491–500 of 517 posts
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"Branson's missing a d from his almost nominatively-determining name" Wat? Edit: This has been a fun puzzle. I read the Wikipedia article for "Nominative determinism" and I've been swapping the letter "d" into various positions of his first and last name trying to figure it out. No luck yet!
I also was confused, but they probably mean “ Brand son”
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Also, the リニア will cut travel time between Tokyo and Nagoya from about 100 minutes to 40 minutes, which is a big difference for people who do business between those two regions.
That's insane. If you didn't have to switch trains for Philly (30th St) to NYC, an avg ride could take a bit than 100 min if there are only around 7 stops the entire way (normal stops would make the ride like 2 hours). Reducing those numbers by more than half would be incredible. Even if this is just a pipe dream and there isn't a direct train between the two cities right now anyway.
The good news is that it's "just" an information problem (well, so is landing a rocket, in a way), the bad news is that the number of possible endpoint pairs in a network is bloody high.
In the end you get back to the old vision of on demand "pods". I suppose that those could still be made "rail-efficient" if you make them robotically jack into a paceline behind a tender that provides drafting and power grabbed from an overhead line (you would not want this per pod), but run on battery power only to get to/from the tender at endpoints (which the tender and its followers passes non-stop) and when the paceline gets broken by someone exiting. If you can start over on a new right of way, this is what you should do (in a pinch, you could also take over the leftmost lane of existing roads, but that's not a good place for doing construction and maintenance).
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…
Your types of comment annoy me more than harsh criticism frankly, at least criticism can be constructive, your comment is just fluff. I mean, let's apply your logic to its logical conclusion: we should never criticize anything, ever, on the off chance it could end up working and then people would look back on our comments and call us silly. On that note I'm just starting a gofundme to create my own interplanetary tra…
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…
For example, you wouldn't have to worry so much about tunneling under a mountain to ameliorate the G-forces if you are traveling more slowly. Once you prove out the route (which could still be competitive with any existing train service), you incrementally build tunnels and modify the route to improve your target speed.
(As for heat discharge, Im pretty sure that was addressed in EM's original paper - dumping the excess heat into an on-board water tank which is exchanged at the end of the ride, or are you referring to something else?)
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I don't think it's right to use figures that can change to disprove an Elon Musk concept. If you did that back in the day, you would say there's no way Tesla could work because the cost of batteries is prohibitive and the supply too limited.
Yes, but we could see that batteries needed to get X better in order for us to achieve Y results in the future. But how much better do vacuum chamber technologies have to get before you can make the biggest one ever built, that also has a high-speed capsule traveling through it, that is also impervious to armor piercing bullets? Furthermore, imagine if every airplane had to fly the exactly same path, and if any failu…
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People often, rightfully so, confuse the misappropriated name of Hyperloop One with Elon's Hyperloop idea, his of which I believe does have sound economics and certainly its pro list outweighs Hyperloop One's technology.
Could you point out the differences in both technological and economical approaches?
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…
That's a rather cynical view of what is essentially him doing dimensional analysis to find out if it's worth putting effort and money into these ventures, and then hiring a bunch of really good engineers to go towards it.
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it's worth noting that coast starlight's once-a-day-each-way schedule sort of makes it limited as a commuter rail option.
Its too long and slow to be commuter rail anyways. The Bay Area -> LA segment takes about 12 hours (of a total 35ish), if its on time (its often multiple hours late). Even if it was never late and left every hour, it wouldnt be a very practical commute. It is fun if you enjoy trains though! Take it if you have the time.
But yes - absolutely terrible from a commuter perspective.
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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.
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Nah, the Dunning-Kruger thing applies equally well to Tesla and SpaceX. He had no experience in either field before starting those companies. It's just that he has, in spite of all probability, succeeded and so you see them in a different light.
Didn't he actually design the first rocket himself? He's quite smart. I don't think "industry experience" counts for much. By the way you're using "Dunning-Kruger," it's unclear that you actually know what it means...