12 ms·

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 buildin

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
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  The first Hyperloop will probably never be built. It's an absurd technology, for a great many reasons.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  > lots of open land beside the existing road, Then you can just build a conventional 300kph high speed train and track. They are 'off the shelf' commodities these days. It will still be competitive with flying.
  - grecy 6y ago
    > It will still be competitive with flying. Flight time is 1 hr 20 mins. At 300kph it's going to take a high-speed train almost 3 hours.
    - liability 6y ago
      Factor in time wasted at the airport when you show up early because the TSA is unreliable. I always give myself at least an hour extra and sometimes that's cutting it razor close. And frankly not being subjected to the TSA is generally worth at least a few hours of my time. I'll sooner drive six hours than fly one because of those worthless assholes.
      - grecy 6y ago
        Australia doesn't have the TSA...
breck 6y ago
Agreed. > She says the pipes could come up on state-owned land beside motorways or (where they exist) railways. No time or planning should go into surface hyperloops. These things belong underground. 100x better.
- TylerE 6y ago
  Say what? That’s crazy talk. Underground would be many times more expensive, and has much worse failure modes. What happens if the train loses power?
  - alacombe 6y ago
    Didn't Musk's "Boring Company" solve the problem of underground boring cost ?
    - dexterdog 6y ago
      If you accept numbers from Elon you might believe this. Otherwise, no.
    - rumanator 6y ago
      No, Musk's Boring Company is a marketing company that just so happened to have bought COTS tunneling equipment.
  - j88439h84 6y ago
    They'll be stuck in a tunnel. Is that worse than being stuck in the desert?
    - TylerE 6y ago
      Yes, if you have no ventilation. If you're above ground you'd just pop an emergency hatch in the tube. You can't do that underground. I'd also point out that a hyperloop tunnel is a much worse place to be stuck in than a normal tunnel. In a normal tunnel there is room to walk alongside the tracks. In a hyperloop tunnel there is virtually no room between the car and tunnel - maybe an inch or two, tops.
ponker 6y ago
Not really, there’s a fourth factor not listed here, which is government vs. private. A government project will, for political reasons, need to support universal access, and a public transit system will have a hard time telling a person “you smell too bad to get on the bus.” A private company won’t have any such problems and can build only for the rich and middle class. The problem that Hyperloop solves is creating 1/20th the throughput at 1/20th the cost, which brings the project feasibility into the private sector domain and allows a product to be sold to the richest and/or cheapest-to-serve 1/20th of the market.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  Why is hyperloop 1/20th the cost? It seems like the expensive parts of high-speed rail (acquiring the land and moving earth to make a long straight path) would also apply.
  - ponker 6y ago
    Not if it’s underground. You can get the right of way much cheaper depending on what’s on top.
    - shajznnckfke 6y ago
      Ok, so how is this cheaper than high-speed rail in a tunnel? It seems to me that hyperloop is high speed rail with the addition of a vacuum, which gets you higher speed. The additional requirement of a giant vacuum tube should make the system cost more, not less. Personally, I’m rooting for Elon Musk to figure out how to make tunnels cheaply with the Boring Company, so we can take that tech and use it to build a bunch of subways. Traffic within urban areas and suburbs is a much bigger societal issue than intercity travel anyway. Subways are a proven solution, but somehow we lost the ability to dig tunnels economically so we stopped building them.
      - fragmede 6y ago
        Two of the largest sources of air pollution in the world are cars and airplanes, and Elon Musk has already been working on attacking the issue of car pollution. Imo extrapolating out from the combination of SpaceX and Starlink, subways are an obvious project for the Boring Company, especially once you have higher-speed boring machines. (Current boring machines move at about 10 meters/day.)
owenversteeg 6y ago
That "Gadgetbahn" article is great, but I do have one criticism. From the article: "If the idea is viable and the people behind it are competent, it should have attracted private investment, as there should be a potential to make profit selling the technology. After all, the proposal has been around for 23 years." High speed rail on a large scale is really something that has to come from the government. While there are small private HSR projects (e.x. Brightline, covering some 60 miles of the Florida coast), the big successes have all been governmental, and that shouldn't be surprising. The uncomfortable part of HSR, of course, is that no matter how perfect your government is, it's going to involve bulldozing some people's homes, conflicting with other government projects, and interfering with nature. Don't get me wrong, I'm not part of team "screw the law, bulldoze straight lines between cities, people and nature be damned". But there do need to be sacrifices made. And a strong, coordinated government can pass the laws and write the checks to make that happen. The interesting thing with HSR is that it is not about the technology. The TGV was operating at 300 km/h nearly 50 years ago, and that's the speed that most of the network operates at today. It's not about the safety (the TGV has never had a fatal accident in normal service) or even the cost (the TGV is also profitable!) It's about the land. A fairly small strip of land in a straight line. My hope is that as people realize this, we'll do what has to be done and tear down a few villages in order to save the planet. But that's politically unpalatable, so instead we have Gadgetbahnen.
