the standard Musk has designed. When taking turns the relevant measure is the lateral G-Force measure, and Coasters don't go too high on that because if they did 6 Gs laterally a 200 lb dude would be exerting 1200 pounds of pressure on the side of their roller-coaster, and it probably can't handle that. They top out at 0.5 Gs lateral. Aircraft don't do a lot of lateral Gs either, partly because they have to go straight really fast or fall from the sky, partly because they have even less structural strength to resist extra pressure on the fuselage, but mostly because people start throwing the fuck up once you break 0.2 lateral. They try to stay below 0.15 laterally unless something has gone horribly wrong.
The whole plan is vintage Musk -- equal parts brilliant engineering, pooh-poohing the standards literally everyone else uses (0.2 Gs laterally is what everything in transportation, except Hyperloop, does), unwarranted financial optimism (his $700 Million tunneling budget won't get him all the way through a single mountain, and Cali has a couple ranges of the damn things), and excellent spin (for example, his planned route technically does not go from LA to San Fran, it goes from 30 miles from LA to the San Francisco Bay, which reduces his costs by roughly 75%, but nobody calls him on it). Given some development the engineering could be very interesting, but you really need a lot of that development.
Current planes are much superior at fighting World War 2, where dogfighting at speed was the norm.
For future wars it's not quite so clear. The last time we engaged in any real dogfights was Vietnam. The Iraqis, who had the planes to dogfight us in the first war, fled to Iran because they figured they'd die of massed missile fire before they got into cannon range.
The theory behind F-35 is that it's virtually impossible to detect, and we have the electronic warfare capabilities to detect anything anyone else actually has. That means that F-35 should be able to fly around at Mach 1.6 with being targeted by the enemy (who don't even know where it is), while firing off it's missiles whenever an enemy aircraft gets into range. It's more a submarine or cloaked starship then a fighter craft. If it works it'll revolutionize aerial warfare and instantly make every Air Force in the world obsolete. Especially the one belonging to Vladimir Putin.
Drone pilots more removed from the action than infantry? Hell yes.
More removed then the rest of the Air Force? Hell no.
The way a drone strike works is a drone loiters on station for weeks on end. During this time the drone's pilots figure out who is in the house when, so they can avoid blowing it up when the local equivalent of the Girl Scouts are in the living room. Which means drone pilots know when their target takes the trash out, whether the teenage daughter has a boyfriend who sneaks in sometimes, etc. This makes for attacks that are much easier on the civilian population then normal bombing, because you can skip the night when the girl and her boyfriend are enjoying themselves, but it makes for very stressed out drone pilots.
OTOH, an F-16 would only be able to loiter on target for a half-hour at a time, and the pilot would be spending his time there focussing on the attack, so he has no fucking idea that the terrorist mastermind he's about to attack has a daughter up to hijinks. He'll drop the bomb, write on his paperwork that the building was totaly destroyed, and dance the Dance of Successful Combat Missions.
Textbook case of disproving a minor point. Whether it's the speed of sound in the air around the tube, or the speed of sound from a table doesn't really change the argument.
My point is that this thing's going significantly faster then anything we let your grandma ride in today, that it's also supposed to make turns in the same radius as a car, all three dimensions (20-100 ft elevation means that you're going up and down relative to the roadbed, which itself goes up and down), etc. It's designed to have a lateral g-force of 0.5 Gs, which is comparable to roller-coasters.
This is not an idea that's likely to actually work without a whole lot more development.
Dude, the document isn't the problem. It's its relation to the real world.
In the real world there is not currently a tunnel through that mountain 20-100 ft in the air above the highway. To get through the mountain they either have to bore a completely new tunnel, 20 ft above the existing tunnel; or they have to bring the Hyperloop down to highway level. Neither is trivial.
Eyeballing the cost of the tunnel, $700 million should be enough to bore a new tunnel through the mountain, but that's about it. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_Tunnel">Eisenhowere Tunnel cost the equivalent of a half-billion$ in today's money. The H-3 in Hawaii cost $80 Million a mile. In 1980s dollars. I included a lot of viaducts and tunneling, and guess which proposal is a 354 mile viaduct interrupted by the occasional tunnel though inconvenient mountains?
And their total cost including developing a totally new mode of transportation, and buying the vehicles, etc. is $16.9 Million a mile for passengers-only, and $20 Million a mile for one wide enough to handle cars.
So I think it'll work eventually. And I think it'll be incredibly cool. But version 1 is not gonna be a 354-mile run in California for peanuts.
The banking thing is interesting, but you totally destroy your credibility with the 3.0 Gs thing.
Hyperloop is not supposed to be a mode of travel grandma can't use. 0.2G is roughly what the competition is doing, and Musk's proposed 0.5 G would actually be comparable to a roller coaster.
This is an idea that'll work great and be near or under cost at scale, but that's because people won't be in it. I am not saying it's a bad idea, or that it's not possible that we'll be zipping our way around on Hyperloops in 2100, but this is a new technology. It's not software. It is pretty much impossible for it to be all three of faster, cheaper, and better without a few more years of aggressive development.
Viaducts never save construction money. The reason is pretty simple: the road-bed you build on the viaduct has to be equivalent of the one you'd build on the dirt, which means the only way to save money is on digging the hole the road-bed would go into. And that's only cheaper if you're in a magical place with easily diggable dirt patches located precisely where you need them.
In the long-term they tend to save money as manageable grades reduce fuel consumption and the need for specialized equipment, but Hyperloop isn't in that phase yet.
See, this sentence is really the reason that I sincerely doubt any of hyperloopies has any clue how much this will cost.
To use the tunnel Hyperloop will have to a) come to the ground (which means that the Hyperloop's vacuum tube is no longer protected from car crashes by being 20 ft above them), and b) convince the government of California to give it a lane through the mountain. Neither is a trivial task. And you're just assuming they'll both happen.
For free.