25 ms·

Hyperloop: Pipes of Fancy

107 points by jkuria 6y ago

MengerSponge 6y ago
Did you know that LIGO designers had to add earthen berms to protect their vacuum pipes from bullets? Not to mention the throughput issues, the energy budget, the cost of construction, the right-of-way issues... Let's be frank: Hyperloop is dumb, and people who are spending money on it are too. You have better things to do with your time than analyzing it or defending it, and so do I.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  > Did you know that LIGO designers had to add earthen berms to protect their vacuum pipes from bullets? No, that's hilarious, where can I read more?
  - Miraste 6y ago
    This article[0] talks about how locals were shooting at it, although it doesn't mention the berms (talking to the sheriff must not have worked out). I think a hyperloop could avoid this problem by not locating in Louisiana. [0] https://www.225batonrouge.com/article/good-vibrations https://www.225batonrouge.com/article/good-vibrations
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      What do you do when a terrorist shoots a hyperloop tube causing a pressure wave that will kill everyone inside?
      - yellow_postit 6y ago
        You avoid building it (above ground at least) in the first place
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        Even building it below ground doesn't work, they just have to punch a hole in the station while it is pressurized.
        nytgop77 6y ago
        How much damage would a bullet hole actually do? If the hole stays of fixed diameter, its throughput would be small compared to the volume of the tube, so pressure would increase gradually. So, how feasible is it that hole would not increase? What hyperloop designs are there? 10 inch thick steel throughout whole length?
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        The designs I've seen had very thin tubes. Certainly not anywhere close to 10 inch thick steel, no. The designs I've seen had thicknesses close to or under one inch. A 50 cal APDS bullet would punch clean through the first layer and would likely leave an inch thick hole, and would likely cause significant damage on the other side if not penetrate it outright. This is almost certainly sufficient to cause explosive pressurization, which would likely cause immediately more damage and eventually create a powerful shockwave that would destroy anything in the tube. Of course, a bomb next to the wall would be much worse. If it was a 10 inch thick steel tube, it would be much better, but also ten times more expensive, making it prohibitively expensive.
        ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        A digging / drilling accident, an earthquake or sinkhole. If we are still talking about terrorists, they grab a shovel?
      - The_Double 6y ago
        What do you do when a terrorist places a derailing device [0] on a piece of rail track that will harm and potentially kill many people inside? [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derail
        marvin 6y ago
        You never ever build railroads again, obviously, and deride everyone that plans building them.
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        Derailing a railroad is a complicated endeavor that will likely get detected and the train stopped, and even in the most catastrophic event only a very small fraction of the occupancy of one train will be killed. Whereas a catastrophic dépressurisation event on a hyperloop will assuredly kill everyone inside. The amount of energy stored in such a pressure differential is equivalent to many hundreds of tons of TNT. It's not comparable at all.
        nytgop77 6y ago
        Derailed train seems to injure most passangers, but kill only few of them [1] [2]. It would seem that hyperloop would be more similar to a plane - more deaths than injuries. Also damage to infrastructure, would be more than a few rails. (please educate me if I'm wrong) [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Washington_train_derailment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Washington_train_derail... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_(2010%E2%80%932019) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_(2010...
        liability 6y ago
        If you derailed a train, you'd lose what, tens of millions of dollars worth of locomotives, cars, and maybe a mile of track? When a hypertunnel explosively pressurizes, chances are you'd lose tens of billions of dollars of tube, plus anything that was anywhere in it.
      - stevehawk 6y ago
        What do you do when American citizens shoot at airplanes? Quit flying? Yesterday an Air Force helicopter was shot at and the pilot injured. Not to mention the number of citizens pointing lasers at cockpits. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/virginia/military-helicopter-shot-at-emergency-landing-in-manassas/65-6c3e7a3d-be07-4622-b6fa-aac0d4a5cbcf https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/virginia/military-h... You can't refuse to do something just because you're scared of a few bad actors. Otherwise we have to stop making cars (they get driven into crowds), building tall buildings (they get bombed or have aircraft flown into them), drinking public water (they get threatened with poisoning attempts), blah blah blah.
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        When an airplane is shot at by a civilian, in 99.999% of cases there will be no big issues (read : multiple deaths). Making an entire transportation system with hundreds of thousands of people inside that can all be killed instantly by a single bullet or bomb is insane lunacy.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  As dumb as the hyperloop projects may be, I think it's dwarfed by all the other money spending elsewhere. We can just look at it from afar and enjoy the mythbuster-XL show
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
brunoqc 6y ago
https://youtu.be/2h6Cz4hwuEI https://youtu.be/2h6Cz4hwuEI How legit is that video and YouTuber?
- _ph_ 6y ago
  A very bad piece. The video uses the very techniques of showing shiny renders to make its point it critisizes. Also mixes up a lot of facts and pretends things are in a context which are not. While there is valid criticism of the Hyperloop concept, this video certainly isn't.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Not sure about this video in particular, but I remember thunderfoot being pretty thorough and accurate in the past.
- baking 6y ago
  He is awfully repetitive and his earlier videos on the subject are more informative, but he's basically right. If the basic science disagrees, it must be a scam until proven otherwise. Plenty of studies were done on the accuracy of labs done on finger sticks before Theranos, but investors were not paying attention.
- vwat 6y ago
  It’s not legit at all. I’ve always been a fan, and all his busted videos in the past featured one very important feature: the violation of thermodynamics. He always showed why a product was physically impossible. But he doesn’t do that with a hyperloop. And ultimately, if you see through the repetition and downright nastiness, you see that his argument is essentially “hyperloop is very expensive, it would be unsafe and render artists don’t know science.” I wouldn’t have minded if he hadn’t taken that low shot at Elon when a rocket blew up on the pad. Honestly, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he started targeting Elon, with the sudden and notable lack of violation-of-physics, around the same time he started pushing his channel to have more engagement and make more money. TLDR: I’ve seen all his videos and his hyperloop videos basically lack substance. Scott Manley is a much better source of opinions on such things.
cs702 6y ago
"A hyperloop system involves passengers or freight transported by pods elevated by magnets, which travel within raised pipes. The pods can be propelled at 620mph (1,000kph), says Jay Walder, boss of Virgin Hyperloop One, one of the firms pushing the idea. At that pace 'you could move between Columbus and Chicago in 40 minutes', he says, so covering the 460 miles many hours quicker than by driving and at a cost (and overall carbon impact) that he says would be lower than flying." If the economics work, for both people and goods, and if the environmental externalities are lower than cars/trucks/trains/planes, then it would be great to have regional networks of hyperloops in the US. I say, bring it on!
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Lower than flying. Train are the most efficient, simplest and oldest form of land transport. Where do you get the idea that hyperloop can even approach efficiency of a car, with all the energy wasted on high speed and keeping up near vacuum?
- manigandham 6y ago
  It already exists for freight. We have a large train network that is extremely efficient. Decreasing carrying capacity while vastly increasing energy costs isn't worth it just for a gain in speed.
