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This is about VIRGIN Hyperloop by Richard Bransons Virgin Brand conglomerate. Not to be confused with Elon Musks Boring Company. FTA: > Virgin Hyperloop was f

by lgrebe 5y ago

This is about VIRGIN Hyperloop by Richard Bransons Virgin Brand conglomerate. Not to be confused with Elon Musks Boring Company. FTA: > Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.

tsimionescu 5y ago
Boring company has abandoned any idea of a hyper loop a long time ago, right? Did they ever even associate with it (outside the branding of their Vegas mini tunnel)?
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Boring company never had anything to do with Hyperloop. The Hyperloop concept was just a Bluepaper released by Musk. It was only years after that Musk started talking about tunnels and the Loop system. Probably at some point Boring company would like to be able to make tunnels long enough that it would make sense to with something more high speed then a normal EV can do. But that is not their focus.
- kjksf 5y ago
  Yes and no. Yes, because they no longer plan to use the original design proposed by Musk (pods in vacuum in tubes installed on the ground). No because long term they still plan to do hyper loop but the latest iteration of the idea is electric cars driving really fast in under-pressurized underground tunnel. See https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop That being said, Boring Company is still in very early stages. They made significant progress (built Las Vegas tunnel and are in building more of it; created prufrock-1 i.e. v1 of boring machine designed by Boring Company). The hyperloop is something they want to do and most likely can do. The limiting factor is more permitting and politics (for example: they had a deal to do a long tunnel in Chicago with one mayor and then the next mayor said it's stupid and scrapped it).
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Well, the Vegas loop is just a short, expensive, small tunnel that took a very very long time to build (more than 1 year per mile) in a straight line with all permitting sorted out, so I'm not sure what it proves except incompetence. Look at some Swiss alpine tunnels or the underwater Channel tunnel if you want to see advanced tunnel boring technology. Edit: to give exact numbers: boring for LVCC Loop started on November 15 2019, and the tunnels opened to the public in April 2021, 1.5 years later for 1.7 miles (2.7km) of tunnel. In contrast, boring for the Channel tunnel started in June 1988, and the tunnels were opened to freight trains in June 1994 - 6 years for 50 km (31 miles) of much larger undersea tunnels, which allow transport up to 160km/h in real use (200 km/h being the highest designed speed). That's 5.2 miles per year, versus TBC's 1.1 miles per year, comparing like with like.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster. The eventual opening had a lot to do with other factors including covid. Convention centers were not exactly in high demand. Doing everything around the actual tunnel took longer. Its also the literally first project ever done by a start up company so of course its not perfect. And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive? The investment for the kind of things like the Channel tunnel or the Base tunnel in Switzerland are 100x that of a Boring company tunnel. Those are incredibly expensive dedicated machines, years of planning beforehand. Boring company is trying to innovate on small tunnel machines and make them more operationally efficient. Moving to electric powered drills, vertical launch and other practical improvements. Those kinds of things you could actually operate and launch in a lot a lot of places. The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible. So we shouldn't try to improve some machine because potentially in another country they already some technology? Apparently the commercial machines that TBC bought to start with clearly didn't have many of those features they wanted on a machine of the size they wanted. So clearly the technology didn't actually exist. So I guess that means the US will also never do Li-Ion battery as Koreans already have better technology. So why try to innovate. SpaceX doing Falcon 1, why Arianespace already has Vega. What's the point? As long as the company is not somehow using massive government funds and they have paying costumers, what is the problem?
softwarebeware 5y ago
Wait, is the Boring Company still pursuing commercial transport via hyperloop?
- Ekaros 5y ago
  No, they do low occupancy cars in a tunnel... Combining all of the worst things...
- kjksf 5y ago
  Yes and no. Yes: https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop No because it's a different system than what Musk originally proposed. Virgin Hyperloop was building Musk's original idea. What Boring Company calls a hyperloop now is a long-distance tunnel, possibly under partial vacuum, with electric cars driving really fast (600+ miles per hour).

by lgrebe 5y ago

tsimionescu 5y ago

Boring company has abandoned any idea of a hyper loop a long time ago, right? Did they ever even associate with it (outside the branding of their Vegas mini tunnel)?

panick21_ 5y ago
Boring company never had anything to do with Hyperloop. The Hyperloop concept was just a Bluepaper released by Musk. It was only years after that Musk started talking about tunnels and the Loop system. Probably at some point Boring company would like to be able to make tunnels long enough that it would make sense to with something more high speed then a normal EV can do. But that is not their focus.
kjksf 5y ago
Yes and no. Yes, because they no longer plan to use the original design proposed by Musk (pods in vacuum in tubes installed on the ground). No because long term they still plan to do hyper loop but the latest iteration of the idea is electric cars driving really fast in under-pressurized underground tunnel. See https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop That being said, Boring Company is still in very early stages. They made significant progress (built Las Vegas tunnel and are in building more of it; created prufrock-1 i.e. v1 of boring machine designed by Boring Company). The hyperloop is something they want to do and most likely can do. The limiting factor is more permitting and politics (for example: they had a deal to do a long tunnel in Chicago with one mayor and then the next mayor said it's stupid and scrapped it).
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Well, the Vegas loop is just a short, expensive, small tunnel that took a very very long time to build (more than 1 year per mile) in a straight line with all permitting sorted out, so I'm not sure what it proves except incompetence. Look at some Swiss alpine tunnels or the underwater Channel tunnel if you want to see advanced tunnel boring technology. Edit: to give exact numbers: boring for LVCC Loop started on November 15 2019, and the tunnels opened to the public in April 2021, 1.5 years later for 1.7 miles (2.7km) of tunnel. In contrast, boring for the Channel tunnel started in June 1988, and the tunnels were opened to freight trains in June 1994 - 6 years for 50 km (31 miles) of much larger undersea tunnels, which allow transport up to 160km/h in real use (200 km/h being the highest designed speed). That's 5.2 miles per year, versus TBC's 1.1 miles per year, comparing like with like.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster. The eventual opening had a lot to do with other factors including covid. Convention centers were not exactly in high demand. Doing everything around the actual tunnel took longer. Its also the literally first project ever done by a start up company so of course its not perfect. And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive? The investment for the kind of things like the Channel tunnel or the Base tunnel in Switzerland are 100x that of a Boring company tunnel. Those are incredibly expensive dedicated machines, years of planning beforehand. Boring company is trying to innovate on small tunnel machines and make them more operationally efficient. Moving to electric powered drills, vertical launch and other practical improvements. Those kinds of things you could actually operate and launch in a lot a lot of places. The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible. So we shouldn't try to improve some machine because potentially in another country they already some technology? Apparently the commercial machines that TBC bought to start with clearly didn't have many of those features they wanted on a machine of the size they wanted. So clearly the technology didn't actually exist. So I guess that means the US will also never do Li-Ion battery as Koreans already have better technology. So why try to innovate. SpaceX doing Falcon 1, why Arianespace already has Vega. What's the point? As long as the company is not somehow using massive government funds and they have paying costumers, what is the problem?

softwarebeware 5y ago

Wait, is the Boring Company still pursuing commercial transport via hyperloop?

Ekaros 5y ago
No, they do low occupancy cars in a tunnel... Combining all of the worst things...
kjksf 5y ago
Yes and no. Yes: https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop No because it's a different system than what Musk originally proposed. Virgin Hyperloop was building Musk's original idea. What Boring Company calls a hyperloop now is a long-distance tunnel, possibly under partial vacuum, with electric cars driving really fast (600+ miles per hour).