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Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

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Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#461

Post by masklinn »

GuB-42 wrote: post #222
dx034 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vacuum is the problem. With HSR you also have small gaps in the system to allow for expansion but nothing there requires a perfect surface.

AFAIK, high speed rails do not have gaps. Expansion is controlled by brute force : lots of clamping and massive supports.

They can have expansion joints around bridges, but generally speaking you're correct, they're thermite-welded and adjusted to correctly handle thermal stresses without kinking (heat expansion) or fracturing (cold contraction).

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#463

Post by rocqua »

Hypx wrote: post #437
Robotbeat wrote: post #296

The biggest problem people have with Hyperloop is because it certainly seems like Elon Musk just waltzed into the high speed rail debate and Dunning-Krugered some crazy scheme that doesn't look anything at all like conventional approaches to the problem and thus doesn't jive with any common sense we might have built up around different transport methods. But that's kind of what Elon Musk does: he Dunning-Krugers hims…

This is also a good time to introduce the concept of survivorship bias. There's a fair chance that it was mostly luck, not ability, that it ultimately succeeded.

I used to think that about Musk, but his successes seem to be piling up. Specifically: Paypal, Tesla, and Space-X all seem to be rather successful.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#464

Post by gsnedders »

zimpenfish wrote: post #443
jdietrich wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Branson owns both an airline and a high-speed rail service. He seems like an eminently sensible choice of partner for Hyperloop. The institutional expertise that Virgin Group are bringing to the table will be at least as important as the capital investment.

> Branson owns both an airline and a high-speed rail service. I can't speak to the airline but the rail service is universally reknowned in the UK as "piss poor", especially since they get huge government subsidies.

Both Virgin Trains (51% Virgin Group) and Virgin Trains East Coast (10% Virgin Group) pay large net premiums to the government (£153 million and £204 million respectively).

The huge government subsidies go to Network Rail, a company wholly owned by HM Government, and are never seen by any of the train operating companies (except insofar as they are indirectly subsidised given they don't pay the full cost of maintaining and improving the infrastructure).

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#465

Post by gsnedders »

vidarh wrote: post #409
buckminster wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Branson's business model is selling the right to use the Virgin brand to other companies. The article doesn't say he made an investment. It is rather more likely that they paid him.

Is that actually the case? My impression is that the vast majority of companies bearing the Virgin brand was either started by Virgin Group, bought by them, or has seen a significant investment. Many have since been divested again, and continued to license the brand, but I've not heard about any cases where they just licensed the brand without other financial involvement. Maybe I've just not paid attention?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Group#Subsidiaries_and_... shows the majority being 100% owned by the Virgin Group, though notably none of the airlines nor rail operators are.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#466

Post by gsnedders »

m_mueller wrote: post #408
jcranmer wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You're starting with the wrong number. The $151B number is Amtrak's estimated cost for it's "shoot for the stars" plan. It…

Meanwhile Switzerland, one of the top most expensive countries in the world, has tunnelled at the base below the alps (one of the most difficult terrains to tunnel due to vertical sediment layers) for ~20B. Workers died on that project too, but that risk is simply being managed rather than grinding everything to a halt. I'd argue it's absolutely possible to improve the cost on American public transit infrastructure b…

How much was there in land take for the Gotthard Base Tunnel? How much land take would there be for Amtrak's $80B line from DC to Boston?

My guess would be that the cost of land in the north-east, combined with AFAIK pretty strong ownership rights, makes it that expensive.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#467

Post by alphaalpha101 »

imron wrote: post #452
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They're hardly the first to propose tunnels of that size! Ridiculous. Ever been on the tube?

Doing it faster does not mean doing it more cheaply. The cost of going slowly is what, labour?

They go slowly because the materials they're tunneling through are incredibly varied.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#468

Post by rocqua »

losteric wrote: post #92
lisper wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not this kind of engineer, but couldn't the pylon problem be addressed by a sliding rail mechanism between the pylon and the sealed tube? Or replicating the station mechanism at each pylon? Maybe I just don't see the problem you're pointing out. edit: in retrospect, I can clearly see the problem with expanding shaped tracks. What happens to a long S-shaped track? Think about expanding each segment of the top curv…

Maybe move the S shape from the horizontal to the vertical plane. Then, you can handle the bend by dynamically changing the height of the pylons.

It's still an issue that at bends of this diameter, the approximation sin(x) = x is pretty accurate, which means it takes 300m of height difference to deal with 300m of thermal expansion. It might be workable to change that to e.g. 100 bumps of 3m.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#469

Post by zimpenfish »

gsnedders wrote: post #464
zimpenfish wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Branson owns both an airline and a high-speed rail service. I can't speak to the airline but the rail service is universally reknowned in the UK as "piss poor", especially since they get huge government subsidies.

Both Virgin Trains (51% Virgin Group) and Virgin Trains East Coast (10% Virgin Group) pay large net premiums to the government (£153 million and £204 million respectively). The huge government subsidies go to Network Rail, a company wholly owned by HM Government, and are never seen by any of the train operating companies (except insofar as they are indirectly subsidised given they don't pay the full cost of maintaini…

https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/private-rail-operators-using-pub...

Has a total net of -£225M from Virgin in 2013/4.

This shows them as still being net-subsidised: http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/25757/rail-fin...

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#470

Post by danmaz74 »

speedplane wrote: post #458
danmaz74 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He took thousands of calculated risks. Lots of those calculated risks didn't pay off, you can be sure. But enough of them did. There are no Übermenschen.
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