jeffreyrogers 6y ago
Hyperloop has sex appeal, but it seems like Maglev or just plain old high speed rail makes more sense from an economics perspective. I can't imagine it's cheap to keep a tube evacuated. Either way, it seems good to try and build these sort of high-tech industries in the US.
- the8472 6y ago
  The speed is supposed to be even higher than maglev, so it can compete with planes over longer distances. But yes, any kind of high speed public transport would be great.
- TylerE 6y ago
  It doesn't have to be that good a vacuum. It's probably really no more expensive than conventional high speed rail. The hyperloop proposal is operating at approximately 1 millibar of pressure. That sounds CLOSE to a vacuum..and it is, roughly 0.01 atm, but with vacuums getting down to around there is easy. Getting down to, say, 0.00001 atm is much much much harder.
  - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    But you aren't just doing it a chemistry lab. You're doing it in an enormous tube and the tube has openings to allow pods in and out, so it's a lot more complicated.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    From a safety perspective 0.01 atm = 0 atm. That tube is either very dangerous, or very overbuilt and expensive.
- riffic 6y ago
  common misconception. Hyperloop tubes were never meant to be fully evacuated, they operate at pressure differentials with air bearings (imagine a cylindrical air hockey table).
  - captainbland 6y ago
smikhanov 6y ago
3.5 years on my prediction holds well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811365
- joering2 6y ago
  you need to fix your clock, its not 2027 yet.
  - fastball 6y ago
    The prediction holds, not the prediction is decided.
- chroma 6y ago
  With any new technology, the likelihood of failure is high but the expected value is positive. As Nat Friedman (CEO of GitHub) said: "Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money."
  - smikhanov 6y ago
    > the likelihood of failure is high but the expected value is positive Except when the new technology was proposed and marketed by a loony, of course.
    - marvin 6y ago
      Yes, all those poor Tesla IPO investors who got misled by a loony are lining up for shareholder lawsuits and yelling for prosecution, due to the obviously financially irresponsible management of their investment. (Refresh my memory here - would an 88X return on investment after IPO be classified as high returns on a high-risk investment?)
      - smikhanov 6y ago
        I sense some notes of disagreement with calling the Tesla CEO "a loony"
auganov 6y ago
Read it as Pipes of Fantasy. Years ago I remember reading about miles long test tracks being built. I haven't been following developments surrounding this at all, but as far as I can tell there are still no serious test tracks, why? The ones that are out there are supposedly too short to get to full speed (or anywhere close to it!). Given the hype surrounding it I have a hard time believing money is the limiting factor here. Sounds to me like the tech just isn't there and won't be anytime soon. And having a full test track would simply kill the deal flow. EDIT: so just to make sure I'm not misremembering anything, here's a story from 2015 https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873014/hyperloop-technologies-elon-musk-las-vegas-land-purchase https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873014/hyperloop-technol... "The near-term goal is to construct a 3-kilometer test track to conduct a full-speed prototype." And it appears to me that what was supposed to be this 3km test track is a 500m Virgin Hyperloop test track today at the same location with some of the same people involved. So they might have land secured for the original length already. "That startup has plans to build an 8-kilometer in Quay Valley" "he expects to conduct the first test with live passengers in 32 months"
- jccooper 6y ago
  Elon seems to have moved on to non-vaccuum underground tunnels via The Boring Company, which is actually doing real projects. Though apparently there are still Hyperloop competitions planned. The 2020 one was supposed to be "in a 10km vacuum tunnel with a curve", though that may be stalled by, well, obvious current events. https://tunnelinsider.com/the-2020-hyperloop-competition-will-be-in-a-six-mile-curved-tunnel/ https://tunnelinsider.com/the-2020-hyperloop-competition-wil... No one else seems to have quite the combination of money and crazy to go much further with Hyperloop.
  - halfFact 6y ago
    Regular slow rail and siphoning tax dollars? Sounds like an Elon company.
    - DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
      Username checks out.
AlexandrB 6y ago
This is evergreen when talking about Hyperloop: http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/ http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/ The problems with building this have nothing to do with technology but with right-of-way, investment, and politics. If those factors were solved, we'd already have high-speed rail in places where Hyperloop has been proposed. The fact that we don't says that Hyperloop is unlikely to be feasible as well.
- grecy 6y ago
  Which is why the first Hyperloop will probably be built outside the USA. Melbourne to Sydney always seemed like a good choice to me. It's one of the busiest air routes in the world[1], there is obviously tons of solar, lots of open land beside the existing road, no seismic activity to speak of and it's a good long distance to get up to speed (~1000km). [1] (actually #3 in the world by number of passengers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_routes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_...
  - cyrrus 6y ago
    Seismic activity is apparently not really an issue. The damage from earthquakes tends to be a ripple of the ground in the first few meters and that’s it.
    - rossjudson 6y ago
      There's a second reason. The hyperloop tubes can slide back and forth on the pylons. If you shake the ground underneath them, the pylons can move around but the tube (tube system) stays still (like moving your hand underneath a baseball -- the ball stays still, rolling).
    - cossatot 6y ago
      This is false. In the case of the original Hyperloop idea which crosses the San Andreas Fault, a major earthquake on that fault in line with the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco should produce accelerations the ground surface within 10 km of the fault in either direction of around 1 g (i.e., 9.8 m s^-2), corresponding to Modified Mercalli intensities of disruption to people and infrastructure of X ("Extreme: Some well-built wooden structures destroyed; most masonry and frame structures destroyed with foundations. Rails bent")[1] Vertical Accelerations above 1 g will literally throw anything not bolted to the ground into the air. Not much will make it through this unscathed. This isn't to say that engineering around these sorts of events is impossible. The Transalaksa oil pipeline crosses the Denali fault, and during the M7.9 Denali earthquake in 2002, the pipeline survived because it was built on sliders near the fault so it would bend when the earth shifted instead of breaking [3]. However, this is a big bend in the pipe; the lateral displacements are on the order of 5-10 m in an earthquake of this size, over a similar across-fault distance. Do you want to go at Hyperloop velocities through a tube with a bend this sharp? [1]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.833.7497&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.833... [2]: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/modified-mercalli-intensity-scale https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/modified-mercalli-intensit... [3]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2003/fs014-03/pipeline.html https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2003/fs014-03/pipeline.html
Animats 6y ago
The Dubai hyperloop project is supposedly proceeding. The 10km test track was supposed to open this year. Can't find any info later than January 2020. The Dubai to Abu Dhabi link is the ideal case. The route is mostly flat, open desert. Funding is available. There is government support. There's considerable traffic between those points. If that doesn't work, not much else will.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  If you've found info on its progress as recent as January 2020, you're doing better than me.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  And, crucially, no-one cares about the economics. Dubai has never paid too much attention to that with mega projects.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  If built, it would compete directly with Etihad Rail, which is building a regular rail network throughout the entire UAE and already has its first phase operational: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etihad_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etihad_Rail This focuses primarily on cargo, but is built with passenger trains at up to 200 km/h in mind. And most Hyperloop business plans also seem to rely heavily on freight.
