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Hyperloop One to shut down

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Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#121

Post by askonomm »

korse wrote: post #80
thechao wrote: post #12

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.

Contrarian take, but tons of truck traffic on interstate highways makes driving far more fun (as long as there isn't road maintenance or undue stoppage). I'm actually looking forward to future me being able to ride my motorcycle around a freight-train's worth of semi-automated cargo-haulers on interstates that are mostly devoid of vacationing families.

To each their own, but as a fellow motorcycle rider myself, I absolutely shit myself around huge trucks that won't be able to even see me.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#122

Post by systems_glitch »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #56
systems_glitch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When folks suggest a new "changes everything" way to go fast, always remember that we used to run NY to Chicago at 120 MPH on steam power and bolted rails.

I mean, we can now do that run at Mach 0.9 in 400 ton aluminum behemoths for the price of a nice dinner, so you know, things have changed

Your nice dinner and my nice dinner must be pretty different :P I was of course speaking to rail travel, which yeah, is not much cheaper anymore, and far less time efficient.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#123

Post by JohnFen »

chrisco255 wrote: post #102
_ea1k wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess that he didn't expect it to work. He never invested significantly, and there must be a reason. The simplest reason seems to be that he expected it not to work, at least with current technology.

The tech is fine, right? It's the long game you have to play with regulators and state and local officials to get right of way to build the tracks or tubes in the first place. Under current regulations, it would take a decade of intense focus and politickin' to probably achieve a minimal viable example.

> The tech is fine, right?

No, the tech is not fine. There are really serious, showstopper issues with it. Issues that were known way back in the early 1900s and there is still no feasible way to overcome them.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#124

Post by klodolph »

panick21_ wrote: post #109
resolutebat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US freight rail network is in excellent shape. It's the passenger network that's in shambles.

Yeah sure. That why their is constant derailment.

The constant derailment is because the operators are chasing profit above safety. Make the trains as long as possible, run them as fast as possible. At some point derailment is inevitable, if you operate the trains that way.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#125

Post by panick21_ »

Syonyk wrote: post #71
renewiltord wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and because of that, today we have mainstream electric cars, an Earth blanketed with Internet from space, and the cheapest spacelift cost ever achieved. 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…

Musk was not instrumental in mainstream EVs. He was on the early wave of it, yes, but other companies had EVs out at the same time or before, and the price drop in lithium was obvious to everyone who was paying attention at the time. It would have happened one way or another. Yes, we've ruined astronomy with a ton of LEO satellites, but we've got some internet in exchange (I'm rural, I have it, I'm quite honestly not…

> but other companies had EVs out at the same time or before

Making EV mainstream is about more then a big company throwing a few batteries into an existing car platform. It was about shifting perceptions, starting a public conversation and making people actual demand EVs. And making EV profitable.

> and the price drop in lithium was obvious to everyone who was paying attention at the time.

Ah that's why Tesla is such a small an insignificant company now, because everybody else knew everything. Brilliant logic.

> It would have happened one way or another.

That is literally what Musk has said for 20 years. Its gone happen anyway, Tesla is about making it happen faster. And his building of the Roaster, Model S were clearly huge steps. Building the Gigafactory Nevada was a huge signal, and lead to a huge amount of investment all threw the supply chains, and lots of companies thinking bigger. The biggest European battery maker is people who helped build Giga Nevada and then went and started a new battery company in Europe.

The Model 3 reaching profitability was a absolutely huge signal in the automotive industry. Tesla building it with 20%+ margin was a literal bomb in the industry. Until that point it was almost universally believed that high volume EV were just not gone be possible. After that pretty much all car companies accelerated their EV strategies.

> Yes, we've ruined astronomy

How this nonsense claim gets repeated over and over again is just beyond me. Anybody who still argues this is just willfully ignorant at this point.

> I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers

And more then 2 million people disagree with you and that number is growing.

> Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome

The inherent permission in your worldview is just sad and depressing. Everything bad must happen even when most experts agree it wont happen.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#126

Post by yuliyp »

thechao wrote: post #12

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.

That sounds like railroads but worse. What's the advantage? Tunneling is incredibly expensive to do, yet you're proposing it in a situation where it'd need enough coverage so as to ban large freight transport over roads.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#127

Post by ianburrell »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #93
vaidhy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe 40mill is the average across the network. The 8 billion is for a specific portion in a high CoL area with the majority being land acquisition costs. If you have a dig a new subway station in middle of Frankfurt, for an infrastructure that does not exist today, it would not be the average.

> The 8 billion is for a specific portion in a high CoL area with the majority being land acquisition costs. This is exactly the kind of thing I was suspecting was by misleading by the original number. "America can't build affordable high-speed rail" suggests that that their is same lacking capability in engineering. "Land costs make building in dense areas unprofitable" is a completely different story.

Also, the $8 billion includes building the train station under the Transbay Terminal. Train stations, especially underground ones, are really expensive.

Plus, it is digging a tunnel for the tracks.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#128

Post by _cenw »

darksaints wrote: post #48
thechao wrote: post #12

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.

Much like highways and trains, the tracks are the easy part. The hard part is in routing and termination - think interchanges, onramps, and offramps. Being underground compounds the routing and termination problem dramatically.

not to mention tunneling costs. if you need a benchmark, look up what it costs the swiss build.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#129

Post by GuB-42 »

Moomoomoo309 wrote: post #79
ForkMeOnTinder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fwiw electric cars date back to the late 1800s. There's no reason old ideas can't work well with new tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Early_development...

If there's been innovation on the fundamental problem, sure. We haven't really improved vacuum pumps that much, nor can we really fix the whole "one high-caliber bullet could implode the entire tunnel" problem yet.

I hear the "catastrophic implosion" argument a lot but it doesn't sound right to me. I never shot at a vacuum chamber but my guess is that it will just create a leak, which is bad, will probably stop traffic for a while before it is repaired and the vacuum reestablished, but nothing catastrophic.

A bomb would be a serious threat, the shockwave from both the explosion and rapid decompression, but I believe it can be mitagated. Bombs are bad for pretty much everything anyways.

The other problem is if the walls don't break but the pipe crumples. But this is more likely to have a self-sealing effect, and with enough overbuilding, it shouldn't cause a chain reaction.

I don't believe in hyperloop, but I think catastrophic implosions are rather low in the list of reasons why it won't happen. It doesn't even make it at the top of safety related reasons.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#130

Post by stevehawk »

JohnFen wrote: post #120
resolutebat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US freight rail network is in excellent shape. It's the passenger network that's in shambles.

The US has no passenger network. It's all freight rail. Passenger trains run on the freight network (and freight always get priority).

Amtrak in the northeast corridor is Amtrak owned track
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