I thought that the "embryo development parallels/replays evolution" thing was a myth? So the anus forming first in the embryo has nothing to do with when it first evolved.
(This shouldn't be confused with studying similarities in embryo development to infer evolutionary relationships.)
I'm not even sure that you understand what welding is, let alone orbital welding. There is no "seal". It's a uniform piece of metal. The metal is literally melted by welding, and rehardens into a single piece. Basic carbon steel doesn't weaken from welding (like, say, T6 aluminum does), it can actually get stronger. An orbital pipe welder is an automatic piece of hardware that circles a piece of pipe on its own, connecting two segments; it leaves a perfect, identical, machine-precision weld every time.
As I recall, Thunderf00t calculated that an effective one-piece pipe like you're describing would expand and contract lengthwise, under normal California temperature differences, by several hundred meters over the course of its 300+ mile stretch. Do you have different figures for that calculated expansion? I guess that's not utterly unworkable in principle, but I do wonder what that terminal is going to look like.
No, it's not directly supported by the ground, its supported on the towers by a multiaxis isolation system, which also allows it to shift via thermal expansion / contraction. A big advantage over HSR, which suffers from serious problems with ground shifting under the rails, particularly in earthquakes.
Hmm. I had not encountered that before. It's not just a matter of "read the paper", you see. One has to actually go and figure out if these alleged solutions are feasible and reasonably cheap and if so, why they can't be used in non-vacuum tube rail solutions. This is a particularly important point when people discuss compressorless, maglev bearing variants of the hyperloop immediately after claiming that the hyperloop would be much cheaper than maglev. Given your original post, we might be in agreement about that point but I would have similar questions about the weight differences and these 'multiaxis isolational systems'.
I admit my enthusiasm here for an in-depth slog of that sort is sapped due to the dogmatic attitude of most hyperloop fans I've encountered. The payoff in doing the research (above and beyond just reading Musk's claims in the paper) is thus kinda low. It's easier to just wait 10 years while they figure it out on their own.
But still, sloth is no excuse. If you're correct in everything that you're saying then I'll concede that I can't refute it at this time.
I don't believe you, nobody who is watching believes you, and deep down...you don't believe you, either.
I've already repeatedly given him credit for Tesla, and Autopilot specifically. And I've given him credit for the business success that came from creating a company that is less fucked up than NASA. Why wouldn't I also give him credit for inventing a new fuel, if I found out he had done such a thing?
Just wanted to underline how little you're paying attention here, apparently because you're still obsessed with defending someone instead of objectively looking at the facts.
Was especially effective at what? Decreasing cost per pound? I thought we weren't talking about cost.
Everything connects back to cost one way or another. Congratulations for your assault on the English language; I admit that I did not cram in every possible disclaimer adjective to prevent a ridiculously overly-literal interpretation, especially in the presence of so many clarifying sentences referring to Musk's business acumen and the inefficiencies in NASA.
So: by "cost", I was obviously referring to business / infrastructure / standard practices cost reductions. Cost reductions achieved through technological breakthrough obviously count as technological progress.
Incidentally, the cost reduction here is secondary to (IIRC) an increase in thrust offered by aluminum-fueled solid rocket boosters.
"no TRUE innovation is based on cost cutting". The personal computer was also mostly about cost-cutting, I guess that wasn't an innovation.
If it involves new technology it's a tech innovation. If it doesn't, then it isn't.
Similarly, formulating a more cost-effective liquid oxidizer that no one has successfully used before would be both technological development and cost cutting. Simply filling up the LOX later in the countdown stage (as SpaceX does, from my understanding), running those minor risks in order to save a few short term bucks from the reduced boil-off, cannot be reasonably termed technological progress.
Also, "soft landing under rocket power" cannot be reasonably termed technological progress unless/until he's managed to do something significantly different/better with it. Because it's not a new idea and it's been done before and hell, you've already said he isn't gaining anything useful out of it yet.
you don't care if you're wrong.
I was wrong to assume you would attempt an intelligent and good-faith interpretation of the word "cost" in the presence of so much obvious context referring to bureaucratic inefficiencies and Musk's business successes.
The joints in Hyperloop Alpha are just standard orbital welded, like water pipe and oil pipe.
Using the present tense does not a persuasive argument make. Those joints remain completely airtight even with a pressure differential of nearly 1 atm? Thermal expansion under the California sun doesn't weaken or break that airtight seal? Mild earthquakes doesn't weaken or break it? The absorbed force of a 600 MPH capsule weighing lord knows how many pounds going around a curve isn't going to weaken it?
Are you sure it isn't bigly low? Tremendously low, even?
>10X lower than previous NASA
Citation needed. And remember, the conversation is about TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION not cost cutting. You're the one who insisted Musk was a "tech visionary".
strawman
Why am I not surprised you don't understand what a strawman is?
Landing rockets allows them to be re-used
It's a good thing no one has thought of this before.
The Space Shuttle, incidentally, was not cheaper than disposable alternatives.
It hasn't been reflected in that cost yet because we're talking about a new technology here.
Viking spacecraft landed on *on another planet* using rockets over 40 years ago They switched to the airbag rolling system for later missions because it was--wait for it--cheaper.
What else do you think Musk invented? I'm genuinely curious.
You literally picked the easiest possible invention to debunk. Did they invent aluminum? Nope. Did they invent rockets? Nope. How about solid fuel rockets? Nope. Were they the first ones to notice that Aluminum has a high energy density? Nope.
I'm not even sure what you're arguing about any more. American scientists discovered that the mixture was especially effective, when previously there was no such knowledge. The Russians figured it out independently a little later, as I recall. This is an example of a significant, if incremental, discovery and improvement. Of the sort that SpaceX is NOT engaged in, to my knowledge.
What the hell is your counter-argument here? Arguing that it's not a real discovery is taking the exact opposite position as the one you appeared to have.
. If Aluminum didn't exist as a solid booster fuel and then Elon Musk tweeted about it, you would be among those lining up with pitchforks claiming that he's a sleazy snake-oil salesmen taking credit for other peoples' inventions.
You're all over the place here. A snake-oil salesman is someone who has an ineffective product. This is clearly mutually exclusive with stealing a product that actually does work.