  - Animats 6y ago
    Interesting. The locomotives are Diesel-electrics made by what used to be a locomotive recycling company in the US. Then Caterpillar bought them, and they now have some decent products, apparently. The railroad's main job is transporting mined sulfur to ports for export. This is a total contrast to "hyperloops". It does a useful but boring job with useful but boring technology.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
GuB-42 6y ago
Can someone explain me how Hyperloop is supposed to work? There are so many things wrong with it. - Hyperloop is a vactrain, a century old idea, and to this day, despite numerous attempts, nothing came close to a working prototype, let alone something production-ready. - By contrast, high-speed trains carries millions of passengers every day in many parts of the world. They are safe, comfortable, and commercially viable. And for hyperloop-like distances (500-1000km), you can expect a 3h trip. It is not 40 minutes, but considering that high speed trains typically go downtown to downtown and usually don't require you to show up more than a few minutes in advance, it is often the fastest way to go in practice. Hyperloop doesn't bring much to the table compared to high speed trains. - The individual pods are tiny compared to a train. And because of the high speeds involved, they certainly require a lot of spacing to stay safe, it means low capacities. - There is a long list of technical challenges, most of them require engineering feats that have never been done on a large scale. It is an Apollo-scale experimental project presented as a commercial venture. - Progress so far has been laughable, none of the hard problems have been solved. What about thermal expansion, the ability to maintain a vacuum while allowing people in and out, safety systems, the civil engineering required... The experimental pods are scaled down with no space for passengers. They can go fast, which is nice, but at 460 km/h they are still below conventional full scale high-speed train records. Not really a technical challenge but it still ticks me off: - Hyperloop is championed by Elon Musk, but he actually has very little involvement in it. He owns none of the hyperloop companies, it is all "open-source", "community", etc.. Basically, besides being a sponsor for "competitions", it is all talk. I know that Elon Musk is far from stupid, he is a world-class businessman and a competent engineer. I can't believe he really sees Hyperloop as something viable. So for me it just a daring publicity stunt (a borderline scam IMHO), something that Elon Musk is also known to be good at. After all, the story says that SpaceX started as a publicity stunt. He wanted to buy a Russian ICBM, repurposed to plant something on Mars. It didn't work, and the fact that he couldn't do it gave him the idea that he could be a market for a rocket company. If you look at Hyperloop, it is essentially a battery powered electric car running inside a tunnel. And guess what, he makes battery powered electric cars, and now tunnels. I have a few doubts about Boring, but at least, it is concrete, and there is always a need for tunnels, even if it is just to dig sewer pipes.
- 6y ago
gumby 6y ago
What is the economic value of transporting factory output from point to point that fast? You’ll likely have to truck it from there.
Havoc 6y ago
The mere fact that Musk is pushing it makes me very wary of betting against it. Sure he's not Tony Stark...but doesn't seem that far off either.
louisblytrhe 6y ago
https://insidethemagic-119e2.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/monorailcolorWATER.jpg https://insidethemagic-119e2.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
masswerk 6y ago
What I'm failing to understand about the Hyperloop concept (apart from all the issues with thermal expansion, maintaining a near vacuum, safety consideration and passenger capacity): In real life tracks will have to include curves, as there's already terrain, existing buildings, etc. Trains have to lean into curves, just like motorbikes. With high speeds, anything exceeding a more traditional maglev train, the angles required will become rather extreme with the track climbing up the sides of the tube. What is supposed to happen, if the train has to decrease speed below the planned cruising speed for the given section or even to halt? What about passengers inside? How could this pass any safety checks for mass transport operations? (Notably, this was the only new thing addressed by Musk's original "air hockey puck", front fan driven air cushion concept, as this could have avoided any fixed installations, like rails or guards, (at the cost of other stability issues) and could have allowed a variable leaning angle. But, since this feature has been universally dismissed, how is this supposed to work?)
- johnwalkr 6y ago
  No problem, 2.5G was mentioned as an acceptable value for experienced acceleration. Do you like roller coasters?
  - masswerk 6y ago
    It's about roll counteracting the parallelogram of (lateral) forces and resulting orientation in space, not linear acceleration.
rdiddly 6y ago
"Dawdling America" seems pretty unlikely to come from behind or even catch up, which is why we need fantasies.
sudosysgen 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs This video has most of the points about why the Hyperloop is a ridiculous idea that will never work.
- pilaf 6y ago
  That video doesn't talk about the Hyperloop at all. You're getting the Boring Company's Loop mixed up with the Hyperloop, which despite the similar-sounding names have close to no relation.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Ah yes, I posted the wrong video. My bad.
9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
http://archive.is/oy1hF http://archive.is/oy1hF
manigandham 6y ago
The vac-train concept is from 1799. Maglev tech is decades in production. I remember a Discovery Channel show 20 years ago about trains traveling 5000mph through tunnels at the bottom of the ocean to cross continents in an hour. Hyperloop is fantastical renaming of old tech without solving any of the fundamental problems of economy, geography, energy and politics. We're capable of building incredible projects if only we had unlimited funding and will. It's nice to see Tesla and Spacex changing global transportation so maybe better train systems will finally get some attention, but right now this is just not realistic.
- qayxc 6y ago
  Please remind me again how a company with a market share of 0.6% [1] is changing global transportation? It's fascinating to me how people seem to vastly underestimate the actual volume of the global car market while overestimating the impact of unicorns. In order to even make a dent in the global market, getting into the double digits would be required. Even in the market "dominated" by Tesla (e.g. plug-in EVs), their market share is a combined 16.6%, meaning more than 83% of EVs are made by other companies [2]... Tesla is to the car market quite literally what Apple is in the desktop PC and smartphone markets - a "dominating force" with a tiny market share in the global market. [1] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/international/2019-full-year-international-worldwide-car-sales/ https://www.best-selling-cars.com/international/2019-full-ye... [2] https://insideevs.com/news/396177/global-ev-sales-december-2019/ https://insideevs.com/news/396177/global-ev-sales-december-2...
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    Call me pro tesla if you will but I think you're underestimating the influence Tesla has had and is having on the whole planet. Few years ago they were a ridicule curiosity. Now electric vehicles are everywhere, trucks are on the way.
    - qayxc 6y ago
      It's highly debatable whether this was due to Tesla or actual legislation, though. CO² fleet restriction forced the hand of automakers, not 3% EV market share. A substantial portion of Tesla's operational income comes from CO² certificates from automakers that don't meet the CO² restrictions, by the way [1]. Also something that people tend to overlook. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300393/tesla-fiat-chrysler-credits-european-union-emissions-fines https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300393/tesla-fiat-chrysl...
golemiprague 6y ago
It's also the whole idea is stupid, unlike spaceX and the boring company which took some technology which was used thousands of times and now trying to incrementally improve it, the hyperloop is basically a maglev in a vacuum. But there are only 2 or 3 high speed maglevs operational right now, shouldn't we wait until there are at least 100 maglev lines before we go to the next stage of sticking them into a pipe? Did we already reaped all the benefits of a regular maglev line like we did with space crafts or tunnelling machines? It's no wonder Musk didn't create a company, he just through a stupid idea into the air and all kind of other delusional companies are wasting investor's money on it.
