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Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

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Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#71
post #16

I see so many negative comments about this, but in my opinion everything has to start somewhere. It doesn't matter how crazy and impossible it looks, it will be done eventually (and we have plenty of examples). Maybe we will not teleport in 2 seconds across the globe or this project will die, who knows if we don't try. A little bit of optimism doesn't hurt. Just saying. And for Virgin, it's not my money, if they want…

It's been said before elsewhere, but HN is the place to go to find out why your project will never succeed. I've seen many successful projects crapped all over here when they were in their infancy / pre-success days. "Stripe?! 3% fees! So dumb. We already have lots of payment gateways. It's not hard. You just have to {list of many tedious manual steps}..."

My favorite is Dropbox. "Store all my personal and/or corporate files on some third-party server?! DOA."

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#72
The engineering has never been a problem, vacuum-tube trains are an idea that's been around for centuries. [1] Removing friction and air resistance is a simple physics problem, and there are already operational maglev [2] trains so putting them in a low-pressure tunnel is not a major revolution.

The real issue is the viability of such a transport because of the cost, complexity, and construction effort involved. We (in the USA) can barely build a high-speed rail line effectively so a Hyperloop competing with existing transportation options doesn't make economic sense currently. Take a look at what happened to the Concorde program for a similar example of great technology that just couldn't survive as a commercial service.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev

EDIT: Yes, the engineering effort is not easy, but the science is pretty straightforward. We're not discovering new physics here...

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#73
post #8

Something I wrote a while ago.... w/ back of the napkin calculations....... Why I wouldn’t invest a money into Hyperloop - Stabilizing a single fault line risk pylon is more than $250K. - How many million are needed for vacuum pumps to evacuate 100+ million cubic feet of of pipe to 100 Pa? - Hot air discharge needs to go somewhere. For every 1 bar pressure, you need ~200 to ~400 cubic meters of volume which is larger…

When Musk first said that an LA SF Hyperloop could be built for 1/8th the cost of the equivalent HSR, I chuckled and then waited for the punchline, which still hasn’t arrived. It’s a cool idea and I do want to see more prototypes and feasibility studies, but people need to get off the hype train (no pun intended) and be realistic about the cost.

To be fair, if Elon worked in the project for 40 - 80 hours a week, he probably could get a team to accomplish it at 1/8th the cost or lower.

Consider he did this with rockets, getting them to under 1/10th the cost

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been said before elsewhere, but HN is the place to go to find out why your project will never succeed. I've seen many successful projects crapped all over here when they were in their infancy / pre-success days. "Stripe?! 3% fees! So dumb. We already have lots of payment gateways. It's not hard. You just have to {list of many tedious manual steps}..."

My favorite is Dropbox. "Store all my personal and/or corporate files on some third-party server?! DOA."

I remember that thread. Hilarious.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#75
post #53
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point is clearly addressed in the paper: The ends of the tube can slide 300 meters next to the station, and the tube is not firmly attached to the pylons but can move to accommodate the expansion.

No. The paper gets this badly wrong. It looks only at the incremental thermal expansion between pylons, and neglects the fact that in a sealed tube the thermal expansion will be cumulative. "These would absorb the small length changes between pylons due to thermal changes, as well as long form subtle height changes." [emphasis added] The cumulative expansion is dealt with in a single sentence: "A telescoping tube, si…

sealed telescoping tube between pylons then?

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#76
Everybody talks about the engineering challenges, which have been beaten to death. Elon Musk has a pretty respectable track record of making things that seem technologically infeasible and making them happen. He's not in charge anymore, but I trust that he wouldn't put his name on something that's not possible. Even if it wasn't possible, I'm not the person to make that critique.

The bigger challenge, IMO, is economic. High speed trains make a lot of money, but their revenue has little to do with competing with airlines over significant distances between large cities, which is what the Hyperloop is attempting to supersede. The financial success of high speed trains has much more to do with their ability to rapidly start and stop in lots of intermediate urban areas within a corridor. I know this goes against the popular narrative about why high speed trains are popular (OMG they can compete with air travel!!!), but the narrative is wrong.

The revenue of HSR has a lot more to do with the number of cities that it services than the end to end speed. If you look at ticket revenues on successful HSR lines, terminus to terminus tickets typically make up possible market share (trains, planes, cars) between terminus cities, it would still be less than the total revenue for that line, due to the additional cities it serves. Even with the gradual growth in power levels for high speed trains, with some now capable of 360kph, end to end speeds have basically gone unchanged. What has changed with more powerful trains? The lines have more stops now...they serve more cities, with the higher power levels used for faster acceleration and deceleration. More cities means more revenue, whereas higher speeds have already hit strongly diminished returns.