If Musk found a new fuel mixture that offered significantly improved thrust, specific impulse or cost-effectiveness, I would be the first to give him credit. Even if he didn't discover it but rather refined or popularized it or proved it was workable where previously there was skepticism, that would still be a pretty big win.
You don't like Elon Musk,
I like Musk and I like Jobs for that matter. I cannot stand the fan club of either, and as human beings they've both done a bunch of dumb shit that people don't want to allow you to mention.
You are, however, boring.
No, haven't you been watching the news? Musk is the one who's boring. Or he's not boring, in which case he's definitely not "very serious", as you described him.
I don't wish to be cured of my sanity or learn to de-value facts and basic reason, thanks. One brief look around shows a hundred people like you, unwilling and unable to debate these simplest of points, but eager enough to mod down any reasonable examination of the hyperloop.
It was a joke or half-joke. Astroturfing is a regular fact of life, not a conspiracy theory, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if there aren't some Tesla or SpaceX folks around here (along with Microsoft, Apple, etc.) Serious contracted full-time astroturfing, probably not. BizX being a subsidiary of SpaceX, obviously not.
But this is the serious context around that joke: People can regularly trash RMS, Linus, even Jobs around these parts and stand a reasonable chance of being modded up, but you can't make a perfectly reasonable list of Musk's flaws without being modded to oblivion by people who are too smug and too cowardly to actually debate you.
Well, they cut the cost of a launch by a factor of 10
Doesn't matter. Per-kilo cost is the only thing that matters. Also, would need to see run the numbers taking into account all of their accidents (and we may not have enough data points yet) to see if that cost savings really holds up.
And even if they had achieved a significant cost savings, that doesn't mean it's a tech revolution. NASA is an expensive, overbuilt pile of shit, full of parasites who are politicians, not scientists. Anyone who is paying attention has known this for 30 years now. If you can't understand why it doesn't take a "tech visionary" to trim some fat from the bloated corpse of a failed government agency...
I guess that doesn't qualify.
Nope. I don't care about landing a rocket on a barge vs. runway shuttle landing vs. splashdown and neither should you. Total cost per kilo is all that matters, and I am referring only to cost savings caused by Musk being a "tech visionary", not the savings caused by his not-being-a-bureaucratic-POS-like-NASA.
Let's try a thought experiment, name a single thing that you consider a "new technology".
American scientists' discovery and refinement of aluminum-based solid rocket booster fuels. That took me less than 5 seconds to remember and type. I'm sure if one were to go digging on Wikipedia there would be two hundred more obvious examples.[1]
you don't understand what technology is. I mean that sincerely. You have no fucking clue.
If you had any argument or retort whatsoever, you could provide it. If you had a single example of SpaceX's massively cost-saving technology, you would surely mock me with it. But you don't. So here's one for free: "putting the LOX in the rocket at the very last second to reduce boil-off." But... say! That's not really a "technology", is it? It's a minor corner-cutting, cost-saving gimmick, and it's a slightly dangerous one at that. It's one that may well be more expensive in the long run due to a raised risk of accident.
Having business acumen, be it short term or long term, real or imagined, is not the same thing as being a "tech visionary"
You don't care about being wrong.
Oh, but I do. Which is precisely why I didn't brainlessly jump on the Musk fanboy wagon, because that would lead me to saying a lot of wrong stuff.
And the people I do tend to admire, like (for instance) Sam Harris, I am not afraid to criticize relentlessly.
You care only about shitting on people you don't like.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of adult literacy courses available across the nation. I suggest that you take advantage of them. I've repeatedly said that I don't think Musk is a bad person; it's just overrated. His actual accomplishments are being vastly overstated, and his proposed future projects are being taken far too seriously.
1. That said, there aren't any major cost saving spaceflight technologies in the foreseeable future unless the EM drive actually pans out, but that still won't get you out of the atmosphere. Cheap spaceflight is obviously a pipe dream. Other areas, like general AI and electric vehicles and biotech and nanotech, are much more promising. My major criticism of Muskites is they are tilting at windmills and setting themselves up for failure.
The so-called civilized world could learn a lot from Japan's immigration policies.
Wow.
You do realize that Japan's "immigration policy" is based on cultural and racial purity. If you are not ethnically Japanese, you cannot ever become a citizen.
There are some "green card" equivalents of course, but as I recall there are serious impediments to owning property as a non-citizen in Japan. And I'm fairly sure that America and (especially in recent years) Europe take in more refugees.
This is what's great about the shinkansen. Of course, it actually takes longer AND COSTS MORE for most trips, but the fact that you can just show up at the station on the day of your trip, buy a ticket from a kiosk a few minutes before the train arrives, and hop on board with no security screening at all, makes it very nice indeed.
Another *wow*. Do you realize how vanishingly small the percentage of people is that are willing to pay more for a slower ride, just to avoid security? Even as a rich person's toy that's pretty abysmal, though I assume dining cars and such might help ameliorate that a bit.
But that lack of security, of course, has very little to do with the tech itself.
I did read your post, I just don't find your reasoning as convincing as you do. Appearing in science fiction doesn't really count as "thinking" from an engineering standpoint. I'm only counting actual engineering work.
*Are* they actually including jet engines and air bearings in this competition? That's kinda interesting. I mean, I'm still not going to read it, for the same reason that I'm not going to read about a contest to build tabletop thermal reactors in anticipation of a 100 billion dollar mega-scale geothermal plant in Yellowstone. I only have a limited number of minutes in the day. I find that disabusing people on the internet of nonsense to be somewhat stimulating, while reading about colossal wastes of time and money and enthusiasm to be depressing... doubly so when it's based on the hero worship of an individual as overrated (not horrible or talentless, just overrated) as Musk.
But if the other poster in this thread was right OR if the Reddit guy was right and the hyperloop focus is now on maglev in a vacuum tube... I think you must concede I have a bit of a point, yes? *If* maglev could be made cheap enough for hyperloop to be economical, it should be even more economical if we can simply leave out the bit where we need a huge sturdy pipe with custom airtight joints and various safety features. There's no plausible way that maglev could be far too expensive and maglev-based hyperloop be economical, yes?
You're projecting. I cram my posts full of disclaimers about what I think is and isn't important, but anything that isn't fawning all over Musk 100% is modded to oblivion around here.
People take Elon Musk seriously because he is, frankly, a pretty fucking serious guy.