scoopertrooper 6y ago
> “Mostly this would be for freight,” says Mark Patton, who oversees transport plans for the Columbus region. Paul Judge, who runs a thriving plastics manufacturer, Axium, in the city, says he would welcome it if it meant he could run a big factory, cheaply, in one spot and ship his billions of units of shampoo bottles, hand-sanitisers and the like to markets in the region. This makes zero sense to me. Surely, there must be a law of decreasing returns in supply chain latency. How could reducing delivery times times to hyperloop levels possibly provide a reasonable pay-off period, given the considerable cost of building and maintaining a subterranean vacuum tube train network?
- richardw 6y ago
  Let’s think it out (as in: add your thoughts). If it’s for goods, you don’t need a human size pod. You can scale pods to a size that represents goods that make sense to transport quickly. Obviously you want benefits that come from standardisation, like containers give you. Fully automated transport between all major cities for anything less than a metre diameter? I think that looks like the future. Mail, Amazon, fresh produce, run as a stream rather than in large batches, automatically routed, staying off highways. More efficient stock management that can react to surges in demand. Charge for it with spot pricing so high value items get priority. Edit: produce sounds a bit silly but taken to extremes might be interesting. When you deliver a ton of lettuce, it’s sold as a stream. Someone gets the fresh stuff and someone gets the three-day old stuff. If you can reorder every 30m, everyone gets fresh. Smaller shelves and stores, maybe no store except online.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    There are two huge problems here: First, very little freight is latency sensitive. The vast majority of cargo is cost sensitive, which is why most bulk goods coming from abroad arrive via cargo ship rather than airplane. There are a ton of companies that’ll accept days or weeks of delay to reduce overall cost; so a loop must compete with rail freight and semi trucks on cost. Theoretically a cargo hyper loop network could compete with domestic air freight, but I find the idea that air freight alone could cover the cost of a hyper loop network hard to buy. This is doubly true when you consider the fact that air freight shares costs with commercial passenger travel, both in terms of infrastructure and vehicle development. Second, they’re already working on automating existing railroads. There’s no particular reason why a hyper loop is necessary to automate a train, and we’re already seeing some of the very long haul train routes in Australia being automated. This comes with the benefit of much lower development time and cost, since it allows for the reuse of the most expensive bit of infrastructure: the rails themselves.
LordHeini 6y ago
All this stuff does not solve the simple problem of moving the people to the rails to begin with. Living in Germany, i can get onto an ICE and tear through the country at 280 km/h at any time (usually with huge delays though). But often people still don't, for a few reasons which will be true for any technology, replacing the standard trains. One reason is, that transportation is always a door to door problem and if the transport from and to the train stations sucks, the whole system will not be used. Who wants to deal with changeovers from buses to trains all the time, if those have horrible working hours, constant delays or long waiting times? The whole public transport system must be comprehensive, always available, reliable and fast. Being partially fast solves nothing.
ajuc 6y ago
Hyperloop makes much more sense on Mars than on Earth. You need shielding anyway and the pressure gradient is much smaller, so the pipes don't need to be so thick, and leaks aren't so dangerous.
SubiculumCode 6y ago
High speed transportation could cause an exodus to areas with sparser populations but maneable commutes to city centers. Live in Utah, work in SF
hawski 6y ago
Off-topic: whenever I see a post here with much more comments then up-votes I suspect a train wreck of a comment section. Looking through it confirms my suspicion. I wonder how many unique commenters are here, and whether unique commenters to overall comments ratio is also a good indicator of quality. From my perspective the best links have not more then around 350 up-votes (often less then 200) and less then third of that comments.
temptemptemp111 6y ago
Amazing how unintelligent all of the engineers replying in this thread are... It is objectively true that having all planes in the air flying the same exact path is idiotic. Ditto for fast pods on the ground. Plus take all of the downsides of not having an atmosphere. Plus take all of the downsides of someone being able to shoot a $10 bullet anywhere along the side of this and you have a shock wave traveling the speed of sound that will destroy any pods within about a mile of the hole (and all of the others if they don't have an intelligent emergency braking system). This whole thing is a joke and anyone who thinks Elon isn't an actor has their head so far up their ass they have no place commenting on the web concerning "space travel" or any related topics.
yodelshady 6y ago
For "short" (< 500 mile?) journeys, a plane wastes a lot of fuel climbing to altitude. Hyperloop has an advantage there. But for those journeys, high-speed or even regular-speed rail is tolerable. The challenge a train has in enabling those journeys is the last mile, which is why trains work in older cities. I can, and do, get off a train terminus in the town centre and walk/cycle/bus to my destination. For longer journeys, I'm not sure there's a technical case for hyperloop over a plane even with zero land cost - planes at altitude are good at what they do. The challenge a plane has in enabling those journeys is that, whilst a plane doesn't need much land in total, it needs an awful lot at the terminus. So it's a last ten miles, not a last mile. However, a good shuttle service can solve that.
- bagacrap 6y ago
  it's not that planes need a lot of space, it's that many airports are ridiculously large to accommodate many planes, and far away from city centers. Those are choices made perhaps due to noise or pollution, but there are exceptions where airports are inside the city and small enough to walk from end to end, such as Burbank in Southern California. Why is there a tendency to build a few huge airports instead of smaller regional ones?
johnwalkr 6y ago
This is such a joke. I remember when it was first described, I predicted that it would do nothing but derail legitimate rail projects, and that's exactly what's happened in California city councils. People have been sold the idea of taking their car on the train like a ferry, for $5 instead of proper public transit, and it will never happen. Vacuum equipment is notoriously difficult to maintain, especially sealing of moving parts. It was proposed to be cheap in part because you "just" make let the tube thermally expand and contract at the stations, rather than at regular intervals like rail. Based on the distances proposed, at California temperatures, you'd need roughly +/-20m of expansion capability, at each station. And you need this at the point where you are sealing things, and starting/stopping cars, having people move in and out (well, not many people because the capacity is a joke), and cleaning up vomit. To the safety standards for transportation. Plus all the same problems a normal train has, like getting right-of-way. Good luck with that. One of the points in the proposal was "assuming 2.5G is an acceptable acceleration..." 2.5-3G is typical of a roller coaster, although the more intense one go to 5G or so. Should have never made if off the napkin.
floppiplopp 6y ago
A car salesman who talks the public into investing huge budgets into a mass transportation system that will never efficiently work and is basically a huge was of taxpayer money? Why would Elongated Muskrat do that, I wonder?
woodandsteel 6y ago
The article presents the expert case for why hyperloop is doomed to fail. Normally in this sort of situation, I assume the experts are correct, but not in this case. Let me explain why. The reason is that we have been in this situation several times before with a Musk idea. The experts all said it was completely crazy, but nonetheless it succeeded spectacularly. The reason the ideas succeeded is Musk is a genius and as a consequence he thinks things out much better than the experts, who are not geniuses, do. I am not saying that hyperloop will succeed. No one succeeds all the time, and perhaps this time Musk will fail. I am just saying it seems to me virtually certain he is quite aware of all the factors that the experts say would cause hyperloop to succeed, and has developed surprising solutions to them, and there is a good chance these solutions will succeed.