- rtpg 6y ago
  High speed rail is also a bit of a red herring. In dense areas you’re not actually going to go fast! “Normal” trains would work fine and be helpful. TGV and Shinkansen go really far! But what makes people in France or Japan take the train a lot is much more around local trains that are just going at normal speeds.
  - noahtallen 6y ago
    I think the counterpoint in the US is that most cities are very far apart and there is practically nothing in between. Obviously places like the northeast corridor or the Bay Area are much more dense. But even a route from SF->Seattle is mostly traveling through non-dense areas. That gets even better across the west and Midwest
disk0 6y ago
first time I heard that term was in donoteat01's video on the loop[0], haven't got around to reading that post till now though (thanks for the reminder) [0] Elon Musk's "Loop" - It's bad, folks https://youtu.be/4dn6ZVpJLxs https://youtu.be/4dn6ZVpJLxs
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  donoteat01 is legitimately one of the greatest techno-political YouTubers.
  - tomcam 6y ago
    I agree and my politics are definitely not his
- mc32 6y ago
  His style reminds me of RedLetterMedia's takedown[1] of Star Wars, but more technical. [1]https://www.redlettermedia.com/plinkett-reviews/mr-plinketts-star-wars-the-phantom-menace-review https://www.redlettermedia.com/plinkett-reviews/mr-plinketts...
- TimSchumann 6y ago
  Great video, thanks for sharing it. Haven't heard of this guy before but he does a really nice breakdown.
jojobas 6y ago
Three words: vacuum expansion seals.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  There are multiple ways to solve this problem. It’s not a showstopper. 1) Bury the lines. Basically isothermal at depth. 2) insulate the tube and maintain stable temperature 3) use materials that don’t drastically change length with temperature 3) allow the tubes to change length. Put them on rollers. 4) use vacuum expansion joints just like us common in vacuum engineering. People act like vacuum is this new thing. Physicists (well, Engineers/technicians hired by physics projects) have been making really long tubes with extremely high vacuum and incredibly high tolerances. This is easy in comparison.
  - sroussey 6y ago
    Plus earthquakes
  - jbay808 6y ago
    Good point. A little hyperloop is nothing compared with CERN.
    - jojobas 6y ago
      Cern beam tube is 6.3cm in diameter. And, you know, it didn't have trains zooming in it at 600m/s.
      - scoopertrooper 6y ago
        Also it's not even that long, it's only about 27 km, which pales in comparison to the globe-crossing aspirations of the hyperloopers.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - liability 6y ago
keenmaster 6y ago
>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. I disagree with your conclusion. Hyperloop technology is so lucrative that it might galvanize America to update its long distance transportation infrastructure in a way that bullet trains couldn't have. Bullet trains: - Popularized when a huge network of new highways and slow rail were already built in America - Faced a suburban, car-loving culture Hyperloop: - 2-3x speed of bullet trains. Can change the way we perceive geographic distance. - Popularized during an increasingly urban culture with crumbling highway and train infrastructure - Cost isn't as much of a concern because a national hyperloop network would create a lot more value than a bullet train equivalent. If the government doesn't want to shoulder the full cost, companies gladly will (when the tech is ripe). I'm hoping for full government funding.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  > "Cost isn't as much of a concern because a national hyperloop network would create a lot more value than a bullet train equivalent." What is the basis for such claim? Most of the information I come across points in the opposite direction. Trains are a lot cheaper infrastructure wise, and have ~10x higher capacity. Many public transport infrastructure professionals consider hyperloop a joke because it can only move a fairly small amount of people. In UK we are running out of capacity on many rail lines. So why do you believe hyperloop would generate more revenue or indirect economic benefits compared to a modern high-speed rail?
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Especially since HSR isn’t experimental anymore, it’s approaching a century old. America could just buy the exact same parts either France or Japan uses.
- jojobas 6y ago
  High speed rail infringe mostly on planes' territory, not cars'. At 3x of bullet trains speed a curve radius of 2500m resolves to 2g lateral acceleration. For all purposes Hyperloop is very much like Theranos.