He made his millions off of Paypal, a company that basically got lucky when they realized the government wasn't going to shut them down for offering banking services without normal banking rules. Their early business decisions were all over the place and the people who started it (not Musk, although he chose to associate with them) didn't even understand how credit card chargebacks worked. I cannot think of a *less* serious or tech-visionary place to begin than Paypal. But wait, it gets worse! He was their CEO until he was fired for refusing to back down on his plan to abandon their existing *nix infrastructure and migrate entirely to Windows. Wow, what a vision that must have been! It's a real pity he never got a chance to attempt it; it might have slowed down Paypal's rocket to ascendancy.
Mars colony rambles are pretty goddamn dumb and non-serious. The sticking point for a Mars colony is NOT the rocket it takes to get there, unless you have some revolutionary tech that makes rockets orders of magnitude cheaper. Which SpaceX most definitely does not have. If he were serious about Mars he'd probably be completely focused on biotech.
Digging a tunnel from the airport to his company is pretty goddamn non-serious, or at least (if he is actually serious) enormously dumb and self-absorbed.
Telsa is good, but they started out building rich people toys and they haven't strayed very far from that niche. They didn't make nearly as much impact as hybrids from regular car companies did (starting with the Prius), and they certainly won't be the ones to make electrical vehicles overtake ICE. They do have the potential to be important pioneers with Autopilot, though.
SpaceX is pretty important.
Only to the extent that NASA is a piece of crap (partially because we didn't listen to Feynman, partially because we keep slashing its budget.) SpaceX has not, to my knowledge, come up with revolutionary new technologies. They've tinkered with a few cost cutting tricks, and they were in the right place at the right time to land some important government contracts and snap up laid-off NASA talent. Good for them.
I mean, I quite like a few of Razer's products, but I don't pretend that they invented or significantly innovated with keyboards or optical mice. And I don't confuse marketing with invention.
Gigafactory
An American factory? Meh. Unlikely to be as cost-effective outsourced factories. Wake me up when they have facilities to produce nanowire or other next-gen batteries. I've been hearing about nanowire batteries for almost as long as Paypal has been successful. Why isn't he holding press conferences and competitions there?
Mightn't it have something to do with the fact that Tesla is a LUXURY car company and thus there isn't any big incentive for him to open the door for electric cars to become a low-cost, widely available thing?
Or maybe he just isn't quite as serious, overall, as you think he is.
SolarCity is a good idea.
Yes, I forgot about Solarcity, the first company that ever specialized in solar power.
I'm not saying the guy does pointless stuff. He's just not *that* special. I mean, people don't tend to claim that Bill Gates *invented* (or even revolutionized) charities in Africa.
You say the hyperloop is silly because of track costs.
I didn't actually say that. I was responding to someone else who said that. That is merely one of the reasons why it's silly, although it is a big one.
I was really disappointed when I found out Star Trek ripped off that scene from 1984 and made it about simple, ordinary torture instead of a totalitarian nightmare.
Do you live in the UK? Remind me... isn't that the country with all of the CCTVs? The one that's trying to collect and bank DNA evidence on everyone every chance they get? The one that routinely tries to ban people with unpopular opinions from setting foot in the country? The one with the ASBOs? The one without a right to remain silent[1] without it being held against you? The one that is banning all "deviant" pornography, including any image or video showing any female orgasm that looks a bit too moist? The one that has made it flatly illegal to refuse to provide your password to the police/courts?
Please. If you want to criticize the American government's attitude towards privacy and individual liberty, you should first try moving to a country that didn't regard 1984 as a goddamn instruction manual. Our healthcare system may be a fucking joke, but privacy rights are still a hundred times better over here even if this order stands.
(if you live in AU or somewhere else, please let me know so I can adjust this rant accordingly.)
You can build anything cheaper if you make a lot of them, and even cheaper if you don't build in factories not on site.
There's obviously a floor on how far economies of scale will get you, and *particularly* heavy things that have to be structurally sound for safety reasons.
This is why there isn't a $5000 (or indeed $500) car that's street legal in America. The demand and the volume are obviously there. Or let's not even get that complicated: someone else in this thread quoted $4M-$10M per mile for highway construction. Surely there's tons of incentives to get *that* price down, eh? I mean, it's just a hard, smooth surface on stable ground! You can't get simpler requirements or higher demand than that.
Pylons and otherwise identical pieces MIGHT drive the costs down to the point where this is economic.
No, no it won't be. And that's ok. There's a ton of other feasible revolutionary ideas out there. Self-driving electric cars with durable nanowire batteries will be completely revolutionary, but Musk is (comparatively speaking) halfassing the promotion of this much, much more realistic dream. Good nanowire batteries alone are complete game-changer, allowing the rest of the electric motor-building world to "beat a path to your door" in addition to small scale solar panel companies (for people wanting to build and live off-grid) and mobile electronic applications. I'd much, much rather have a sub-$10,000 car that runs for less than $1.50/gallon equivalent and lasts for a million miles without major servicing than have a land-based version of the Concorde, but that dream future isn't Musk's (or the luxury car maker Tesla's) top priority.
Well, that's a tall order, given that people have been noodling about maglev for decades, and working systems have even been built. People have been brainstorming; we're at the stage of needing more practical experience as grist for the brainstorming mill.
We know that maglev physically works, it just doesn't work economically yet.
*Sigh*. Maybe you could re-read the post you just replied to? In summary:
1. People have been thinking about vacuum trains for over a hundred years.
2. This competition (along with some other specific hyperloop proposals) *is* maglev. Maglev plus a vacuum tube. So if maglev is too expensive, pretty sure this isn't going to be any cheaper.
The forms of hyperloop that aren't maglev (and thus aren't represented in this contest) rely, from my understanding, on a jet engine in addition to a linear electric motor. I have a few doubts here about the economic savings being very compelling.
Syre, Hyperloop sounds ridiculous. But when you look closer at it... well, I grant you it still sounds ridiculous. But less ridiculous. And that makes it interesting.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in the world. The EM drive is interesting. The extraction of gold from seawater is interesting. Mass produced and aligned graphine that's 100x the strength is steel, self-healing in the presence of CO2 and transparent is interesting. Mass produced carbon nanotubes are interesting. A giant geothermal power station in Yellowstone is interesting. We should think about this stuff from time to time, sure. Absolutely.