107 points by jkuria 6y ago

Did you know that LIGO designers had to add earthen berms to protect their vacuum pipes from bullets? Not to mention the throughput issues, the energy budget, the cost of construction, the right-of-way issues... Let's be frank: Hyperloop is dumb, and people who are spending money on it are too. You have better things to do with your time than analyzing it or defending it, and so do I.

jjoonathan 6y ago
> Did you know that LIGO designers had to add earthen berms to protect their vacuum pipes from bullets? No, that's hilarious, where can I read more?
- Miraste 6y ago
  This article[0] talks about how locals were shooting at it, although it doesn't mention the berms (talking to the sheriff must not have worked out). I think a hyperloop could avoid this problem by not locating in Louisiana. [0] https://www.225batonrouge.com/article/good-vibrations https://www.225batonrouge.com/article/good-vibrations
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    What do you do when a terrorist shoots a hyperloop tube causing a pressure wave that will kill everyone inside?
    - yellow_postit 6y ago
      You avoid building it (above ground at least) in the first place
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Even building it below ground doesn't work, they just have to punch a hole in the station while it is pressurized.
        nytgop77 6y ago
        How much damage would a bullet hole actually do? If the hole stays of fixed diameter, its throughput would be small compared to the volume of the tube, so pressure would increase gradually. So, how feasible is it that hole would not increase? What hyperloop designs are there? 10 inch thick steel throughout whole length?
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        The designs I've seen had very thin tubes. Certainly not anywhere close to 10 inch thick steel, no. The designs I've seen had thicknesses close to or under one inch. A 50 cal APDS bullet would punch clean through the first layer and would likely leave an inch thick hole, and would likely cause significant damage on the other side if not penetrate it outright. This is almost certainly sufficient to cause explosive pressurization, which would likely cause immediately more damage and eventually create a powerful shockwave that would destroy anything in the tube. Of course, a bomb next to the wall would be much worse. If it was a 10 inch thick steel tube, it would be much better, but also ten times more expensive, making it prohibitively expensive.
      - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        A digging / drilling accident, an earthquake or sinkhole. If we are still talking about terrorists, they grab a shovel?
    - The_Double 6y ago
      What do you do when a terrorist places a derailing device [0] on a piece of rail track that will harm and potentially kill many people inside? [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derail
      - marvin 6y ago
        You never ever build railroads again, obviously, and deride everyone that plans building them.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Derailing a railroad is a complicated endeavor that will likely get detected and the train stopped, and even in the most catastrophic event only a very small fraction of the occupancy of one train will be killed. Whereas a catastrophic dépressurisation event on a hyperloop will assuredly kill everyone inside. The amount of energy stored in such a pressure differential is equivalent to many hundreds of tons of TNT. It's not comparable at all.
      - nytgop77 6y ago
        Derailed train seems to injure most passangers, but kill only few of them [1] [2]. It would seem that hyperloop would be more similar to a plane - more deaths than injuries. Also damage to infrastructure, would be more than a few rails. (please educate me if I'm wrong) [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Washington_train_derailment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Washington_train_derail... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_(2010%E2%80%932019) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_(2010...
      - liability 6y ago
        If you derailed a train, you'd lose what, tens of millions of dollars worth of locomotives, cars, and maybe a mile of track? When a hypertunnel explosively pressurizes, chances are you'd lose tens of billions of dollars of tube, plus anything that was anywhere in it.
    - stevehawk 6y ago
      What do you do when American citizens shoot at airplanes? Quit flying? Yesterday an Air Force helicopter was shot at and the pilot injured. Not to mention the number of citizens pointing lasers at cockpits. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/virginia/military-helicopter-shot-at-emergency-landing-in-manassas/65-6c3e7a3d-be07-4622-b6fa-aac0d4a5cbcf https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/virginia/military-h... You can't refuse to do something just because you're scared of a few bad actors. Otherwise we have to stop making cars (they get driven into crowds), building tall buildings (they get bombed or have aircraft flown into them), drinking public water (they get threatened with poisoning attempts), blah blah blah.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        When an airplane is shot at by a civilian, in 99.999% of cases there will be no big issues (read : multiple deaths). Making an entire transportation system with hundreds of thousands of people inside that can all be killed instantly by a single bullet or bomb is insane lunacy.
agumonkey 6y ago
As dumb as the hyperloop projects may be, I think it's dwarfed by all the other money spending elsewhere. We can just look at it from afar and enjoy the mythbuster-XL show

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

brunoqc 6y ago

https://youtu.be/2h6Cz4hwuEI https://youtu.be/2h6Cz4hwuEI How legit is that video and YouTuber?

_ph_ 6y ago
A very bad piece. The video uses the very techniques of showing shiny renders to make its point it critisizes. Also mixes up a lot of facts and pretends things are in a context which are not. While there is valid criticism of the Hyperloop concept, this video certainly isn't.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
Not sure about this video in particular, but I remember thunderfoot being pretty thorough and accurate in the past.
baking 6y ago
He is awfully repetitive and his earlier videos on the subject are more informative, but he's basically right. If the basic science disagrees, it must be a scam until proven otherwise. Plenty of studies were done on the accuracy of labs done on finger sticks before Theranos, but investors were not paying attention.
vwat 6y ago
It’s not legit at all. I’ve always been a fan, and all his busted videos in the past featured one very important feature: the violation of thermodynamics. He always showed why a product was physically impossible. But he doesn’t do that with a hyperloop. And ultimately, if you see through the repetition and downright nastiness, you see that his argument is essentially “hyperloop is very expensive, it would be unsafe and render artists don’t know science.” I wouldn’t have minded if he hadn’t taken that low shot at Elon when a rocket blew up on the pad. Honestly, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he started targeting Elon, with the sudden and notable lack of violation-of-physics, around the same time he started pushing his channel to have more engagement and make more money. TLDR: I’ve seen all his videos and his hyperloop videos basically lack substance. Scott Manley is a much better source of opinions on such things.

cs702 6y ago

"A hyperloop system involves passengers or freight transported by pods elevated by magnets, which travel within raised pipes. The pods can be propelled at 620mph (1,000kph), says Jay Walder, boss of Virgin Hyperloop One, one of the firms pushing the idea. At that pace 'you could move between Columbus and Chicago in 40 minutes', he says, so covering the 460 miles many hours quicker than by driving and at a cost (and overall carbon impact) that he says would be lower than flying." If the economics work, for both people and goods, and if the environmental externalities are lower than cars/trucks/trains/planes, then it would be great to have regional networks of hyperloops in the US. I say, bring it on!