aaron695 6y ago
The entire point of the Hyperloop is to get around right of way and politics. That is it's design. That is exactly what Elon is doing. You might argue it can't do what it's setting out to achieve, but this has never been a technological solution. He's designed a technology to fit with current societal processes rather than the old, get society to accept a technology.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Exactly this. That’s why The Boring Company is focusing on reducing the costs of tunneling dramatically. And they started by just using existing technology. With that (and without the cost inflation that many corrupted projects experience), they were able to achieve about $10 per mile of tunnel. A lane of highway per direction is $1m to $8m depending on if it’s rural or urban. They’ve developed a new machine, Prufroc, that’s supposed to be much faster and capable of “porpoising” (ie angling back up and curving straight) so you can avoid having to excavate a deep station through other means. If they can get the cost equivalent to a typical surface street in urban areas, they can now compete with surface streets. Much easier to autonomously drive in purpose-built tunnels. Or put a train or a bike trail or moving walkway or whatever. So they are actually trying to solve the right problem. And using cars is a good idea because cars are really cheap per passenger in terms of upfront capital cost, and they meet the speed, autonomy, safety, and electrification requirements while also allowing use on just regular paved surfaces. If the one-dimensional autonomy works well, they might be able to reduce follow distance at speed enough to exceed a highway lane throughout. And with high occupancy, also a typical light rail train or whatever. Would be kind of neat to have autonomous driving at 120mph immune to weather and with low enough capital cost that we could afford to crisscross the country with them, without much impact to existing land uses. A clear win if it works. Actually, a clearer win than full autonomous driving on existing roads, as that might quickly clog up surface streets. Plus this is probably technically easier than perfected level 5 autonomy which is still a sort of open ended problem.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    > they were able to achieve about $10 per mile of tunnel Do you mean $10m per mile?
_ph_ 6y ago
I am disagreeing with the article. Of course, when designing/selling new train systems, a lot of showmanship and gadgetery are involved, but there are real shortcomings with current train systems which cause people to develop new technologies. First of all: trains are great, there are many places where they perform admirably. Many cities have a great subway network, countries like France, Japan, Taiwan and now China have great high speed reail networks. So if there are transportation problems to solve, it should be a no-brainer to consider traditional train systems first. However, there are shortcomings wiht traditional train systems, these new systems try to address. One big limitation for trains is, where to put the tracks. Inside cities, going underground usually is the only solution. With traditional rail, this is extremely expensive and also a slow process. In Munich, not log ago the digging for a new underground train line started - it is expected to take a whole decade and going to be quite expensive (which has delayed the project by another decade, as people were discussing costs). Outside of cities, rail is possible, but still faces problems to get the necessary ground. Noise is a further problems with trains. Finally, most traditional train systems are not operated autonomusly, so costs are too high for high frequencies and often enough there are just not enough drivers available. These shortcomings create a lot of creativity to address them. The Boring companie tries to lower tunnel costs by making them less in diameter. Other systems try carts which run on or hang from stilts, reducing the space needed or allowing the train installations to go on top of existing roads. Maglevs are still a huge topic. On the one side, they do allow higher speeds, as rails get mechanically challenging above 300kph. The only challenge for maglev is air resistance, there is no risk of derailing. Also, at any speed, maglevs are less noisy than rails, they can accelerate faster than rail and most importanly, go up much higher inclines. Maglev is therefore not only interesting for long-distance transportation, but also inside city regions, especially due to the lower noise and also because of autonomous operations. A good example is this maglev system: https://transportsystemboegl.com/ https://transportsystemboegl.com/ It is designed for city regions, fully autonomous and not just some technology concept, but ready-to-buy. It has been developed by a major construction company. That means, they won't just sell you some fancy technology, they are going to build the whole infrastructure for you ready to use. This is one of the two companies responsible for the quick building process at the Tesla Giga Berlin factory. They are basically factory producing the parts for industrial buildings and just assembling them on-site. (Ironically Volkswagen is also building a new factory for electric cars in Bremen, Germany at the moment and it looks exactly like what Tesla is building, as they ordered the factory from the same company)