Maybe with Hyperloop being really fast could grow the market and monopolize market share between Alpha cities, but that would still be a stretch if the goal is economic viability. People see hyperloop, they crave its speed, but the costs are too high and revenues are too low to just serve the endpoints. But if you decide to serve intermediate cities, you slow it down, and it no longer becomes the object of technological lust, and nobody will want anything to do with it.

Among economic historians and really nerdy train enthusiasts like me, this isn't a contentious point. The same economic delusions were a primary causative factor in the overhyping of railways during railway mania, best exemplified in chapters 16-20 of Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s [0], which is a masterpiece of economic history IMO. Anybody in charge of building out some version of hyperloop should do themselves a favor and read it, and then work on not repeating history.

[0] http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/hallucinations.pdf

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#77
post #8

Something I wrote a while ago.... w/ back of the napkin calculations....... Why I wouldn’t invest a money into Hyperloop - Stabilizing a single fault line risk pylon is more than $250K. - How many million are needed for vacuum pumps to evacuate 100+ million cubic feet of of pipe to 100 Pa? - Hot air discharge needs to go somewhere. For every 1 bar pressure, you need ~200 to ~400 cubic meters of volume which is larger…

When Musk first said that an LA SF Hyperloop could be built for 1/8th the cost of the equivalent HSR, I chuckled and then waited for the punchline, which still hasn’t arrived. It’s a cool idea and I do want to see more prototypes and feasibility studies, but people need to get off the hype train (no pun intended) and be realistic about the cost.

Is this not an attempt to just derail CAHSR, or HSR in general? Nearly every anti-HSR comment is now 'we should build hyperloop instead!'.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been said before elsewhere, but HN is the place to go to find out why your project will never succeed. I've seen many successful projects crapped all over here when they were in their infancy / pre-success days. "Stripe?! 3% fees! So dumb. We already have lots of payment gateways. It's not hard. You just have to {list of many tedious manual steps}..."

My favorite is Dropbox. "Store all my personal and/or corporate files on some third-party server?! DOA."

More like "uh, how is this different from rsync?"

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#79
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CERN LHC tube is a 27km circle of vacuum and near-zero temperature, and they don't seem to have a problem with that (granted, they had some but it's solved now). Frankly, yes, there may be issues, but I'm confident that the Human race will be able to overcome those.

What about building a high speed train? Proven technology, works in a lot of countries. LA to SF in 2 hours. Is it really that bad?

Someone made the argument that in the US our rails were built by men half killing themselves for low wages and with very few safety standards. That means a modern buildout is much more expensive than it was historically and the political will to build that budget is difficult or impossible.

Hyperloop is a run around that problem. Largely autonomous/low staffed boring that's non-union labor, non-public sector can make a lot of progress quickly. There's no public sector union demanding x amount of jobs, x amount of pensions, and other expensive regulations or union concessions. Musk's Boring Company thinks it can build tunnels for a fraction of the cost privately without much public sector regulatory weight and they might be right.

HSR is the saner idea, but without Congress funding it, its just not going to happen. Obama made a big push for it during the stimulus but more conservative states decided against accepting the money for both ideological and financial reasons. Once enough states say no, then the rail can't go very far, and the project eventually died:

First, Tea Party conservatives in Florida and wealthy liberal suburbanites in the Bay Area began questioning their states’ plans. Then, just as Joe Biden was calling for $53 billion in high-speed-rail spending over the next six years, a crop of freshly elected Republican governors turned down billions in federal money for lines in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida. Finally, Republicans in Congress zeroed out the federal high-speed rail budget last month.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technocracy/2011/12...

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#80
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Musk first said that an LA SF Hyperloop could be built for 1/8th the cost of the equivalent HSR, I chuckled and then waited for the punchline, which still hasn’t arrived. It’s a cool idea and I do want to see more prototypes and feasibility studies, but people need to get off the hype train (no pun intended) and be realistic about the cost.

To be fair, if Elon worked in the project for 40 - 80 hours a week, he probably could get a team to accomplish it at 1/8th the cost or lower. Consider he did this with rockets, getting them to under 1/10th the cost

He hasn’t done that with rockets. He wants to eventually, but he hasn’t yet. Let’s not let hype cloud facts.
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