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Lower than flying. Train are the most efficient, simplest and oldest form of land transport. Where do you get the idea that hyperloop can even approach efficiency of a car, with all the energy wasted on high speed and keeping up near vacuum?
manigandham 6y ago
It already exists for freight. We have a large train network that is extremely efficient. Decreasing carrying capacity while vastly increasing energy costs isn't worth it just for a gain in speed.

jeffreyrogers 6y ago

Hyperloop has sex appeal, but it seems like Maglev or just plain old high speed rail makes more sense from an economics perspective. I can't imagine it's cheap to keep a tube evacuated. Either way, it seems good to try and build these sort of high-tech industries in the US.

the8472 6y ago
The speed is supposed to be even higher than maglev, so it can compete with planes over longer distances. But yes, any kind of high speed public transport would be great.
TylerE 6y ago
It doesn't have to be that good a vacuum. It's probably really no more expensive than conventional high speed rail. The hyperloop proposal is operating at approximately 1 millibar of pressure. That sounds CLOSE to a vacuum..and it is, roughly 0.01 atm, but with vacuums getting down to around there is easy. Getting down to, say, 0.00001 atm is much much much harder.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  But you aren't just doing it a chemistry lab. You're doing it in an enormous tube and the tube has openings to allow pods in and out, so it's a lot more complicated.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  From a safety perspective 0.01 atm = 0 atm. That tube is either very dangerous, or very overbuilt and expensive.
riffic 6y ago
common misconception. Hyperloop tubes were never meant to be fully evacuated, they operate at pressure differentials with air bearings (imagine a cylindrical air hockey table).
- captainbland 6y ago

smikhanov 6y ago

3.5 years on my prediction holds well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811365

joering2 6y ago
you need to fix your clock, its not 2027 yet.
- fastball 6y ago
  The prediction holds, not the prediction is decided.
chroma 6y ago
With any new technology, the likelihood of failure is high but the expected value is positive. As Nat Friedman (CEO of GitHub) said: "Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money."
- smikhanov 6y ago
  > the likelihood of failure is high but the expected value is positive Except when the new technology was proposed and marketed by a loony, of course.
  - marvin 6y ago
    Yes, all those poor Tesla IPO investors who got misled by a loony are lining up for shareholder lawsuits and yelling for prosecution, due to the obviously financially irresponsible management of their investment. (Refresh my memory here - would an 88X return on investment after IPO be classified as high returns on a high-risk investment?)
    - smikhanov 6y ago
      I sense some notes of disagreement with calling the Tesla CEO "a loony"

auganov 6y ago

Read it as Pipes of Fantasy. Years ago I remember reading about miles long test tracks being built. I haven't been following developments surrounding this at all, but as far as I can tell there are still no serious test tracks, why? The ones that are out there are supposedly too short to get to full speed (or anywhere close to it!). Given the hype surrounding it I have a hard time believing money is the limiting factor here. Sounds to me like the tech just isn't there and won't be anytime soon. And having a full test track would simply kill the deal flow. EDIT: so just to make sure I'm not misremembering anything, here's a story from 2015 https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873014/hyperloop-technologies-elon-musk-las-vegas-land-purchase https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873014/hyperloop-technol... "The near-term goal is to construct a 3-kilometer test track to conduct a full-speed prototype." And it appears to me that what was supposed to be this 3km test track is a 500m Virgin Hyperloop test track today at the same location with some of the same people involved. So they might have land secured for the original length already. "That startup has plans to build an 8-kilometer in Quay Valley" "he expects to conduct the first test with live passengers in 32 months"

jccooper 6y ago
Elon seems to have moved on to non-vaccuum underground tunnels via The Boring Company, which is actually doing real projects. Though apparently there are still Hyperloop competitions planned. The 2020 one was supposed to be "in a 10km vacuum tunnel with a curve", though that may be stalled by, well, obvious current events. https://tunnelinsider.com/the-2020-hyperloop-competition-will-be-in-a-six-mile-curved-tunnel/ https://tunnelinsider.com/the-2020-hyperloop-competition-wil... No one else seems to have quite the combination of money and crazy to go much further with Hyperloop.
- halfFact 6y ago
  Regular slow rail and siphoning tax dollars? Sounds like an Elon company.
  - DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
    Username checks out.

AlexandrB 6y ago

This is evergreen when talking about Hyperloop: http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/ http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/ The problems with building this have nothing to do with technology but with right-of-way, investment, and politics. If those factors were solved, we'd already have high-speed rail in places where Hyperloop has been proposed. The fact that we don't says that Hyperloop is unlikely to be feasible as well.

grecy 6y ago
Which is why the first Hyperloop will probably be built outside the USA. Melbourne to Sydney always seemed like a good choice to me. It's one of the busiest air routes in the world[1], there is obviously tons of solar, lots of open land beside the existing road, no seismic activity to speak of and it's a good long distance to get up to speed (~1000km). [1] (actually #3 in the world by number of passengers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_routes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_...
- cyrrus 6y ago
  Seismic activity is apparently not really an issue. The damage from earthquakes tends to be a ripple of the ground in the first few meters and that’s it.
  - rossjudson 6y ago
    There's a second reason. The hyperloop tubes can slide back and forth on the pylons. If you shake the ground underneath them, the pylons can move around but the tube (tube system) stays still (like moving your hand underneath a baseball -- the ball stays still, rolling).
  - cossatot 6y ago
    This is false. In the case of the original Hyperloop idea which crosses the San Andreas Fault, a major earthquake on that fault in line with the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco should produce accelerations the ground surface within 10 km of the fault in either direction of around 1 g (i.e., 9.8 m s^-2), corresponding to Modified Mercalli intensities of disruption to people and infrastructure of X ("Extreme: Some well-built wooden structures destroyed; most masonry and frame structures destroyed with foundations. Rails bent")[1] Vertical Accelerations above 1 g will literally throw anything not bolted to the ground into the air. Not much will make it through this unscathed. This isn't to say that engineering around these sorts of events is impossible. The Transalaksa oil pipeline crosses the Denali fault, and during the M7.9 Denali earthquake in 2002, the pipeline survived because it was built on sliders near the fault so it would bend when the earth shifted instead of breaking [3]. However, this is a big bend in the pipe; the lateral displacements are on the order of 5-10 m in an earthquake of this size, over a similar across-fault distance. Do you want to go at Hyperloop velocities through a tube with a bend this sharp? [1]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.833.7497&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.833... [2]: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/modified-mercalli-intensity-scale https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/modified-mercalli-intensit... [3]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2003/fs014-03/pipeline.html https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2003/fs014-03/pipeline.html

Animats 6y ago

The Dubai hyperloop project is supposedly proceeding. The 10km test track was supposed to open this year. Can't find any info later than January 2020. The Dubai to Abu Dhabi link is the ideal case. The route is mostly flat, open desert. Funding is available. There is government support. There's considerable traffic between those points. If that doesn't work, not much else will.

jcranmer 6y ago
If you've found info on its progress as recent as January 2020, you're doing better than me.
rsynnott 6y ago
And, crucially, no-one cares about the economics. Dubai has never paid too much attention to that with mega projects.
9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
If built, it would compete directly with Etihad Rail, which is building a regular rail network throughout the entire UAE and already has its first phase operational: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etihad_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etihad_Rail This focuses primarily on cargo, but is built with passenger trains at up to 200 km/h in mind. And most Hyperloop business plans also seem to rely heavily on freight.
- Animats 6y ago
  Interesting. The locomotives are Diesel-electrics made by what used to be a locomotive recycling company in the US. Then Caterpillar bought them, and they now have some decent products, apparently. The railroad's main job is transporting mined sulfur to ports for export. This is a total contrast to "hyperloops". It does a useful but boring job with useful but boring technology.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

