"It'll be complete in 2 years"
-some idiot emerald baron 8 years ago
32A very long muskrat indeed.
2
I think there needs to be some disambiguation.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop One is literally a train. They themselves call it a train. I guess the idea is that they're small individual cars (called pods) instead of a chain of train cars connected together, which seems really energy inefficient.
Elon Musk's Hyperloop is a train for automobiles, which has all the inefficient downsides of a personal car, with none of the energy benefits of a train. It is the worst of both worlds. And it relies on car infrastructure at both ends, so it will bottleneck just like a highway on/off ramp. Completely nonsensical.
26That sounds like a very Muskrat idea. Don't worry though, he never builds his own ideas. When someone smarter comes along and invents something better, Elongated will buy it and claim to have invented it, just like every single one of his other accomplishments.
7Elongated 😂
4
Musk "invented" the hyperloop and said he didn't want to develop it and others should. One of the companies that picked it up was virgin. The car tunnels are the "loop".
4Structurally it also falls through, it just can't happen
1
Leave it to Musk to be so full of himself that he thinks he's invented trains.
10The Hyperloop is just a fancy train. Or a very large vacuum tube document transfer system, whichever description you like best.
8It's basically much more expensive slightly faster trains right?
7More like a pipe dream with no practical thought put into it that was sold by a conman entirely to derail the planned high speed rail that would have connected SoCal to Seattle.
The end result is a tiny quarter mile tube in a convention centre where you can drive your Tesla in a loop but only like 10 mph and god forbid there's an emergency like a fire because there's no emergency exits if you're stuck behind a burning Tesla.
27FWIW the hyperloop ("pods" in vacuum tubes) and the loop (teslas in tunnels) are separate grifts.
18Actually, maglev trains are slowly becoming practical, and the hyperloop is just a train in a tube with no air. It won't be something revolutionary, just an even faster high speed train. Of course removing air from a tunnel creates its own problems: What if there is a fire? Normally you could get out into the tunnel, can't do that with no air.
2
Much more expensive? Have you looked at how much it costs to build subways in the US compared to EU? It's absolutely insane. We are failing to do this affordably. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184420745/why-building-public-transit-in-the-us-costs-so-much
4I thought it was a giant underground highway with no rest stops or ways to get out.
2Hyperloop is more of a concept for high-speed trains/pods in a vacuum tube that go between two major cities (in a loop, hyper fast). It got conflated with his bs tunneling project (the tunnels are smaller, that's the only "innovation"), but a Hyperloop would be much more likely to be primarily elevated like a high speed train.
1
You left out less safe, smaller, and harder to repair
2
So I have a question to anyone who might know.
Is there any reason to go with low-pressure tunnels at all? For example, having a plexiglass tunnel at .5 atm doesn’t sound that dangerous to me, and it should be easier to build and maintain, but does it actually provide any irl benefit? Like what’s the production costs/train speed/energy savings relation here? What’s the highest low pressure that starts to make sense? Like, do you have to go down to .01 atm, or can .1 or .5 provide enough of a benefit? If not now, what kind of material advances might help?
Just curious about long-term feasibility of that whole thing.
5Hi, aerospace engineer here. As far as benefits go it depends.
If we assume the tube is constant volume and constant temperature. The ideal gas law says that in this case, the pressure would change proportionally with density. So if you lower the pressure by 50% the density should lower by about 50%.
Drag force is also proportional to density. So a 50% decrease in density will result in a 50% decrease in drag. This is true for subsonic speeds. The speed of sound is 343 m/s or 770 mph.
Drag also has a square relationship with velocity. So drag gets extremely high when there is an increase in velocity.
If we take the speed of the shinkansen(90 m/s or 200mph) as a baseline and lower the pressure by half. The new speed the Hyperloop would be able to travel with the new speed is 127m/s or 284 mph. That is faster 40% for the same amount the trains will have to work, but to build all of that infrastructure, spend all the money creating a lower pressure environment and maintain that pressure for thousands of miles is just not worth it. The vacuum tube is just not practical to make.