The difference with Musk's ideas are people take them really, really seriously, inspiring immediate action and investment, even when they're pretty clearly not economically feasible. And it's rather depressing. Geeks need better heroes than this, and better projects to dream about. The most important thing Musk has done is Tesla, and specifically Autopilot, but if he would only spend 1/10th as much time talking about nanowire batteries as he did hyperloops and Mars colonies...
It's just an expensive investment in physical plant with a long payoff period. It may takes years, even decades, but it's not like people are going to stop using this new-fangled thing called the Internet.
I want Comcast to die too, but if the free market is going to kill it then the people doing the investing have to be convinced that the payoff (adjusted for risk) is worth more than other projects they could invest in.
You can't ever say "eventually you'll make it back" and expect that to be a compelling argument. I mean, if it rate of return fails to keep up with AAA debt, it's an objectively stupid investment. And if the rate of return fails to keep up with inflation, it's an objectively losing investment.
The stock price of Tesla Motors is a fine example. Here we have a company investing hugely in physical plant, and Wall Street has no idea what to do with it, so the value of TSLA fluctuates by 50% of its value, all the time. So-called "financial analysts" don't even know how to talk about it. It doesn't fit into their neat little boxes.
(And there's a job that's just ripe for automation. It wouldn't even take a sophisticated neural net. 90% of the financial "analysts" in the world could be replaced by some templates and a bucket of Markov chains, driven by a small shell script.)
No, the rational long-term valuations of Tesla (which are masked by a hell of a lot of noise, yes) are driven by things that expert systems can't grasp, namely the plausibility of electric dominating, the timeline of that domination, and whether Tesla will remain near the top or be overtaken and eclipsed by ICE car competitors switching to electric. And the people who've done serious research and calculations on these things tend not to talk all about it in WSJ interviews.
Without the rational long term valuations and long term investors, IPOs don't succeed and the short term investors and algorithm traders don't have any wave of genuine long term growth interest that they can try to predict and make money off of. (And without the short term traders, liquidity plummets, ultimately hurting the IPOs a lot.)
I'm actually surprised anything is being done with something the was pretty much dismissed as vaporware.
From what I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if Musk accidentally blew his entire hyperloop budget on web astroturfers. Or perhaps BizX is simply a subsidiary of SpaceX. Regardless, it's 5:1 odds that any criticism of Musk or the hyperloop will be modded down.
You know, if you want to discredit me you might try NOT modding it troll within 2 minutes.
The Hyperloop concept could be found in a physics text book circa 1990 (or earlier)
It's closer to the 1890s than 1990s. Vacuum tube trains are a very old idea. Sticking a jet engine on the front of the thing and making some use of a small remnant air pressure is a newer concept, but that has nothing to do with this competition, which (as someone else has already noted) is just maglev in a vacuum tube.
What is required is an X-Prize style competition for building the Hyperloop track as the cost of the rolling stock is likely to pale into insignificance.
Good luck with that. SpaceX is a successful company (in no small part because NASA has had all kinds of internal and external problems), but it's not like the X-Prize competition magically made spaceflight an order of magnitude cheaper or something. The challenges surrounding a 300 mile long length of pipe with airtight joints that can resist expansion and moderate seismic forces, elevated on pylons (that preferably should be sturdy enough to survive a hit from a tractor-trailer), seem similarly resistant to revolutionary cost reductions.
We could completely ditch the idea of going down the interstate median to perhaps save the money spent on pylons, but at that point it's probably more worthwhile/realistic to brainstorm to see if we can build a cheaper maglev track.
I'm a big fan of the proposal laid out in the Hyperloop Alpha document. But these maglev vactrains in the "competition" have nothing interesting about them by comparison to the Hyperloop Alpha low pressure ground-effect train system. They throw the advantages of Alpha out the window, in favour of age-old concepts with economic problems (maintaining a hard vacuum, cost of maglev track vs. plain pipe, etc) that have similarly been known about for ages.
Pssshhh, you're obviously just a one of those haters who doesn't want to admit that Musk is the most revolutionary innovator in the world today. You're like those guys over at Paypal who fired him as CEO because he wouldn't back down from his brilliant plan to move all of their *nix servers to Windows; you just can't handle his vision.
cost of maglev track vs. plain pipe
...
What 'plain pipe' were you thinking of, exactly? Plain joints, too?
I'm actually surprised anything is being done with something the was pretty much dismissed as vaporware.
From what I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if Musk accidentally blew his entire hyperloop budget on web astroturfers. Or perhaps BizX is simply a subsidiary of SpaceX. Regardless, it's 5:1 odds that any criticism of Musk or the hyperloop will be modded down.
First, install uMatrix in Firefox which will, under certain conditions, disallow a web page to load if it determines there is something malicious or off about the page. It is not foolproof, but it's a good line of defense.
Anyone interested in uMatrix should start with uBlock Origins if they haven't already. The former can do more fine-grained blocking but the latter is easier to use and although there is some overlap, it does some important things that uMatrix doesn't (particularly the "graylist" option, instead of just whitelist/blacklist.) You can subscribe to the same security blocklists that you can with uMatrix, in addition to using the same adblocking lists that ABP uses.
It's worth noting that with uBlock Origins (and uMatrix too? I still haven't gotten around to tinkering with it) doesn't silently deny page loads if it thinks it's a security risk. Instead, it very helpfully presents a full-page dialog telling you that the page is currently blocked and giving you the option to temporarily (or permanently) unblock the page with just a click or two.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that the "embryo development parallels/replays evolution" thing was a myth? So the anus forming first in the embryo has nothing to do with when it first evolved.
(This shouldn't be confused with studying similarities in embryo development to infer evolutionary relationships.)
I'm not even sure that you understand what welding is, let alone orbital welding. There is no "seal". It's a uniform piece of metal. The metal is literally melted by welding, and rehardens into a single piece. Basic carbon steel doesn't weaken from welding (like, say, T6 aluminum does), it can actually get stronger. An orbital pipe welder is an automatic piece of hardware that circles a piece of pipe on its own, connecting two segments; it leaves a perfect, identical, machine-precision weld every time.
