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Hyperloop One to shut down

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131–140 of 490 posts

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#131

As I recall Musk stated publicly that the only reason he pushed Hyperloop was to derail the California High Speed Rail initiative. In that regard it was somewhat successful. [1] “He admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced—even though he had no intention of pursuing it—was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project” -- https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valleys-transportation-fail…

That might have been his intent but it appears California didn't need the help in failing to produce high speed rail in a timely manner at anywhere near the estimated cost.

The high speed rail authority is not only tasked with building and operating the final high speed rail route but also has had to deal with land use politics of dozens of jurisdictions along the alignment. HSR has no at-grade crossings which means everywhere along the route that it crosses a road there needs to be an overpass or underpass. In the central valley where most construction has been happening that's at least one every mile for about 150 miles. They also had had to do multi-year environmental impact studies (because California law requires it for any major change from the status quo) which have to be incredibly thorough because people can just appeal any part of the project for any arbitrary "environmental" reasons such as "the overhead wires alter my view of [something, usually nothing]" if they can claim that it wasn't considered in the study.

Can we build it? Yes. The issue is mostly that we have so much process that delays building and scope creep for what does get built.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#132
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess you’re supposed to reenact the space whale scene from treasure planet.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would want put in pure electric rail, since you don’t want to ventilate it to handle diesel fumes from the hybrid electric diesel turbine engines so common in the USA. Since the USA’s rail system is barely electrified at all, it would be a huge undertaking.

If you don't want to ventilate, it would likely need to be non-contact electric rail, unless you want the tunnels to have extremely high concentrations of ozone. The arcs from electric contact catenaries produce ozone, which is fine outdoors because of immediate dissipation and short half-life. Put it in a tunnel and you either have to invest in ventilation (what most subway systems do), or mitigation (via contactles…

Interestingly enough, even if you don’t have any arcing you still need to ventilate because there’s nowhere for heat to go, and eventually running enough trains over many years heats up the ground.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#134
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.

Why go underground (expensive 3rd dimension down) when we have the whole 3rd dimension up almost unused? The freight can be trucked by large Zeppelins for example (and electric at that with the most of the energy generated by the solar panels covering the upper surface of the Zeppelin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38017937). The issues are pure engineering ones. These freight Zeppelins can be fully automated, flying around any densely populated places.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#135
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats The Boring Company. Musk's other tunnel idea. Dodgy but not yet bankrupt.

I thought the plan was to put hyper loops in tunnels made by the boring company? There are too many failing pieces to keep track of.

Hyperloop and Boring Co are separate. Hyperloop was proposal for super-high-speed capsule in vacuum tube. Boring makes tunnels and they make "transit" tunnels. They want to make autonomous pods but so far they have only done Teslas.

To make more confusing, Boring calls its cars in tunnels product Loop.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess you’re supposed to reenact the space whale scene from treasure planet.

An absolute gem of a movie. Didn't see it until I had kids and it was one of the few movies that I didn't get tired of rewatching again and again with them.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#137
post #118
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

other companies had EVs out at the same time Who? And how did they mainstream EVs more than Tesla? Fisker was in the market early, but didn’t mainstream EVs. GM was in way early, but probably held the market back.

Honestly, Musk’s innovation with Tesla has nothing to do with the damn cars. He made sure they build a supercharging network to answer the main complaint. That worked.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want to ventilate, it would likely need to be non-contact electric rail, unless you want the tunnels to have extremely high concentrations of ozone. The arcs from electric contact catenaries produce ozone, which is fine outdoors because of immediate dissipation and short half-life. Put it in a tunnel and you either have to invest in ventilation (what most subway systems do), or mitigation (via contactles…

There are lots of tunnels that do electric rail in Europe and China. Even that very long one in Switzerland. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel I think it is using overhead wires.

Yes, and that tunnel has massive ventilation systems, not just for emergencies like fires too. Fun trivia: the tunnel is so deep that without ventilation the temperature in it would be 40 centigrade.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#139
post #6

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...

Reminds me of how HN received the original proposal: with as much discussion about the thing that it was supposed to replace as the supposed novel tech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6201586

Probably deserves as much recognition as the original Dropbox thread, but for different reasons.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#140
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered just how bad an idea must have been. If Musk didn't go after it. Specially considering that he is the one who published it...

Elon Musk said from the outset that he was not gonna build it, he thought the idea was good and published a whitepaper on it which basically started the conversation. He also talks about a supersonic electrical passenger jet from time to time, but he says he don't have the time to do that either.

Perhaps we should apply a bit more of a critical standard to Elon's various statements: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
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