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
sudosysgen 6y ago
The first Hyperloop will probably never be built. It's an absurd technology, for a great many reasons.
kwhitefoot 6y ago
> lots of open land beside the existing road, Then you can just build a conventional 300kph high speed train and track. They are 'off the shelf' commodities these days. It will still be competitive with flying.
- grecy 6y ago
  > It will still be competitive with flying. Flight time is 1 hr 20 mins. At 300kph it's going to take a high-speed train almost 3 hours.
  - liability 6y ago
    Factor in time wasted at the airport when you show up early because the TSA is unreliable. I always give myself at least an hour extra and sometimes that's cutting it razor close. And frankly not being subjected to the TSA is generally worth at least a few hours of my time. I'll sooner drive six hours than fly one because of those worthless assholes.
    - grecy 6y ago
      Australia doesn't have the TSA...

breck 6y ago

Agreed. > She says the pipes could come up on state-owned land beside motorways or (where they exist) railways. No time or planning should go into surface hyperloops. These things belong underground. 100x better.

TylerE 6y ago
Say what? That’s crazy talk. Underground would be many times more expensive, and has much worse failure modes. What happens if the train loses power?
- alacombe 6y ago
  Didn't Musk's "Boring Company" solve the problem of underground boring cost ?
  - dexterdog 6y ago
    If you accept numbers from Elon you might believe this. Otherwise, no.
  - rumanator 6y ago
    No, Musk's Boring Company is a marketing company that just so happened to have bought COTS tunneling equipment.
- j88439h84 6y ago
  They'll be stuck in a tunnel. Is that worse than being stuck in the desert?
  - TylerE 6y ago
    Yes, if you have no ventilation. If you're above ground you'd just pop an emergency hatch in the tube. You can't do that underground. I'd also point out that a hyperloop tunnel is a much worse place to be stuck in than a normal tunnel. In a normal tunnel there is room to walk alongside the tracks. In a hyperloop tunnel there is virtually no room between the car and tunnel - maybe an inch or two, tops.

ponker 6y ago

Not really, there’s a fourth factor not listed here, which is government vs. private. A government project will, for political reasons, need to support universal access, and a public transit system will have a hard time telling a person “you smell too bad to get on the bus.” A private company won’t have any such problems and can build only for the rich and middle class. The problem that Hyperloop solves is creating 1/20th the throughput at 1/20th the cost, which brings the project feasibility into the private sector domain and allows a product to be sold to the richest and/or cheapest-to-serve 1/20th of the market.

shajznnckfke 6y ago
Why is hyperloop 1/20th the cost? It seems like the expensive parts of high-speed rail (acquiring the land and moving earth to make a long straight path) would also apply.
- ponker 6y ago
  Not if it’s underground. You can get the right of way much cheaper depending on what’s on top.
  - shajznnckfke 6y ago
    Ok, so how is this cheaper than high-speed rail in a tunnel? It seems to me that hyperloop is high speed rail with the addition of a vacuum, which gets you higher speed. The additional requirement of a giant vacuum tube should make the system cost more, not less. Personally, I’m rooting for Elon Musk to figure out how to make tunnels cheaply with the Boring Company, so we can take that tech and use it to build a bunch of subways. Traffic within urban areas and suburbs is a much bigger societal issue than intercity travel anyway. Subways are a proven solution, but somehow we lost the ability to dig tunnels economically so we stopped building them.
    - fragmede 6y ago
      Two of the largest sources of air pollution in the world are cars and airplanes, and Elon Musk has already been working on attacking the issue of car pollution. Imo extrapolating out from the combination of SpaceX and Starlink, subways are an obvious project for the Boring Company, especially once you have higher-speed boring machines. (Current boring machines move at about 10 meters/day.)

owenversteeg 6y ago

That "Gadgetbahn" article is great, but I do have one criticism. From the article: "If the idea is viable and the people behind it are competent, it should have attracted private investment, as there should be a potential to make profit selling the technology. After all, the proposal has been around for 23 years." High speed rail on a large scale is really something that has to come from the government. While there are small private HSR projects (e.x. Brightline, covering some 60 miles of the Florida coast), the big successes have all been governmental, and that shouldn't be surprising. The uncomfortable part of HSR, of course, is that no matter how perfect your government is, it's going to involve bulldozing some people's homes, conflicting with other government projects, and interfering with nature. Don't get me wrong, I'm not part of team "screw the law, bulldoze straight lines between cities, people and nature be damned". But there do need to be sacrifices made. And a strong, coordinated government can pass the laws and write the checks to make that happen. The interesting thing with HSR is that it is not about the technology. The TGV was operating at 300 km/h nearly 50 years ago, and that's the speed that most of the network operates at today. It's not about the safety (the TGV has never had a fatal accident in normal service) or even the cost (the TGV is also profitable!) It's about the land. A fairly small strip of land in a straight line. My hope is that as people realize this, we'll do what has to be done and tear down a few villages in order to save the planet. But that's politically unpalatable, so instead we have Gadgetbahnen.

