41–50 of 490 posts
Robert Goddard designed a vacuum train in the 1910s, why did Elon think it was going to work a century later?
The simplest reason seems to be that he expected it not to work, at least with current technology.
This is a weird case of Musk being right, in a way. Before the hyperloop paper he was asked about "maglev in an evacuated tube" and he said the economics of that didn't make sense. The hyperloop paper proposed an air-bearing for levitation rather than magnetics, and presumably that doesn't work either; I'm not a mech-e, but I'd imagine the tolerances for an air-bearing are too tight for a tube that is attached to (mo…
How is this an example of him being right? He neither proved that his idea worked, nor did he prove that maglev didn't work. Obviously he has gotten some things right, which is a good thing. But Musk has an extraordinary track record of being wrong about a lot of things. That, by itself, is not a problem - you lose, you learn, you fix, you win. The problem is that Musk aggressively attacks public policy with his aggr…
I mentioned it in the first place because him being right about something like this is peculiar, not because it's typical.
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If the US rail network wasn't in such a state of disrepair and freight trains weren't miles long to cut labor costs, you wouldn't even need to dig tunnels for them. That also saves the cost of digging those tunnels and actually making them safe (i.e. having service tunnels, ventilation, fire escapes, fire suppression systems, etc etc). And of course with tunnels you'd want rail anyway because you don't want to be stu…
The US freight rail network is in excellent shape. It's the passenger network that's in shambles.
The German rail network is in shambles - but compared to how some American freight rail looks like, even that is more like Japan's excellent railways... I've seen far too many examples like [1] for my liking on youtube. This kind of shit would actually land you jail time here if you as a responsible person would let a train run there. Or this legit, on-camera derailment [2] - no way the train would be allowed to just continue to move on, it would get a full-blown investigation and those responsible for the dereliction probably a criminal trial for endangering rail traffic [3].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI
Robert Goddard designed a vacuum train in the 1910s, why did Elon think it was going to work a century later?
Because the arrogance of modern Silicon Valley thinking is that "We are better, in every possible way, than older engineers, because we know code. " And Elon Musk seems very, very prone to this sort of thinking (or, at least, his companies do, and I think it comes from him). One example of many is the weird conversations he was having about sonic velocity robots and "lights out dreadnaught" sort of auto factories, wh…
Any one of these would have cemented him as a premier industrialist.
In the end, there's legions of Internet commenters who complain about Elon Musk in between complaining about their bosses or complain about Google and Facebook or what have you. And then there's this guy doing things successfully.
The Silicon Valley attitude that I love is that when someone tells you "that's not going to work", you just go ahead and do it if you have conviction. After all, you're only sacrificing your own self.
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High Speed rail attempts have failed everywhere in North America, it has nothing to do with Musk or Hyperloop and everything to do with how incredibly poorly HSR fits into the existing urban fabric of North America. There have been many studies of building a HSR line between Windsor and Quebec City and you just can't make it work.
Brightline exists and is operational in Florida, you can now ride a high speed train from Miami to Orlando (as long as you're okay with 120mph as high speed). They are still expanding it to Tampa too.
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It was supposed to be an air-bearing; there would be some sort of fan that would take air from the front of the car, and move it to the back of the car, diverting some fraction to the bottom of the car for it to slide over (think like an air-hockey table).
I work quite a bit with air bearings. There is an inverse relationship with pressure requirements and tolerances. If you want low pressures, you need high tolerances...if you want low tolerances, you need high pressures. There was some fundamental math that could have refuted this idea from the very beginning, but Musk spoke before he calculated.
There is a world where we dig tunnels under federal highways, and stick freight trucks down there. They'd run on a monorail, at 120+ mph. Surface vehicles would be dramatically limited in terms of height, width, and length. Maybe people buses could go down there? In my imagination these tunnels are, like, 200' down. Like mole people.
It served its purpose of diverting attention (and so funding) from high speed rail, which is a threat to his business of selling cars. https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1571628269555826688?lan...
CA HSR is going to spend $8b to connect 4th and King to the Transbay Terminal. That's 2 miles. At $4b/mi, the problem would be too much attention not too little https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/27/san-francisco-downtown-rai...
You comment reduced a complex issue to an elementary word problem in math.
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Why would you not take it when it's free? Makes zero sense.
Cost is not the only factor. For certain social classes, public transport is seen as fundamentally shameful or dangerous, something better left to poor people.