As I recall, Thunderf00t calculated that an effective one-piece pipe like you're describing would expand and contract lengthwise, under normal California temperature differences, by several hundred meters over the course of its 300+ mile stretch. Do you have different figures for that calculated expansion? I guess that's not utterly unworkable in principle, but I do wonder what that terminal is going to look like.
No, it's not directly supported by the ground, its supported on the towers by a multiaxis isolation system, which also allows it to shift via thermal expansion / contraction. A big advantage over HSR, which suffers from serious problems with ground shifting under the rails, particularly in earthquakes.
Hmm. I had not encountered that before. It's not just a matter of "read the paper", you see. One has to actually go and figure out if these alleged solutions are feasible and reasonably cheap and if so, why they can't be used in non-vacuum tube rail solutions. This is a particularly important point when people discuss compressorless, maglev bearing variants of the hyperloop immediately after claiming that the hyperloop would be much cheaper than maglev. Given your original post, we might be in agreement about that point but I would have similar questions about the weight differences and these 'multiaxis isolational systems'.
I admit my enthusiasm here for an in-depth slog of that sort is sapped due to the dogmatic attitude of most hyperloop fans I've encountered. The payoff in doing the research (above and beyond just reading Musk's claims in the paper) is thus kinda low. It's easier to just wait 10 years while they figure it out on their own.
But still, sloth is no excuse. If you're correct in everything that you're saying then I'll concede that I can't refute it at this time.
I don't believe you, nobody who is watching believes you, and deep down...you don't believe you, either.
I've already repeatedly given him credit for Tesla, and Autopilot specifically. And I've given him credit for the business success that came from creating a company that is less fucked up than NASA. Why wouldn't I also give him credit for inventing a new fuel, if I found out he had done such a thing?
Just wanted to underline how little you're paying attention here, apparently because you're still obsessed with defending someone instead of objectively looking at the facts.
Was especially effective at what? Decreasing cost per pound? I thought we weren't talking about cost.
Everything connects back to cost one way or another. Congratulations for your assault on the English language; I admit that I did not cram in every possible disclaimer adjective to prevent a ridiculously overly-literal interpretation, especially in the presence of so many clarifying sentences referring to Musk's business acumen and the inefficiencies in NASA.
So: by "cost", I was obviously referring to business / infrastructure / standard practices cost reductions. Cost reductions achieved through technological breakthrough obviously count as technological progress.
Incidentally, the cost reduction here is secondary to (IIRC) an increase in thrust offered by aluminum-fueled solid rocket boosters.
"no TRUE innovation is based on cost cutting". The personal computer was also mostly about cost-cutting, I guess that wasn't an innovation.
If it involves new technology it's a tech innovation. If it doesn't, then it isn't.
Similarly, formulating a more cost-effective liquid oxidizer that no one has successfully used before would be both technological development and cost cutting. Simply filling up the LOX later in the countdown stage (as SpaceX does, from my understanding), running those minor risks in order to save a few short term bucks from the reduced boil-off, cannot be reasonably termed technological progress.
Also, "soft landing under rocket power" cannot be reasonably termed technological progress unless/until he's managed to do something significantly different/better with it. Because it's not a new idea and it's been done before and hell, you've already said he isn't gaining anything useful out of it yet.
you don't care if you're wrong.
I was wrong to assume you would attempt an intelligent and good-faith interpretation of the word "cost" in the presence of so much obvious context referring to bureaucratic inefficiencies and Musk's business successes.
The joints in Hyperloop Alpha are just standard orbital welded, like water pipe and oil pipe.
Using the present tense does not a persuasive argument make. Those joints remain completely airtight even with a pressure differential of nearly 1 atm? Thermal expansion under the California sun doesn't weaken or break that airtight seal? Mild earthquakes doesn't weaken or break it? The absorbed force of a 600 MPH capsule weighing lord knows how many pounds going around a curve isn't going to weaken it?
SpaceX has a very low cost per kg into space.
Are you sure it isn't bigly low? Tremendously low, even?
>10X lower than previous NASA
Citation needed. And remember, the conversation is about TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION not cost cutting. You're the one who insisted Musk was a "tech visionary".
strawman
Why am I not surprised you don't understand what a strawman is?
Landing rockets allows them to be re-used
It's a good thing no one has thought of this before.
The Space Shuttle, incidentally, was not cheaper than disposable alternatives.
It hasn't been reflected in that cost yet because we're talking about a new technology here.
Viking spacecraft landed on *on another planet* using rockets over 40 years ago They switched to the airbag rolling system for later missions because it was--wait for it--cheaper.
What else do you think Musk invented? I'm genuinely curious.
You literally picked the easiest possible invention to debunk. Did they invent aluminum? Nope. Did they invent rockets? Nope. How about solid fuel rockets? Nope. Were they the first ones to notice that Aluminum has a high energy density? Nope.
I'm not even sure what you're arguing about any more. American scientists discovered that the mixture was especially effective, when previously there was no such knowledge. The Russians figured it out independently a little later, as I recall. This is an example of a significant, if incremental, discovery and improvement. Of the sort that SpaceX is NOT engaged in, to my knowledge.
What the hell is your counter-argument here? Arguing that it's not a real discovery is taking the exact opposite position as the one you appeared to have.
. If Aluminum didn't exist as a solid booster fuel and then Elon Musk tweeted about it, you would be among those lining up with pitchforks claiming that he's a sleazy snake-oil salesmen taking credit for other peoples' inventions.
You're all over the place here. A snake-oil salesman is someone who has an ineffective product. This is clearly mutually exclusive with stealing a product that actually does work.
If Musk found a new fuel mixture that offered significantly improved thrust, specific impulse or cost-effectiveness, I would be the first to give him credit. Even if he didn't discover it but rather refined or popularized it or proved it was workable where previously there was skepticism, that would still be a pretty big win.
You don't like Elon Musk,
I like Musk and I like Jobs for that matter. I cannot stand the fan club of either, and as human beings they've both done a bunch of dumb shit that people don't want to allow you to mention.
You are, however, boring.
No, haven't you been watching the news? Musk is the one who's boring. Or he's not boring, in which case he's definitely not "very serious", as you described him.
I don't wish to be cured of my sanity or learn to de-value facts and basic reason, thanks. One brief look around shows a hundred people like you, unwilling and unable to debate these simplest of points, but eager enough to mod down any reasonable examination of the hyperloop.