rtpg 6y ago
High speed rail is also a bit of a red herring. In dense areas you’re not actually going to go fast! “Normal” trains would work fine and be helpful. TGV and Shinkansen go really far! But what makes people in France or Japan take the train a lot is much more around local trains that are just going at normal speeds.
- noahtallen 6y ago
  I think the counterpoint in the US is that most cities are very far apart and there is practically nothing in between. Obviously places like the northeast corridor or the Bay Area are much more dense. But even a route from SF->Seattle is mostly traveling through non-dense areas. That gets even better across the west and Midwest

disk0 6y ago

first time I heard that term was in donoteat01's video on the loop[0], haven't got around to reading that post till now though (thanks for the reminder) [0] Elon Musk's "Loop" - It's bad, folks https://youtu.be/4dn6ZVpJLxs https://youtu.be/4dn6ZVpJLxs

sudosysgen 6y ago
donoteat01 is legitimately one of the greatest techno-political YouTubers.
- tomcam 6y ago
  I agree and my politics are definitely not his
mc32 6y ago
His style reminds me of RedLetterMedia's takedown[1] of Star Wars, but more technical. [1]https://www.redlettermedia.com/plinkett-reviews/mr-plinketts-star-wars-the-phantom-menace-review https://www.redlettermedia.com/plinkett-reviews/mr-plinketts...
TimSchumann 6y ago
Great video, thanks for sharing it. Haven't heard of this guy before but he does a really nice breakdown.

jojobas 6y ago

Three words: vacuum expansion seals.

Robotbeat 6y ago
There are multiple ways to solve this problem. It’s not a showstopper. 1) Bury the lines. Basically isothermal at depth. 2) insulate the tube and maintain stable temperature 3) use materials that don’t drastically change length with temperature 3) allow the tubes to change length. Put them on rollers. 4) use vacuum expansion joints just like us common in vacuum engineering. People act like vacuum is this new thing. Physicists (well, Engineers/technicians hired by physics projects) have been making really long tubes with extremely high vacuum and incredibly high tolerances. This is easy in comparison.
- sroussey 6y ago
  Plus earthquakes
- jbay808 6y ago
  Good point. A little hyperloop is nothing compared with CERN.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    Cern beam tube is 6.3cm in diameter. And, you know, it didn't have trains zooming in it at 600m/s.
    - scoopertrooper 6y ago
      Also it's not even that long, it's only about 27 km, which pales in comparison to the globe-crossing aspirations of the hyperloopers.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - liability 6y ago

keenmaster 6y ago

>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. I disagree with your conclusion. Hyperloop technology is so lucrative that it might galvanize America to update its long distance transportation infrastructure in a way that bullet trains couldn't have. Bullet trains: - Popularized when a huge network of new highways and slow rail were already built in America - Faced a suburban, car-loving culture Hyperloop: - 2-3x speed of bullet trains. Can change the way we perceive geographic distance. - Popularized during an increasingly urban culture with crumbling highway and train infrastructure - Cost isn't as much of a concern because a national hyperloop network would create a lot more value than a bullet train equivalent. If the government doesn't want to shoulder the full cost, companies gladly will (when the tech is ripe). I'm hoping for full government funding.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
> "Cost isn't as much of a concern because a national hyperloop network would create a lot more value than a bullet train equivalent." What is the basis for such claim? Most of the information I come across points in the opposite direction. Trains are a lot cheaper infrastructure wise, and have ~10x higher capacity. Many public transport infrastructure professionals consider hyperloop a joke because it can only move a fairly small amount of people. In UK we are running out of capacity on many rail lines. So why do you believe hyperloop would generate more revenue or indirect economic benefits compared to a modern high-speed rail?
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Especially since HSR isn’t experimental anymore, it’s approaching a century old. America could just buy the exact same parts either France or Japan uses.
jojobas 6y ago
High speed rail infringe mostly on planes' territory, not cars'. At 3x of bullet trains speed a curve radius of 2500m resolves to 2g lateral acceleration. For all purposes Hyperloop is very much like Theranos.

aaron695 6y ago

The entire point of the Hyperloop is to get around right of way and politics. That is it's design. That is exactly what Elon is doing. You might argue it can't do what it's setting out to achieve, but this has never been a technological solution. He's designed a technology to fit with current societal processes rather than the old, get society to accept a technology.

