The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done • Hacker News Board

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#201

Post by bluGill » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

grp000 wrote: post #197

bluGill wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lesson: don't do one-off projects. Find a project that meets you needs, and copy it. Make minor tweaks to their design to fit your needs, but copy as much as possible. Houses typically go according to plan because so many of the processes and parts are standard. Even large mansions can go according to plan if you have good management (note that cheap management is rewarded for change orders and thus will ensure thing…

Guess we should have stopped at the wheel.

We have improved it a lot, but the wheel has been round for a very long time. We laugh at people who reinvent the wheel as opposed to doing incremental improvements on it.

We do have ships, rockets, and a few other things that don't need wheels (tough they tend to have wheels of some form inside), but the wheel itself is still just incremental improvements on that first one way back...

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#202

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:32 AM UTC

martamoreno2 wrote: post #184

Is this for real? They are basically getting orgasms just because someone drills a tunnel, which is indeed revolutionary for public transportation... And it transports a whopping 4500 people per hour, will you think of that! That is almost as much as a normal, 100 year old subway train can do in a few minutes.

[deleted]

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#203

Post by m463 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:34 AM UTC

martamoreno2 wrote: post #184

Is this for real? They are basically getting orgasms just because someone drills a tunnel, which is indeed revolutionary for public transportation... And it transports a whopping 4500 people per hour, will you think of that! That is almost as much as a normal, 100 year old subway train can do in a few minutes.

Don't subways and other rail projects routinely cost a billion dollars?

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#204

Post by aris85 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:35 AM UTC

martamoreno2 wrote: post #184

Is this for real? They are basically getting orgasms just because someone drills a tunnel, which is indeed revolutionary for public transportation... And it transports a whopping 4500 people per hour, will you think of that! That is almost as much as a normal, 100 year old subway train can do in a few minutes.

Lol silly White Worlder, this is a Black Project what you are unaware is that Elon is using Nuclear Tunnel Boring Machines (NTBM) no wonder they keep you blind and living under the veil

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#205

Post by aris85 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

What they don’t mention is the tunnel from Las Vegas to Dreamland, soon JANET flights will be a thing of the past

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#206

Post by CamperBob2 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:49 AM UTC

MiroF wrote: post #191

privateSFacct wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this is a joke, but if not please look into the cost and timeliness of subway maintenance costs by unionized workforce’s dealing with things like switching and signaling equipment - your claim is that this is drastically more efficient than some car mechanics? And if your number is low - you are not counting deferred maintenance which is huge in these systems

Yes, even counting "unionized workforce" cars cannot even remotely compete with mass transit rail on a per capita cost. Why is this so hard for people to understand?

Yes, rail transit is far more cost-effective than private automobiles when it comes to getting people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#207

Post by duckymcduckface » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:54 AM UTC

cordite wrote: post #77

danso wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were an actual innovation in tunneling, I feel like they’d be able to give actual specific metrics to rebut critics who argue that it’s apples to oranges. But AFAIK the bottleneck in tunneling is not a mechanical engineering one.

What is the bottleneck

Geotech is a bitch. Soils aren't homogenous and vary a lot in both composition and characteristics. There are multiple types of TBMs that are designed to operate under very specific conditions, for example a soft rock/soil TBM excavates through different mechanisms than a hard rock TBM. One of the big problems in any excavation is you have no idea what's actually down there until you start working in it. The underlying material can differ a lot over very short distances. You can very easily be minding your own business driving the TBM and run into a transition that will straight up mess you up. Combine that with all the previous mentioned stuff and you get a lot of cost overruns and time overruns. But yea, subsurface is a bitch.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#208

Post by mikeyouse » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:57 AM UTC

ericd wrote: post #189

mikeyouse wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah they are.. they have a few, their first was just off-the-shelf technology, the second is a hybrid, and their third one is apparently fully designed by Boring Co.: https://tunnelinsider.com/everything-we-know-about-the-borin...

Pretty sure that's a joke, unless rocket engines are suddenly useful for tunnel boring...

The pictures are jokes since it's proprietary to the company, but the names and descriptions are real. There were some spy shots of the gantry being used to set up 'proof-rock' awhile back:

https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-the-boring-company-tunne...

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#209

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:02 AM UTC

aeharding wrote: post #101

ryantgtg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the costs are also emergency systems, such as ventilation and frequent exits. From what I've seen (I'm not an engineer or a tunnel expert), his tunnels do not account for these things. The standards, which cost a lot to meet, are there for a reason.

What I am skeptical about is putting large car batteries in tunnels, which store enormous amounts of energy that could potentially be released in combustion and need be managed by adequate ventilation and fire suppression systems. Versus an electric train. Theoretically, since the energy is transported into the tunnel via power lines, wouldn’t fire suppression and ventilation systems be cheaper since they wouldn’t ne…

[deleted]

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#210

Post by modo_mario » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:05 AM UTC

spectrum1234 wrote: post #181

gamblor956 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk never learned that most of the cost of subways is the stations and supporting infrastructure, not digging the tunnel itself. Musk has not proposed any improvements to the expensive parts of tunneling.

This is completely wrong. The biggest costs to tunnels is bureaucracy. Simply using private funds without numerous contractors can decreases costs by an order of magnitude with no technological improvements.

Well sucks that it relies heftily on public funds then.