It was a joke or half-joke. Astroturfing is a regular fact of life, not a conspiracy theory, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if there aren't some Tesla or SpaceX folks around here (along with Microsoft, Apple, etc.) Serious contracted full-time astroturfing, probably not. BizX being a subsidiary of SpaceX, obviously not.
But this is the serious context around that joke: People can regularly trash RMS, Linus, even Jobs around these parts and stand a reasonable chance of being modded up, but you can't make a perfectly reasonable list of Musk's flaws without being modded to oblivion by people who are too smug and too cowardly to actually debate you.
Well, they cut the cost of a launch by a factor of 10
Doesn't matter. Per-kilo cost is the only thing that matters. Also, would need to see run the numbers taking into account all of their accidents (and we may not have enough data points yet) to see if that cost savings really holds up.
And even if they had achieved a significant cost savings, that doesn't mean it's a tech revolution. NASA is an expensive, overbuilt pile of shit, full of parasites who are politicians, not scientists. Anyone who is paying attention has known this for 30 years now. If you can't understand why it doesn't take a "tech visionary" to trim some fat from the bloated corpse of a failed government agency...
I guess that doesn't qualify.
Nope. I don't care about landing a rocket on a barge vs. runway shuttle landing vs. splashdown and neither should you. Total cost per kilo is all that matters, and I am referring only to cost savings caused by Musk being a "tech visionary", not the savings caused by his not-being-a-bureaucratic-POS-like-NASA.
Let's try a thought experiment, name a single thing that you consider a "new technology".
American scientists' discovery and refinement of aluminum-based solid rocket booster fuels. That took me less than 5 seconds to remember and type. I'm sure if one were to go digging on Wikipedia there would be two hundred more obvious examples.[1]
you don't understand what technology is. I mean that sincerely. You have no fucking clue.
If you had any argument or retort whatsoever, you could provide it. If you had a single example of SpaceX's massively cost-saving technology, you would surely mock me with it. But you don't. So here's one for free: "putting the LOX in the rocket at the very last second to reduce boil-off." But... say! That's not really a "technology", is it? It's a minor corner-cutting, cost-saving gimmick, and it's a slightly dangerous one at that. It's one that may well be more expensive in the long run due to a raised risk of accident.
Having business acumen, be it short term or long term, real or imagined, is not the same thing as being a "tech visionary"
You don't care about being wrong.
Oh, but I do. Which is precisely why I didn't brainlessly jump on the Musk fanboy wagon, because that would lead me to saying a lot of wrong stuff.
And the people I do tend to admire, like (for instance) Sam Harris, I am not afraid to criticize relentlessly.
You care only about shitting on people you don't like.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of adult literacy courses available across the nation. I suggest that you take advantage of them. I've repeatedly said that I don't think Musk is a bad person; it's just overrated. His actual accomplishments are being vastly overstated, and his proposed future projects are being taken far too seriously.
1. That said, there aren't any major cost saving spaceflight technologies in the foreseeable future unless the EM drive actually pans out, but that still won't get you out of the atmosphere. Cheap spaceflight is obviously a pipe dream. Other areas, like general AI and electric vehicles and biotech and nanotech, are much more promising. My major criticism of Muskites is they are tilting at windmills and setting themselves up for failure.
Maybe. Oddly phrased and oddly timed (Trump's immigration stuff) if so.
Yes, that's hilarious.
You realize how sad this is, right? I mean, even people complaining that Linus using cuss words routinely get modded up to +5.
The so-called civilized world could learn a lot from Japan's immigration policies.
Wow.
You do realize that Japan's "immigration policy" is based on cultural and racial purity. If you are not ethnically Japanese, you cannot ever become a citizen.
There are some "green card" equivalents of course, but as I recall there are serious impediments to owning property as a non-citizen in Japan. And I'm fairly sure that America and (especially in recent years) Europe take in more refugees.
This is what's great about the shinkansen. Of course, it actually takes longer AND COSTS MORE for most trips, but the fact that you can just show up at the station on the day of your trip, buy a ticket from a kiosk a few minutes before the train arrives, and hop on board with no security screening at all, makes it very nice indeed.
Another *wow*. Do you realize how vanishingly small the percentage of people is that are willing to pay more for a slower ride, just to avoid security? Even as a rich person's toy that's pretty abysmal, though I assume dining cars and such might help ameliorate that a bit.
But that lack of security, of course, has very little to do with the tech itself.
I did read your post, I just don't find your reasoning as convincing as you do. Appearing in science fiction doesn't really count as "thinking" from an engineering standpoint. I'm only counting actual engineering work.
I am reasonably confident that some engineers, somewhere have written some equations on it over the past 100 years. Certainly, it was more than just fiction. Exactly 100 years ago there appears to be some sort of paper on it in Popular Science, for instance.
Clearly you haven't even bothered to read about the competition before offering your opinion.
No, I based that comment on having read about prior small scale 'hyperloop' demonstrations which were just maglev, plus another poster's comment in this thread saying that that's all this was, plus my conversations in a Reddit thread with an enthusiast who was saying about how the 'Hyperloop One' (whatever that is) is apparently moving away from air bearing design and uses a maglev bearing instead, plus my rudimentary knowledge and suspicions that fully functional turbine jet engines of that size aren't cheap or (even if they were cheap) necessarily equivalent / mathematically useful in modeling a full sized hyperloop. That was sufficient to veto the RTFA article option for me.
*Are* they actually including jet engines and air bearings in this competition? That's kinda interesting. I mean, I'm still not going to read it, for the same reason that I'm not going to read about a contest to build tabletop thermal reactors in anticipation of a 100 billion dollar mega-scale geothermal plant in Yellowstone. I only have a limited number of minutes in the day. I find that disabusing people on the internet of nonsense to be somewhat stimulating, while reading about colossal wastes of time and money and enthusiasm to be depressing... doubly so when it's based on the hero worship of an individual as overrated (not horrible or talentless, just overrated) as Musk.
But if the other poster in this thread was right OR if the Reddit guy was right and the hyperloop focus is now on maglev in a vacuum tube... I think you must concede I have a bit of a point, yes? *If* maglev could be made cheap enough for hyperloop to be economical, it should be even more economical if we can simply leave out the bit where we need a huge sturdy pipe with custom airtight joints and various safety features. There's no plausible way that maglev could be far too expensive and maglev-based hyperloop be economical, yes?
