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Hyperloop

spacex.com

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Re: Hyperloop

#301

Post by mcintyre1994 »

ewoodrich wrote: post #275
lmg643 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting point that big government provoked the advancement of the hyperloop idea - counterintuitive idea, and clearly yes. but any idea like this will need government cooperation. The real test of big government will be how they respond to the hyperloop. magic response: "of course we may be wrong, we'll look into this immediately." and then they decide to build it. likely answer: praise, perhaps even an evaluatio…

It was approved by a ballot measure, so in this case it may be the "idiocy" (or will) of the voter. http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition...

I'm not from the area, so I don't know how such a ballot works but for voters who didn't have Musk-level engineering knowledge, was the choice the status quo of not fast trains and spending on fast trains?

Re: Hyperloop

#302

Post by lotu »

cma wrote: post #193
aaronmarks wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the report: "...with capsules departing as often as every 30 seconds from each terminal and carrying 28 people each. This gives a total of 7.4 million people each way that can be transported each year on Hyperloop."

Eventually hits up against this problem: http://books.google.com/books?id=DenWKRgqzWMC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA...

Ehh, really you don't just speed up the lift you redesign the whole loading and unloading system to allow it to load and unload more people per second. You see this in actual high speed lifts.

Re: Hyperloop

#303

Post by verbin217 »

Seems like this would be particularly vulnerable to terrorist attacks. There is a huge surface area that needs to be protected (tubes/pylons). If there are pods leaving every thirty seconds and traveling at supersonic speeds then taking out one pylon could kill several hundred people and leave the entire train inoperable. In a future where this design was used extensively to connect cities on the coasts it would quickly become a critical piece of transportation infrastructure. Attacking several arcs of the city graph simultaneously would be utterly debilitating. Especially if the system's relative efficiency leads to the displacement of other forms of transportation.

Re: Hyperloop

#304

Post by jarek »

munificent wrote: post #295
rthomas6 wrote: post #53

I am skeptical of the proposed cost were someone to actually build this. Sure, the cost of materials, labor, engineering, etc. is probably accurate, but something like this has never been built before. What about the cost of research and testing? Not to mention there doesn't currently exist an industry of contractors to build most of the parts of this system, which is not true in the case of traditional high speed ra…

> something like this has never been built before That was true of everything, once.

Doesn't mean building the first one should be expected to be easy.

Re: Hyperloop

#305

Post by lowkey »

Adding a compressor fan to actively transfer air from the front to the rear of the pod while simultaneously serving as an air cushion to support the vehicle is simple, elegant and absolutely brilliant!

An ingenious solution appears so obvious in hindsight that it leads you to ask "why didn't I think of that?" While being subtle enough to confound all those who came before.

I have been following the developments of the ET3 Consortium for the past year. I have read virtually all the technical literature available online on the topic of alternative high-speed transportation systems going back as far as the RAND paper and even reading related patents from much earlier.

Looking at the genius of Elon Musk's insight is both inspiring ang greatly humbling - but mostly inspiring. Holy awesome! I would love to see this innovation take root. It could be the perfect elixer to our stagnant economic malaise.

Well done Mr. Musk!

Re: Hyperloop

#306

Post by asmithmd1 »

marshray wrote: post #203
ciex wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get out of there in case of fire? If the doors open like that I don't think it would work while inside the tube wouldn't it?

Well, there's a low grade vacuum outside so you probably don't want to. It's a failure of the onboard steam tanks that scares me. ("The steam is stored onboard until reaching the station. Water and steam tanks are changed automatically at each stop") I don't want to think about what the result of that would look like for the cleanup crew. Eeeewww.

The output of the compressor is at 1000 deg. F and 300 psi. That is pretty scary.

Re: Hyperloop

#307

Post by prawn »

ajiang wrote: post #183
prawn wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might Tony Hsieh champion a group pushing for LA to Vegas? I imagine SF-Vegas might have a roundabout route.

That could definitely make sense. Vegas might even put up some capital to make it easier for people to visit and put their hard earned dollars to good use. I can also imagine that from an infrastructure standpoint building across desert you'd run into fewer obstacles, although that might be wishful / oversimplified thinking.

And 30 minutes would mean that you could go to Vegas on a Friday or Saturday night and return to crash in your own place.

Re: Hyperloop

#309

Post by fallse7en »

bvi wrote: post #251
fatjokes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each chair is actually a toilet. Problem solved.

This is genius.

This is also disgusting. Can you imagine a Greyhound where every seat was also a toilet? I would definitely think long and hard before riding it.

Re: Hyperloop

#310

Post by jarek »

mason55 wrote: post #191
potatolicious wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently you get up and go to the bathroom at the end of the car. I've only had time to skim the full PDF, but there's something about experiencing 0.5g of acceleration - unsure if that is a constant or if that is simply right at the very beginning. If you're going to experience 0.5g of acceleration over a prolonged period, letting passengers get up and move about is going to be a bad idea. It also doesn't look like…

> unsure if that is a constant or if that is simply right at the very beginning. If the top speed is 700mph then you'd have 142 seconds of 0.5 g acceleration to get to top speed. How often you'd be accelerating or decelerating would depend on how many intermediate stations there are.

Curves are also specced for 0.5g. That will account for quite a bit more of the total acceleration time than just speeding up and slowing down.
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