GuB-42 6y ago

Can someone explain me how Hyperloop is supposed to work? There are so many things wrong with it. - Hyperloop is a vactrain, a century old idea, and to this day, despite numerous attempts, nothing came close to a working prototype, let alone something production-ready. - By contrast, high-speed trains carries millions of passengers every day in many parts of the world. They are safe, comfortable, and commercially viable. And for hyperloop-like distances (500-1000km), you can expect a 3h trip. It is not 40 minutes, but considering that high speed trains typically go downtown to downtown and usually don't require you to show up more than a few minutes in advance, it is often the fastest way to go in practice. Hyperloop doesn't bring much to the table compared to high speed trains. - The individual pods are tiny compared to a train. And because of the high speeds involved, they certainly require a lot of spacing to stay safe, it means low capacities. - There is a long list of technical challenges, most of them require engineering feats that have never been done on a large scale. It is an Apollo-scale experimental project presented as a commercial venture. - Progress so far has been laughable, none of the hard problems have been solved. What about thermal expansion, the ability to maintain a vacuum while allowing people in and out, safety systems, the civil engineering required... The experimental pods are scaled down with no space for passengers. They can go fast, which is nice, but at 460 km/h they are still below conventional full scale high-speed train records. Not really a technical challenge but it still ticks me off: - Hyperloop is championed by Elon Musk, but he actually has very little involvement in it. He owns none of the hyperloop companies, it is all "open-source", "community", etc.. Basically, besides being a sponsor for "competitions", it is all talk. I know that Elon Musk is far from stupid, he is a world-class businessman and a competent engineer. I can't believe he really sees Hyperloop as something viable. So for me it just a daring publicity stunt (a borderline scam IMHO), something that Elon Musk is also known to be good at. After all, the story says that SpaceX started as a publicity stunt. He wanted to buy a Russian ICBM, repurposed to plant something on Mars. It didn't work, and the fact that he couldn't do it gave him the idea that he could be a market for a rocket company. If you look at Hyperloop, it is essentially a battery powered electric car running inside a tunnel. And guess what, he makes battery powered electric cars, and now tunnels. I have a few doubts about Boring, but at least, it is concrete, and there is always a need for tunnels, even if it is just to dig sewer pipes.

6y ago

gumby 6y ago

What is the economic value of transporting factory output from point to point that fast? You’ll likely have to truck it from there.

Havoc 6y ago

The mere fact that Musk is pushing it makes me very wary of betting against it. Sure he's not Tony Stark...but doesn't seem that far off either.

louisblytrhe 6y ago

https://insidethemagic-119e2.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/monorailcolorWATER.jpg https://insidethemagic-119e2.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

masswerk 6y ago

What I'm failing to understand about the Hyperloop concept (apart from all the issues with thermal expansion, maintaining a near vacuum, safety consideration and passenger capacity): In real life tracks will have to include curves, as there's already terrain, existing buildings, etc. Trains have to lean into curves, just like motorbikes. With high speeds, anything exceeding a more traditional maglev train, the angles required will become rather extreme with the track climbing up the sides of the tube. What is supposed to happen, if the train has to decrease speed below the planned cruising speed for the given section or even to halt? What about passengers inside? How could this pass any safety checks for mass transport operations? (Notably, this was the only new thing addressed by Musk's original "air hockey puck", front fan driven air cushion concept, as this could have avoided any fixed installations, like rails or guards, (at the cost of other stability issues) and could have allowed a variable leaning angle. But, since this feature has been universally dismissed, how is this supposed to work?)

johnwalkr 6y ago
No problem, 2.5G was mentioned as an acceptable value for experienced acceleration. Do you like roller coasters?
- masswerk 6y ago
  It's about roll counteracting the parallelogram of (lateral) forces and resulting orientation in space, not linear acceleration.

rdiddly 6y ago

"Dawdling America" seems pretty unlikely to come from behind or even catch up, which is why we need fantasies.

sudosysgen 6y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs This video has most of the points about why the Hyperloop is a ridiculous idea that will never work.

pilaf 6y ago
That video doesn't talk about the Hyperloop at all. You're getting the Boring Company's Loop mixed up with the Hyperloop, which despite the similar-sounding names have close to no relation.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Ah yes, I posted the wrong video. My bad.

9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago

http://archive.is/oy1hF http://archive.is/oy1hF

manigandham 6y ago

The vac-train concept is from 1799. Maglev tech is decades in production. I remember a Discovery Channel show 20 years ago about trains traveling 5000mph through tunnels at the bottom of the ocean to cross continents in an hour. Hyperloop is fantastical renaming of old tech without solving any of the fundamental problems of economy, geography, energy and politics. We're capable of building incredible projects if only we had unlimited funding and will. It's nice to see Tesla and Spacex changing global transportation so maybe better train systems will finally get some attention, but right now this is just not realistic.

qayxc 6y ago
Please remind me again how a company with a market share of 0.6% [1] is changing global transportation? It's fascinating to me how people seem to vastly underestimate the actual volume of the global car market while overestimating the impact of unicorns. In order to even make a dent in the global market, getting into the double digits would be required. Even in the market "dominated" by Tesla (e.g. plug-in EVs), their market share is a combined 16.6%, meaning more than 83% of EVs are made by other companies [2]... Tesla is to the car market quite literally what Apple is in the desktop PC and smartphone markets - a "dominating force" with a tiny market share in the global market. [1] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/international/2019-full-year-international-worldwide-car-sales/ https://www.best-selling-cars.com/international/2019-full-ye... [2] https://insideevs.com/news/396177/global-ev-sales-december-2019/ https://insideevs.com/news/396177/global-ev-sales-december-2...
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Call me pro tesla if you will but I think you're underestimating the influence Tesla has had and is having on the whole planet. Few years ago they were a ridicule curiosity. Now electric vehicles are everywhere, trucks are on the way.
  - qayxc 6y ago
    It's highly debatable whether this was due to Tesla or actual legislation, though. CO² fleet restriction forced the hand of automakers, not 3% EV market share. A substantial portion of Tesla's operational income comes from CO² certificates from automakers that don't meet the CO² restrictions, by the way [1]. Also something that people tend to overlook. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300393/tesla-fiat-chrysler-credits-european-union-emissions-fines https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300393/tesla-fiat-chrysl...

golemiprague 6y ago

It's also the whole idea is stupid, unlike spaceX and the boring company which took some technology which was used thousands of times and now trying to incrementally improve it, the hyperloop is basically a maglev in a vacuum. But there are only 2 or 3 high speed maglevs operational right now, shouldn't we wait until there are at least 100 maglev lines before we go to the next stage of sticking them into a pipe? Did we already reaped all the benefits of a regular maglev line like we did with space crafts or tunnelling machines? It's no wonder Musk didn't create a company, he just through a stupid idea into the air and all kind of other delusional companies are wasting investor's money on it.

