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Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

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Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#451

Post by Chathamization »

jaredhansen wrote: post #185
daemin wrote: post #165

Just as a thought experiment, could the promotion of these "hyperloop" projects be a clever political ploy to misdirect/divert attention and prevent a viable high speed rail network from being built? Elon's main business is electric cars and (one of) Branson's is airlines. So a reasonable competitor to both is fast and cheap(er) public transport along a major travel corridor in the USA. This means that by promoting t…

Of all the problems facing construction of "viable high speed rail" in the US (they already exist in many other places), I don't think Hyperloop competition is among ... the top 50. Practically anything could be "a clever political ploy", but where's the evidence for this? Any in the absence of such evidence, why speculate? Just as a thought experiment, could HN user daemin's comments be part of a clever ploy to inve…

> Practically anything could be "a clever political ploy", but where's the evidence for this?

I mean, Musk's initial announcement regarding the hyperloop was about how California high speed rail shouldn't be built. These are the first lines of his blogpost announcing the hyperloop[1]:

> When the California “high speed” rail was approved, I was quite disappointed, as I know many others were too.

We can debate Musk's motivation, but the fact remains that the hyperloop is being used to argue against high speed rail construction, and has been since it was first announced.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/hyperloop

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#452

Post by imron »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #450
imron wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do it magically, but you can do it by improving the technology - see for example SpaceX.

SpaceX is cheap due to reuse and commercial of the shelf development compared to mostly military-government development. Tunneling gets cheaper due to ? I would be interested. I guess the Swiss would be interested too.

Musk talked about it here: https://medium.com/@giftedproducts/elon-musks-ted-talk-2017-...

Salient points:

"If you just do two things you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and then go beyond that. The first thing to do is cut the tunnel diameter by 2 times or more. A single road tunnel has to be 26 to 28 feet in diameter to allow for crashes and emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars.

But if you shrunk it to 12 feet, what we're attempting, which is plenty for a skate to get through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of 4. The tunnel costs scales with the cross-sectional area. That's roughly half an order of magnitude improvement right there.

Then, tunneling machines tunnel half time and then stop and the rest of the time is reinforcements for the tunnel walls. If you design the machine to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that, and it's a factor of 8. Also these machines are far from being at their power or thermal limit. I think you can get a factor of two, maybe even four or five on top of that.

There’s a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess of an order of magnitude improvement in cost per mile. Our target actually is that we have pet snail named Gary from....Sponge Bob Square Pants. Gary is capable of going 14 times faster than a tunnel boring machine. We want to beat Gary."

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#453

Post by danmaz74 »

speedplane wrote: post #447
Hypx wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are far more people who tried crazy ideas and failed, and are promptly forgotten. The whole point of survivorship bias is that you have to be cognizant of the data points that failed and therefore aren't recorded, not just the ones that survived and are recorded. According to this: https://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/us-entrepreneurship-reach... there are 27 million entrepreneurs in the the US. That's a large en…

> "all being luck or mostly being luck" Seriously? What, he flipped a coin a million times which determined what he's going to do next? How are you defining "luck"?

Not the OP, but the point of survivor bias is that there were 10 million people flipping coins for the first "moonshot" idea, and let's say 1000 succeeded; then those tossed the coin for the second moonshot and only 1 succeeded. Was the one who succeeded so much better than the other 1000, or mostly luckier?

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#454

Post by danmaz74 »

alphaalpha101 wrote: post #397
biznickman wrote: post #94

The viability of Hyperloop One should not be the focus in the context of this article. That's not what this is about at all. It's that Hyperloop One needed Richard Branson on board because Elon Musk is creating his own competitor now. This is an incredibly smart move to ensure the survivability of the business from a publicity perspective. Branson has a history of doing things that people thought impossible or just a…

The viability of hyperloop is nil. It doesn't exist. It is literally physically impossible for it to be viable. I think it's on-topic whenever hyperloop is on-topic.

Physically impossible or economically impossible? The physics doesn't look impossible at first glance.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#455

Post by danmaz74 »

hbosch wrote: post #86
Analemma_ wrote: post #21

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.

