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SpaceX is livestreaming a hyperloop pod competition
- gizmo 10y agoThis is really cool. For people just tuning in: this is a test of pods in a vacuum tube travelling by their own power. Designed by students. A pod just got 94km/hr top speed.
- smbullet 10y agoIt's not by their own power, there's a pusher vehicle bringing them up to speed.
- shadowfacts 10y agoThe pusher is only accelerating the test vehicles up to a fraction of that, so that they can achieve levitation and after that the vehicle is under its own power. It wouldn't make for much of a competition if the SpaceX vehicle was the one doing all the work.
- smbullet 10y agoAlmost no pods have any kind of self propulsion. IIRC the whitepaper states the use of linear accelerators on the tube I-beams to propel the pod. That hasn't been integrated in the competition so the teams just coast at the pusher's 94km/h
- skykooler 10y agoThe pushers max speed was 80 km/h. The Warr team accelerated past that to hit 94.
- flukus 10y ago> A pod just got 94km/hr top speed. Why is that impressive?
- AtheistOfFail 10y agodecent aerodynamics?
- OV-104 10y agoAerodynamics are negligible in a vacuum.
- nothrabannosir 10y agoIsn't it a vacuum?
- Geee 10y agoNo. There's enough air pressure to potentially lift and cushion the pod in the pipe (at least in the original plan). However most pod designs (I think) use magnetic levitation for lift.
- rmccue 10y agoIt's specifically not a vacuum, but rather a low pressure system. > Just as aircraft climb to high altitudes to travel through less dense air, Hyperloop encloses the capsules in a reduced pressure tube. The pressure of air in Hyperloop is about 1/6 the pressure of the atmosphere on Mars. This is an operating pressure of 100 Pascals, which reduces the drag force of the air by 1,000 times relative to sea level conditions and would be equivalent to flying above 150,000 feet altitude. A hard vacuum is avoided as vacuums are expensive and difficult to maintain compared with low pressure solutions.
- stephen_g 10y agoYou're using faulty definitions there. Even outer space is not a 'true' vacuum. Any pressure lower than atmospheric pressure is considered a partial vacuum. 100 Pascals in a lab would be considered a 'medium' vacuum. And in a tube the size of an actual full-size hyperloop, even that will probably be extremely difficult and expensive to achieve. I think the hyperloop will end up being technologically unviable mostly because of the cost and the limitations of technology (like the expansion joints that will be required on a decently long track), but I hope I'm wrong on that. It may lead to new innovations which will be good.
- foota 10y agoNow this is podracing!
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- firefoxd 10y agoI passed there yesterday on my way home. It was surprising to see the long 1 mile tube literally on the closed side walk. It was past 6 and I shared an uber ride with one of the contestant. He was very secretive of his work but was excited about it.
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- djrogers 10y agoLink to the SpaceX site one star of slashdot: http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop
- shade23 10y agoCould someone replace the HN link to this? The current link just redirects to a slashdot forum page.
- capkutay 10y agoSo is this a legitimate step closer to having the hyperloop or is it more of a hiring/PR stunt for SpaceX? Has anyone confirmed that the hyperloop could survive a seismic event?
- djsumdog 10y agoI feels very publicity. I wonder what they make this kids sign in order to join the competition. I bet SpaceX gets to keep the intellectual property. Seems like a cheap way to get a bunch of engineering ideas.
- baking 10y agoSince the only practical application of this is on Mars, I wonder if intellectual property rights will matter.
- Twirrim 10y agohttp://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/2016_0831_hyperloop_competition_ii_rules.pdf http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/2016_0831_hyperloop... I did a quick bit of looking around, rather than making accusations about the company. So far I find no indication in any of the rules I've found for the competitions that SpaceX is running that would suggest any such thing. It's probably worth pointing out that SpaceX isn't much involved in Hyperloop. Elon published the idea, and has mostly left it up to other groups to work on / produce.
- pjscott 10y agoA bit of googling doesn't turn up any mention of that sort of sketchy business. This seems like a pretty standard, innocuous publicity/recruiting event. The world already has enough scandals without inventing fictional ones.
- robryan 10y agoDoes it matter? They have built a prototype, has anyone else done that on this scale? Experimenting with a decent sized model seems like a pretty big step towards having something workable.
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- ChuckMcM 10y agoSo really the hyperloop is just the highway system Elon expects to have on Mars :-) More seriously I find engineering challenges like this are the single best way to motivate students, it gives them a real problem (no spherical cows or massless pulleys) that tests their ability to create engineering solutions.
- sjwright 10y agoIn high school we built and competed in a model solar car race. It was great fun and we learned numerous concepts like aerodynamics and torque.
- aaronblohowiak 10y agoAnd his idea to have the drilling solution for cities is really because you'd need to drill a lot on mars for habitats. You need 5 meters of Martian soil to provide equivalent protection to earth atmosphere
- mulmen 10y agoWow! Do you have a source? I'd love to know more about that. When you say protection do you mean from radiation or do you mean to trap an earth-like atmosphere in the rock?
- NamTaf 10y agoRadiation, I believe. Mars has barely enough atmosphere to protect from the various things Earth's atmosphere protects us from, so we have to go underground (or come up with some hefty structure) to not get gradually scorched. Also, my guess would be that 5m of rock probably isn't good enough at trapping gases.
