101–110 of 155 posts
Kind of OT, or maybe not. But why didn't Musk (or anyone else) go with Maglev tech? The efficiency seems ok, and it probably doesn't matter if you do it above vs below ground, and it's deployed around the world now.
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Why do articles about fusion power keep hitting HN over regular nuclear power?
Fusion has no waste products except ordinary elements, low on the periodic table. It's an entirely different beast. You could theoretically have a little Tony Stark reactor powering your home, safely.
A lot of people seem to be confused. Elon does not have any companies working on a hyperloop. He kicked off the idea and released a white paper with some very early engineering work seemingly put together by a group of engineers working at SpaceX and Tesla[1]. He never had any plans to commercialize it himself and was releasing it as "open source" for anyone else to take up. Several companies sprang up to pursue the…
What about TBC and the Las Vegas plans? It's not a Hyperloop as originally explained but uses the name - and seems to be par for the course in terms of Elon proposing products that aren't exactly delivered the way they were marketed.
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What about TBC and the Las Vegas plans? It's not a Hyperloop as originally explained but uses the name - and seems to be par for the course in terms of Elon proposing products that aren't exactly delivered the way they were marketed.
They have very little in common besides the name and the fact that they both are transit systems involving tubes. Hyperloop's main goal was to provide fast intercity transit, TBC's goal is to provide convenient intracity transit
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Because all the US passenger rail companies went out of business. Amtrak was essentially created out of the wreckage to maintain some passenger rail service. (It's a very complicated history.) Amtrak makes almost all of its money on the Northeast Corridor which it then basically throws away in the rest of the country.
Arguably Amtrak was intended to dismantle the remains of passenger rail, and its persistence 50 years later was not foreseen.
China: Builds 40,000 miles of high speed rail in 12 years https://twitter.com/xiaoyewen/status/1494588071483875333 United States: Thinks about vacuum tubes for awhile, gives up entirely.
I’m much more excited by Japan’s new maglev that will go from Tokyo to Nagoya by 2026 or 2028.
Hyper loop had a lot of potential to avoid the problem facing most rail projects in the states (lack of land for straight shots needed for HSR, and the government’s unwilling to use eminent domain to get that, also, I think Americans are more adverse to viaducts everywhere than the Chinese). A vaccine tube underneath would solve a lot of that.
Kind of OT, or maybe not. But why didn't Musk (or anyone else) go with Maglev tech? The efficiency seems ok, and it probably doesn't matter if you do it above vs below ground, and it's deployed around the world now.
20 miles of maglev track from the shanghai airport to the city cost 1.2 billion dollars for China to build, god knows how much it would cost Americans (NYC spent about a billion per mile on the last expansion to the subway, and that's hundred year old tech)
The Shanghai maglev is kind of a pink elephant, it doesn’t even go to downtown Shanghai. I took it once for the novelty l, but a cab is much better time wise and about the same price.
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We can do it in the ISS. Not an easy problem, but it is a solvable problem. The problem is all the solutions will cost a ton of money.
The ISS isn’t kept at a vacuum and isn’t hundreds of kilometres long, and space needs no assistance from us to maintain a vacuum, gravity’s got that covered.
Large-diameter tube freight has, a history.[1] The USSR built a few sizable TRANSPROGRESS tube systems with diameters in the 1.5 to 2 meter range in the 1970s. Mostly for garbage disposal. There have been proposals on and off for over a century. Pneumatic garbage disposal is in use in a very few places. Roosevelt Island in New York has had a working system since the 1980s. It works well and is well-liked. Roosevelt I…
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The limit on speed is air resistance.
That would be true if US passenger rail was actually capable of high speeds to start with. As it stands right now US passenger rail is total joke compared to the rest of the developed world. Slower, less reliable, more expensive. Air resistance in the US is the same as everywhere else, so that isn’t the limit factor.