Your petty psychological need to reject anything
You're projecting. I cram my posts full of disclaimers about what I think is and isn't important, but anything that isn't fawning all over Musk 100% is modded to oblivion around here.
People take Elon Musk seriously because he is, frankly, a pretty fucking serious guy.
He made his millions off of Paypal, a company that basically got lucky when they realized the government wasn't going to shut them down for offering banking services without normal banking rules. Their early business decisions were all over the place and the people who started it (not Musk, although he chose to associate with them) didn't even understand how credit card chargebacks worked. I cannot think of a *less* serious or tech-visionary place to begin than Paypal. But wait, it gets worse! He was their CEO until he was fired for refusing to back down on his plan to abandon their existing *nix infrastructure and migrate entirely to Windows. Wow, what a vision that must have been! It's a real pity he never got a chance to attempt it; it might have slowed down Paypal's rocket to ascendancy.
Mars colony rambles are pretty goddamn dumb and non-serious. The sticking point for a Mars colony is NOT the rocket it takes to get there, unless you have some revolutionary tech that makes rockets orders of magnitude cheaper. Which SpaceX most definitely does not have. If he were serious about Mars he'd probably be completely focused on biotech.
Digging a tunnel from the airport to his company is pretty goddamn non-serious, or at least (if he is actually serious) enormously dumb and self-absorbed.
Telsa is good, but they started out building rich people toys and they haven't strayed very far from that niche. They didn't make nearly as much impact as hybrids from regular car companies did (starting with the Prius), and they certainly won't be the ones to make electrical vehicles overtake ICE. They do have the potential to be important pioneers with Autopilot, though.
SpaceX is pretty important.
Only to the extent that NASA is a piece of crap (partially because we didn't listen to Feynman, partially because we keep slashing its budget.) SpaceX has not, to my knowledge, come up with revolutionary new technologies. They've tinkered with a few cost cutting tricks, and they were in the right place at the right time to land some important government contracts and snap up laid-off NASA talent. Good for them.
I mean, I quite like a few of Razer's products, but I don't pretend that they invented or significantly innovated with keyboards or optical mice. And I don't confuse marketing with invention.
Gigafactory
An American factory? Meh. Unlikely to be as cost-effective outsourced factories. Wake me up when they have facilities to produce nanowire or other next-gen batteries. I've been hearing about nanowire batteries for almost as long as Paypal has been successful. Why isn't he holding press conferences and competitions there?
Mightn't it have something to do with the fact that Tesla is a LUXURY car company and thus there isn't any big incentive for him to open the door for electric cars to become a low-cost, widely available thing?
Or maybe he just isn't quite as serious, overall, as you think he is.
SolarCity is a good idea.
Yes, I forgot about Solarcity, the first company that ever specialized in solar power.
I'm not saying the guy does pointless stuff. He's just not *that* special. I mean, people don't tend to claim that Bill Gates *invented* (or even revolutionized) charities in Africa.
You say the hyperloop is silly because of track costs.
I didn't actually say that. I was responding to someone else who said that. That is merely one of the reasons why it's silly, although it is a big one.
Trump: "How much is 2 + 2?"
THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!
I was really disappointed when I found out Star Trek ripped off that scene from 1984 and made it about simple, ordinary torture instead of a totalitarian nightmare.
Do you live in the UK? Remind me... isn't that the country with all of the CCTVs? The one that's trying to collect and bank DNA evidence on everyone every chance they get? The one that routinely tries to ban people with unpopular opinions from setting foot in the country? The one with the ASBOs? The one without a right to remain silent[1] without it being held against you? The one that is banning all "deviant" pornography, including any image or video showing any female orgasm that looks a bit too moist? The one that has made it flatly illegal to refuse to provide your password to the police/courts?
Please. If you want to criticize the American government's attitude towards privacy and individual liberty, you should first try moving to a country that didn't regard 1984 as a goddamn instruction manual. Our healthcare system may be a fucking joke, but privacy rights are still a hundred times better over here even if this order stands.
(if you live in AU or somewhere else, please let me know so I can adjust this rant accordingly.)
1. Granted, ours has frayed a bit recently.
You can build anything cheaper if you make a lot of them, and even cheaper if you don't build in factories not on site.
There's obviously a floor on how far economies of scale will get you, and *particularly* heavy things that have to be structurally sound for safety reasons.
This is why there isn't a $5000 (or indeed $500) car that's street legal in America. The demand and the volume are obviously there. Or let's not even get that complicated: someone else in this thread quoted $4M-$10M per mile for highway construction. Surely there's tons of incentives to get *that* price down, eh? I mean, it's just a hard, smooth surface on stable ground! You can't get simpler requirements or higher demand than that.
Pylons and otherwise identical pieces MIGHT drive the costs down to the point where this is economic.
No, no it won't be. And that's ok. There's a ton of other feasible revolutionary ideas out there. Self-driving electric cars with durable nanowire batteries will be completely revolutionary, but Musk is (comparatively speaking) halfassing the promotion of this much, much more realistic dream. Good nanowire batteries alone are complete game-changer, allowing the rest of the electric motor-building world to "beat a path to your door" in addition to small scale solar panel companies (for people wanting to build and live off-grid) and mobile electronic applications. I'd much, much rather have a sub-$10,000 car that runs for less than $1.50/gallon equivalent and lasts for a million miles without major servicing than have a land-based version of the Concorde, but that dream future isn't Musk's (or the luxury car maker Tesla's) top priority.
Well, that's a tall order, given that people have been noodling about maglev for decades, and working systems have even been built. People have been brainstorming; we're at the stage of needing more practical experience as grist for the brainstorming mill. We know that maglev physically works, it just doesn't work economically yet.
*Sigh*. Maybe you could re-read the post you just replied to? In summary:
1. People have been thinking about vacuum trains for over a hundred years.
2. This competition (along with some other specific hyperloop proposals) *is* maglev. Maglev plus a vacuum tube. So if maglev is too expensive, pretty sure this isn't going to be any cheaper.