- baking 10y agoIt is Earth's magnetic field that primarily protects us from solar flares.
- justifier 10y agothey just showed a pov of a pod moving through the hyperloop it was cool to see the tires on the pod spinning as they made contact at the beginning and the end of the loop but be still while moving through the loop
- modeless 10y agoThey just said it takes 30-40 minutes to evacuate the tube every time they open it. I expected them to have some kind of airlock to help with that.
- ethbro 10y agoThe only airlock necessary regular operation is for the introduction of squishy meat into the pods, no? I'd be curious what kind of compression you would need to make air bladders seal around a door.
- wtfishackernews 10y agoThat was the plan, but it turned out too complicated.
- skykooler 10y agoThey only expected a few teams to pass all the checks to be ready to compete today, so that was not something they needed to focus on for this competition.
- soheil 10y agoSeems like there should be a separate competition for designing the tube. For example why should the radius of the tube be what it is, why have a center rail instead of two rails or side tracks, should the tube have some sort of inner coating? What if it should be a double tube, a tube within a tube, for sound/temperature isolation and to reduce vibrations, and to reduce the risk of depressurization due to outside impact kinda like a double-haul oil tanker? Can it be made out of glass (that'd be kinda cool to look at/out of)? How close to vacuum the pressure and thick the walls of the tube should be? Can someone double check my work here: In the webcast they mentioned it will take 30mins to depressurize the tube. The length of the tube is 1mi. For example from LA to SF is roughly 400 miles if the final pump is twice stronger it'll take 6000mins or 4 days to depressurize, I'm assuming they will only need to do this once and have gates to maintain the main tube's pressure near areas of loading/unloading.
- the8472 10y agoa longer tunnel would likely have more pumps along the track. I don't think you should extrapolate from this small-scale model.
- smbullet 10y agoIt definitely doesn't scale linearly. They had a section of the tube only several meters long for vacuum testing pods and that took 15 minutes to depressurize. It's likely bigger/more pumps would be used.
- annerajb 10y agoWoudn't the need for depressuration be removed if using airlock since you only have to depressurize the airlock volume?
- vidarh 10y agoTo some extent, but part of the reason for having pumps is that it removes the need to make the tube fully airtight - the idea being that it's likely to be cheaper to build a tube that is largely airtight and use pumps to deal with leaks than to build one that can keep a vacuum over time.
- nether 10y agoThere's also a single non-university group: Reddit's rLoop, http://rloop.org/ http://rloop.org/.
- imaginenore 10y agoIf you haven't seen the technical criticisms of Hyperloop, Thunderf00t has an interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk I haven't seen most of the issues he raises addressed.
- zenir 10y agoIt's a partial vacuum not a full vacuum. Stopped watching at that point..
- e2e8 10y agoI don't think that objection, by itself, invalidates the the video author's criticisms. According to Wikipedia, the hyperloop is intended to have a pressure of 100 Pa or 0.1 % of atmospheric pressure[1]. That is not much different from a prefect vacuum for the purposes of an approximate engineering calculation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
- ustolemyname 10y agoThat's like saying there's no difference between 99.9℅ the speed of light and going all the way there, from an engineer perspective. Turns out, one of these requires an infinite more expenditure of energy than the other. Similarly, if you're evacuating a tube by removing gave the gas at a time, 1/1000 is attainable. 0? Not so much.
- e2e8 10y agoI don't disagree but that is not issue here. The issue is that for the purposes of discussing the mechanics of the tube like strength, seals, safety etc. the small amount of air left in the tube should not throw off simple calculations by too much.
- Animats 10y agoNo, the air in the tube matters, at least in Musk's original design, which has the pod running on a very thin air cushion. In practice, most designs are maglev, for which a hard vacuum is best.
- TearsInTheRain 10y agoAnyone have a vod of the stream?
- SkyRocknRoll 10y agoHere is a video on facebook. https://www.facebook.com/dailybreeze/videos/10154912664654326/ https://www.facebook.com/dailybreeze/videos/1015491266465432...
- RA_Fisher 10y agoIt's hard to celebrate achievements that can be linked back to Elon knowing that he's lending legitimacy to Trump.
- frik 10y ago1967 Bay Area Gravity Vacuum Transit next to BART track ... sounds like Hyperloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#In_public_transportation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#In_public_trans... Using the well known pneumatic vaccum tube not just for parcels but for public transport is not a new idea. There have been such transports for some time long in the past. The current question will the first such public transport in this century be built in US or in China or somewhere else. The Transrapid magnetic train was built in Shanghai China (called Maglev there) by Siemens from Germany, another such cool idea that has little usage - but it works like a charm there with 430km/h on a elevated 30km track for more than 10 years.
- tamal 10y agoHyperloop utilizes an evacuated vacuum chamber. It's different than a pneumatic tube concept.
- coss 10y agoAny information on how students tested their pods?
- baking 10y agoThere was a ten step process. There was a stationary vacuum test to assure that the components would operate in a vacuum, there was a moving open air test on a rail, and the final moving test in the mile long low-pressure tube. The other 7 steps were design and safety reviews and a check of the control system. 3 of the 27 teams passed the first 9 steps and participated in the final speed test.