Okay, we'll bookmark this for the future. Amtrak estimated a HSR/"bullet train" from D.C. to Boston would cost ~$151 billion. Since LA to SF will only be two stops, and we can assume Amtrak estimated at least 4 (Philly and NYC) let's bring the number down closer to $100 billion to make it even. Do we think the Hyperloop costs are more or less than that? 1/8 of a theoretical $100b is $12.5b -- is $12.5billion for Hype…

Honestly, 12.5B look like a ridiculously small amount to me for an infrastructure project stretching along 550Km and involving an unproven, technically very challenging technology.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#456

Post by danmaz74 »

pstuart wrote: post #359
Pxtl wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could the Hyperloop not require the same expropriations? A giant tube isn't any smaller than a train track. Is it the fact that it's elevated? Rail can be elevated. Yes, rail is heavy, but so are giant evacuated steel tubes.

I think he's planning on making lots of tunnels. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-test-tunnel/

Tunnels are very, very expensive.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#457

Post by zimpenfish »

danmaz74 wrote: post #456
pstuart wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's planning on making lots of tunnels. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-test-tunnel/

Tunnels are very, very expensive.

e.g. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/12/15/second-avenue-...

> The total length of the project, from 96th Street and 2nd Avenue to 125th Street and Lexington, is about 2.7 km. At $2.2 billion per km, this sets a new world record for subway construction costs, breaking that of the first phase of the same line, which only cost $1.7 billion per km.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#458

Post by speedplane »

danmaz74 wrote: post #453
speedplane wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "all being luck or mostly being luck" Seriously? What, he flipped a coin a million times which determined what he's going to do next? How are you defining "luck"?

Not the OP, but the point of survivor bias is that there were 10 million people flipping coins for the first "moonshot" idea, and let's say 1000 succeeded; then those tossed the coin for the second moonshot and only 1 succeeded. Was the one who succeeded so much better than the other 1000, or mostly luckier?

But my point is that he didn't flip thousands of coins. He made thousands of calculated decisions. His thousands of decisions resulted in success. Others, with their own thousands of decisions did not. I don't see the "luck" here.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#459

Post by bertil »

Animats wrote: post #295

Maglev in a tube is a proven technology at full train scale. Here's the Chuo Maglev from the inside.[1] 500KPH in tunnels. They're not pumping down the tunnels, just plowing through on sheer power and money. The Chuo Maglev makes the Hyperloop One look like a toy project. Watch the video. They have a production-quality train, with tourists and whiny kids riding it, going 500km/h. They've hit 603km/h in tests, but don…

I’d separate:

- longitudinal, predictable acceleration, where you can safely tell people to stay in their seats and all will be fine, I’m quite confident most humans would be comfortable with 1G horizontal that adds up to 1.5G diagonal: that’s basically a roller-coaster; it’s not too bad if you ease people into it, i.e. you minimise the jerk;

- lateral, predictable acceleration, like one would expect in turns: not familiar with train technology enough to know if you could adapt pendular train to MagLev, but it seems like a simple enough hack to increase comfort significantly;

- vibrations and turbulences: seem unlikely in a tube on rails, without a train coming in the opposite direction. Those definitely, customers don’t like.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#460

Post by ZoFreX »

bertil wrote: post #459
Animats wrote: post #295

Maglev in a tube is a proven technology at full train scale. Here's the Chuo Maglev from the inside.[1] 500KPH in tunnels. They're not pumping down the tunnels, just plowing through on sheer power and money. The Chuo Maglev makes the Hyperloop One look like a toy project. Watch the video. They have a production-quality train, with tourists and whiny kids riding it, going 500km/h. They've hit 603km/h in tests, but don…

I’d separate: - longitudinal, predictable acceleration, where you can safely tell people to stay in their seats and all will be fine, I’m quite confident most humans would be comfortable with 1G horizontal that adds up to 1.5G diagonal: that’s basically a roller-coaster; it’s not too bad if you ease people into it, i.e. you minimise the jerk; - lateral, predictable acceleration, like one would expect in turns: not fa…

Lateral acceleration is much more annoying to deal with than longitudinal or vertical, even if it's constant. Perhaps they could tilt in bends to convert some of that lateral to vertical?
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