The forms of hyperloop that aren't maglev (and thus aren't represented in this contest) rely, from my understanding, on a jet engine in addition to a linear electric motor. I have a few doubts here about the economic savings being very compelling.
Syre, Hyperloop sounds ridiculous. But when you look closer at it... well, I grant you it still sounds ridiculous. But less ridiculous. And that makes it interesting.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in the world. The EM drive is interesting. The extraction of gold from seawater is interesting. Mass produced and aligned graphine that's 100x the strength is steel, self-healing in the presence of CO2 and transparent is interesting. Mass produced carbon nanotubes are interesting. A giant geothermal power station in Yellowstone is interesting. We should think about this stuff from time to time, sure. Absolutely.
The difference with Musk's ideas are people take them really, really seriously, inspiring immediate action and investment, even when they're pretty clearly not economically feasible. And it's rather depressing. Geeks need better heroes than this, and better projects to dream about. The most important thing Musk has done is Tesla, and specifically Autopilot, but if he would only spend 1/10th as much time talking about nanowire batteries as he did hyperloops and Mars colonies...
It's just an expensive investment in physical plant with a long payoff period. It may takes years, even decades, but it's not like people are going to stop using this new-fangled thing called the Internet.
It doesn't work like that. Unfortunately.
I want Comcast to die too, but if the free market is going to kill it then the people doing the investing have to be convinced that the payoff (adjusted for risk) is worth more than other projects they could invest in.
You can't ever say "eventually you'll make it back" and expect that to be a compelling argument. I mean, if it rate of return fails to keep up with AAA debt, it's an objectively stupid investment. And if the rate of return fails to keep up with inflation, it's an objectively losing investment.
The stock price of Tesla Motors is a fine example. Here we have a company investing hugely in physical plant, and Wall Street has no idea what to do with it, so the value of TSLA fluctuates by 50% of its value, all the time. So-called "financial analysts" don't even know how to talk about it. It doesn't fit into their neat little boxes. (And there's a job that's just ripe for automation. It wouldn't even take a sophisticated neural net. 90% of the financial "analysts" in the world could be replaced by some templates and a bucket of Markov chains, driven by a small shell script.)
No, the rational long-term valuations of Tesla (which are masked by a hell of a lot of noise, yes) are driven by things that expert systems can't grasp, namely the plausibility of electric dominating, the timeline of that domination, and whether Tesla will remain near the top or be overtaken and eclipsed by ICE car competitors switching to electric. And the people who've done serious research and calculations on these things tend not to talk all about it in WSJ interviews.
Without the rational long term valuations and long term investors, IPOs don't succeed and the short term investors and algorithm traders don't have any wave of genuine long term growth interest that they can try to predict and make money off of. (And without the short term traders, liquidity plummets, ultimately hurting the IPOs a lot.)
Hah! "What if all of Musk's projects are rooted in an intense hatred of driving?"
It explains a lot, when you think about it. Even Paypal.
I'm actually surprised anything is being done with something the was pretty much dismissed as vaporware.
From what I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if Musk accidentally blew his entire hyperloop budget on web astroturfers. Or perhaps BizX is simply a subsidiary of SpaceX. Regardless, it's 5:1 odds that any criticism of Musk or the hyperloop will be modded down.
You know, if you want to discredit me you might try NOT modding it troll within 2 minutes.
Just a thought.
The Hyperloop concept could be found in a physics text book circa 1990 (or earlier)
It's closer to the 1890s than 1990s. Vacuum tube trains are a very old idea. Sticking a jet engine on the front of the thing and making some use of a small remnant air pressure is a newer concept, but that has nothing to do with this competition, which (as someone else has already noted) is just maglev in a vacuum tube.
What is required is an X-Prize style competition for building the Hyperloop track as the cost of the rolling stock is likely to pale into insignificance.
Good luck with that. SpaceX is a successful company (in no small part because NASA has had all kinds of internal and external problems), but it's not like the X-Prize competition magically made spaceflight an order of magnitude cheaper or something. The challenges surrounding a 300 mile long length of pipe with airtight joints that can resist expansion and moderate seismic forces, elevated on pylons (that preferably should be sturdy enough to survive a hit from a tractor-trailer), seem similarly resistant to revolutionary cost reductions.
We could completely ditch the idea of going down the interstate median to perhaps save the money spent on pylons, but at that point it's probably more worthwhile/realistic to brainstorm to see if we can build a cheaper maglev track.
I'm a big fan of the proposal laid out in the Hyperloop Alpha document. But these maglev vactrains in the "competition" have nothing interesting about them by comparison to the Hyperloop Alpha low pressure ground-effect train system. They throw the advantages of Alpha out the window, in favour of age-old concepts with economic problems (maintaining a hard vacuum, cost of maglev track vs. plain pipe, etc) that have similarly been known about for ages.
Pssshhh, you're obviously just a one of those haters who doesn't want to admit that Musk is the most revolutionary innovator in the world today. You're like those guys over at Paypal who fired him as CEO because he wouldn't back down from his brilliant plan to move all of their *nix servers to Windows; you just can't handle his vision.
cost of maglev track vs. plain pipe
...
What 'plain pipe' were you thinking of, exactly? Plain joints, too?
I'm actually surprised anything is being done with something the was pretty much dismissed as vaporware.
From what I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if Musk accidentally blew his entire hyperloop budget on web astroturfers. Or perhaps BizX is simply a subsidiary of SpaceX. Regardless, it's 5:1 odds that any criticism of Musk or the hyperloop will be modded down.
First, install uMatrix in Firefox which will, under certain conditions, disallow a web page to load if it determines there is something malicious or off about the page. It is not foolproof, but it's a good line of defense.
Anyone interested in uMatrix should start with uBlock Origins if they haven't already. The former can do more fine-grained blocking but the latter is easier to use and although there is some overlap, it does some important things that uMatrix doesn't (particularly the "graylist" option, instead of just whitelist/blacklist.) You can subscribe to the same security blocklists that you can with uMatrix, in addition to using the same adblocking lists that ABP uses.
It's worth noting that with uBlock Origins (and uMatrix too? I still haven't gotten around to tinkering with it) doesn't silently deny page loads if it thinks it's a security risk. Instead, it very helpfully presents a full-page dialog telling you that the page is currently blocked and giving you the option to temporarily (or permanently) unblock the page with just a click or two.