Robotbeat 6y ago
Exactly this. That’s why The Boring Company is focusing on reducing the costs of tunneling dramatically. And they started by just using existing technology. With that (and without the cost inflation that many corrupted projects experience), they were able to achieve about $10 per mile of tunnel. A lane of highway per direction is $1m to $8m depending on if it’s rural or urban. They’ve developed a new machine, Prufroc, that’s supposed to be much faster and capable of “porpoising” (ie angling back up and curving straight) so you can avoid having to excavate a deep station through other means. If they can get the cost equivalent to a typical surface street in urban areas, they can now compete with surface streets. Much easier to autonomously drive in purpose-built tunnels. Or put a train or a bike trail or moving walkway or whatever. So they are actually trying to solve the right problem. And using cars is a good idea because cars are really cheap per passenger in terms of upfront capital cost, and they meet the speed, autonomy, safety, and electrification requirements while also allowing use on just regular paved surfaces. If the one-dimensional autonomy works well, they might be able to reduce follow distance at speed enough to exceed a highway lane throughout. And with high occupancy, also a typical light rail train or whatever. Would be kind of neat to have autonomous driving at 120mph immune to weather and with low enough capital cost that we could afford to crisscross the country with them, without much impact to existing land uses. A clear win if it works. Actually, a clearer win than full autonomous driving on existing roads, as that might quickly clog up surface streets. Plus this is probably technically easier than perfected level 5 autonomy which is still a sort of open ended problem.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > they were able to achieve about $10 per mile of tunnel Do you mean $10m per mile?

_ph_ 6y ago

I am disagreeing with the article. Of course, when designing/selling new train systems, a lot of showmanship and gadgetery are involved, but there are real shortcomings with current train systems which cause people to develop new technologies. First of all: trains are great, there are many places where they perform admirably. Many cities have a great subway network, countries like France, Japan, Taiwan and now China have great high speed reail networks. So if there are transportation problems to solve, it should be a no-brainer to consider traditional train systems first. However, there are shortcomings wiht traditional train systems, these new systems try to address. One big limitation for trains is, where to put the tracks. Inside cities, going underground usually is the only solution. With traditional rail, this is extremely expensive and also a slow process. In Munich, not log ago the digging for a new underground train line started - it is expected to take a whole decade and going to be quite expensive (which has delayed the project by another decade, as people were discussing costs). Outside of cities, rail is possible, but still faces problems to get the necessary ground. Noise is a further problems with trains. Finally, most traditional train systems are not operated autonomusly, so costs are too high for high frequencies and often enough there are just not enough drivers available. These shortcomings create a lot of creativity to address them. The Boring companie tries to lower tunnel costs by making them less in diameter. Other systems try carts which run on or hang from stilts, reducing the space needed or allowing the train installations to go on top of existing roads. Maglevs are still a huge topic. On the one side, they do allow higher speeds, as rails get mechanically challenging above 300kph. The only challenge for maglev is air resistance, there is no risk of derailing. Also, at any speed, maglevs are less noisy than rails, they can accelerate faster than rail and most importanly, go up much higher inclines. Maglev is therefore not only interesting for long-distance transportation, but also inside city regions, especially due to the lower noise and also because of autonomous operations. A good example is this maglev system: https://transportsystemboegl.com/ https://transportsystemboegl.com/ It is designed for city regions, fully autonomous and not just some technology concept, but ready-to-buy. It has been developed by a major construction company. That means, they won't just sell you some fancy technology, they are going to build the whole infrastructure for you ready to use. This is one of the two companies responsible for the quick building process at the Tesla Giga Berlin factory. They are basically factory producing the parts for industrial buildings and just assembling them on-site. (Ironically Volkswagen is also building a new factory for electric cars in Bremen, Germany at the moment and it looks exactly like what Tesla is building, as they ordered the factory from the same company)