Edit: If you maintain a reduced pressure and increase speeds about 30% of the speed of sound, the subsonic equations I used start to be less accurate. But in that case drag increases dramatically in transonic and supersonic regimes.
5This is the kind of actual discussion that I hope for in these discussions. While many people focus on the dangers of the vacuum tube proposed for the Hyperloop infrastructure, I always wondered about the benefits. It's not like putting a train in a vacuum will suddenly make it go infinitely fast.
So, the question is how much faster would it go? Once you have that number, you can adjust the car vs plane vs train chart that CityNerd showed off. All it would do is deepen and lengthen the railed transit curve some amount. It would potentially increase the distance two cities could be and still provide a benefit over airplane travel. It's just a question of how many city pairs it would help to include as a rail option.
Going from 200 mph to 284 mph won't make that much of a difference. Yes, it'll open up more city pairs for high speed rail, but when comparing those benefits against the cost of the massive tube construction it's not going to seriously pencil out as a net benefit.
Here's the video where CityNerd lays out their reasoning and charts a rough model of where high speed rail is going to be a more reasonable choice for travel based on the distance needed to go: https://youtu.be/pwgZfZxzuQU?t=477
2
I think it will depend on future technology and that it is not feasible nor cost effective with current technology (or it would be built already).
2This. Hyperloop or whatever isn't a POC or an actual product. Meanwhile, we have actual high-speed trains in production.
1
Having a consistent pressure (fully tunnel or fully open air) might help, as the shinkansen needs the very long-nosed trains to help with the 'pop' entering or leaving a tunnel.
However that could also be alleviated with the concrete tubes at the end of each tunnel that gradually get more enclosed
1
The Hyperloop was never meant to be built. Elon Musk admitted it was all about fueling opposition to California’s high-speed rail project so it would get canceled. He never planned to improve transportation;
he just wants to keep people trapped in cars.
4Isn't Hyperloop just a concept for a vacuum train though? That literally is a form of train, just one that is, at least presently, too impractical and expensive to actually use. Honestly I think the concept has some merits, we just don't have the technology, logistics or need to have use of it just yet.
3I'm thinking ever. The Hyperloop was Musk's way to disrupt high speed rail, which exists and is proven, to sell more EVs.
7I'm skeptical of the idea that the concept, or at least the general concept of a maglev train in a vacuum or low pressure system to enable higher speeds and efficiency, will never ever be realized, because there are any number of future technologies that would make it easier (for instance, significantly better materials would make it easier to build long vacuum chambers, significant advances in automation could increase productivity to the point where society can afford much more expensive projects, and if people ever actually start to build settlements in space, then it'd be really easy to build one on a place like the moon because there's no need for the huge vacuum chamber. I understand it would take a very long time for enough people to live in such settlements to actually need such things, but someday it could happen.)
Not that I don't think that it's being pushed today isnt wishful thinking at best and intentional distraction at worst, but I think the general concept could be sound one day with the right technology
2
- 3
Lol what a clown
8Being more environmentally friendly and cheaper? Where is he pulling that from?
Inventing a new technology from more or less scratch will be way more expensive. And I feel like they’d be comparable environmentally if they are both electric
2Eh I wouldn't think about it to much, dude is either fucked in the head, gets paid for such opinions or both.
Edit. If you're interested in the Thai opposition, this channel has some critical vidos of it.
1
The vision seems like an exclusive tunnel for Tesla owners rather than a viable form of transport. Actually, I'm not really sure what it is anymore, since there appeared to be a weird one that was basically a Tesla tunnel, and another that had maglev capsules or something. Not sure either seems like the best idea ever, but I doubt decent trains will ever exist in the US, so perhaps it's better than nothing.
3I saw a video of the hyperloop.. I think the convention center segment in vegas?
I'd be more comfortable burried alive in a coffin, than in that claustrophobic hell hole.
2Hyperloop is the future, permanently.
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