scoopertrooper 6y ago

> “Mostly this would be for freight,” says Mark Patton, who oversees transport plans for the Columbus region. Paul Judge, who runs a thriving plastics manufacturer, Axium, in the city, says he would welcome it if it meant he could run a big factory, cheaply, in one spot and ship his billions of units of shampoo bottles, hand-sanitisers and the like to markets in the region. This makes zero sense to me. Surely, there must be a law of decreasing returns in supply chain latency. How could reducing delivery times times to hyperloop levels possibly provide a reasonable pay-off period, given the considerable cost of building and maintaining a subterranean vacuum tube train network?

richardw 6y ago
Let’s think it out (as in: add your thoughts). If it’s for goods, you don’t need a human size pod. You can scale pods to a size that represents goods that make sense to transport quickly. Obviously you want benefits that come from standardisation, like containers give you. Fully automated transport between all major cities for anything less than a metre diameter? I think that looks like the future. Mail, Amazon, fresh produce, run as a stream rather than in large batches, automatically routed, staying off highways. More efficient stock management that can react to surges in demand. Charge for it with spot pricing so high value items get priority. Edit: produce sounds a bit silly but taken to extremes might be interesting. When you deliver a ton of lettuce, it’s sold as a stream. Someone gets the fresh stuff and someone gets the three-day old stuff. If you can reorder every 30m, everyone gets fresh. Smaller shelves and stores, maybe no store except online.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  There are two huge problems here: First, very little freight is latency sensitive. The vast majority of cargo is cost sensitive, which is why most bulk goods coming from abroad arrive via cargo ship rather than airplane. There are a ton of companies that’ll accept days or weeks of delay to reduce overall cost; so a loop must compete with rail freight and semi trucks on cost. Theoretically a cargo hyper loop network could compete with domestic air freight, but I find the idea that air freight alone could cover the cost of a hyper loop network hard to buy. This is doubly true when you consider the fact that air freight shares costs with commercial passenger travel, both in terms of infrastructure and vehicle development. Second, they’re already working on automating existing railroads. There’s no particular reason why a hyper loop is necessary to automate a train, and we’re already seeing some of the very long haul train routes in Australia being automated. This comes with the benefit of much lower development time and cost, since it allows for the reuse of the most expensive bit of infrastructure: the rails themselves.

LordHeini 6y ago

All this stuff does not solve the simple problem of moving the people to the rails to begin with. Living in Germany, i can get onto an ICE and tear through the country at 280 km/h at any time (usually with huge delays though). But often people still don't, for a few reasons which will be true for any technology, replacing the standard trains. One reason is, that transportation is always a door to door problem and if the transport from and to the train stations sucks, the whole system will not be used. Who wants to deal with changeovers from buses to trains all the time, if those have horrible working hours, constant delays or long waiting times? The whole public transport system must be comprehensive, always available, reliable and fast. Being partially fast solves nothing.

ajuc 6y ago

Hyperloop makes much more sense on Mars than on Earth. You need shielding anyway and the pressure gradient is much smaller, so the pipes don't need to be so thick, and leaks aren't so dangerous.

SubiculumCode 6y ago

High speed transportation could cause an exodus to areas with sparser populations but maneable commutes to city centers. Live in Utah, work in SF

hawski 6y ago

Off-topic: whenever I see a post here with much more comments then up-votes I suspect a train wreck of a comment section. Looking through it confirms my suspicion. I wonder how many unique commenters are here, and whether unique commenters to overall comments ratio is also a good indicator of quality. From my perspective the best links have not more then around 350 up-votes (often less then 200) and less then third of that comments.

temptemptemp111 6y ago

Amazing how unintelligent all of the engineers replying in this thread are... It is objectively true that having all planes in the air flying the same exact path is idiotic. Ditto for fast pods on the ground. Plus take all of the downsides of not having an atmosphere. Plus take all of the downsides of someone being able to shoot a $10 bullet anywhere along the side of this and you have a shock wave traveling the speed of sound that will destroy any pods within about a mile of the hole (and all of the others if they don't have an intelligent emergency braking system). This whole thing is a joke and anyone who thinks Elon isn't an actor has their head so far up their ass they have no place commenting on the web concerning "space travel" or any related topics.

yodelshady 6y ago

For "short" (< 500 mile?) journeys, a plane wastes a lot of fuel climbing to altitude. Hyperloop has an advantage there. But for those journeys, high-speed or even regular-speed rail is tolerable. The challenge a train has in enabling those journeys is the last mile, which is why trains work in older cities. I can, and do, get off a train terminus in the town centre and walk/cycle/bus to my destination. For longer journeys, I'm not sure there's a technical case for hyperloop over a plane even with zero land cost - planes at altitude are good at what they do. The challenge a plane has in enabling those journeys is that, whilst a plane doesn't need much land in total, it needs an awful lot at the terminus. So it's a last ten miles, not a last mile. However, a good shuttle service can solve that.

bagacrap 6y ago
it's not that planes need a lot of space, it's that many airports are ridiculously large to accommodate many planes, and far away from city centers. Those are choices made perhaps due to noise or pollution, but there are exceptions where airports are inside the city and small enough to walk from end to end, such as Burbank in Southern California. Why is there a tendency to build a few huge airports instead of smaller regional ones?

johnwalkr 6y ago

This is such a joke. I remember when it was first described, I predicted that it would do nothing but derail legitimate rail projects, and that's exactly what's happened in California city councils. People have been sold the idea of taking their car on the train like a ferry, for $5 instead of proper public transit, and it will never happen. Vacuum equipment is notoriously difficult to maintain, especially sealing of moving parts. It was proposed to be cheap in part because you "just" make let the tube thermally expand and contract at the stations, rather than at regular intervals like rail. Based on the distances proposed, at California temperatures, you'd need roughly +/-20m of expansion capability, at each station. And you need this at the point where you are sealing things, and starting/stopping cars, having people move in and out (well, not many people because the capacity is a joke), and cleaning up vomit. To the safety standards for transportation. Plus all the same problems a normal train has, like getting right-of-way. Good luck with that. One of the points in the proposal was "assuming 2.5G is an acceptable acceleration..." 2.5-3G is typical of a roller coaster, although the more intense one go to 5G or so. Should have never made if off the napkin.

floppiplopp 6y ago

A car salesman who talks the public into investing huge budgets into a mass transportation system that will never efficiently work and is basically a huge was of taxpayer money? Why would Elongated Muskrat do that, I wonder?

woodandsteel 6y ago

The article presents the expert case for why hyperloop is doomed to fail. Normally in this sort of situation, I assume the experts are correct, but not in this case. Let me explain why. The reason is that we have been in this situation several times before with a Musk idea. The experts all said it was completely crazy, but nonetheless it succeeded spectacularly. The reason the ideas succeeded is Musk is a genius and as a consequence he thinks things out much better than the experts, who are not geniuses, do. I am not saying that hyperloop will succeed. No one succeeds all the time, and perhaps this time Musk will fail. I am just saying it seems to me virtually certain he is quite aware of all the factors that the experts say would cause hyperloop to succeed, and has developed surprising solutions to them, and there is a good chance these solutions will succeed.