111–120 of 178 posts
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> a hyperloop to be created with no tube, only a track Don't we call that a “train?”
Sure, but I think it's fair to call a train that is powered with electromagnetic pulses from stationary coils something different than a train that is powered by an onboard engine.
There's a palpable excitement around Hyperloop and I can't wait to know if this will reshape our world or not. One of the largest problem I can see is not technical. The consensus is that a "standard" Hyperloop track (between 2 cities, 300 to 800km apart) would have a ~1,500 passengers/hour max capacity. High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour. Even if Hyperloop managed to get built…
> High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour. How is that remotely true? There is one Eurostar approximately every 30 minutes (looking at the departures from London [0], it seems that there are 32 Eurostar leaving London every day), and I seriously doubt one train can carry 5000 passengers (I would say about 500 passengers), so your approximation is completely off (even taking into acco…
Related: http://quora.com/Will-Hyperloop-One’s-Hyperloop-product-work... I think the deal breaker is the high speeds, which require a much straighter track and much larger turn radius (410ft for a train, ~4.6 mi. for HL). That means a lot of tunneling through mountains and bulldozing expensive buildings. Land is the biggest expense in these projects. I'm more hopeful of NASA's current work trying to reduce the sonic…
The problem with flights is the time and trouble spent getting to and getting through airports so the flight time has to be long enough to justify the wasted time.
High speed rail has the big advantage that it can use existing tracks, at slower speed, to reach the center city train stations.
Just imagine the TSA line for the hyperloop. You'll have to arrive days ahead of time.
Why? Wouldn't it be more like a train than a plane? A terrorist would only be able to kill ~28 people at a time (1 pod), compared to >200 for a plane
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SpaceX received uncounted billions' of dollars worth of R&D for free thanks to the existence of government-funded space programs, which already solved many of the difficult fundamental problems in the field of rocketry so SpaceX wouldn't have to. And while it's neat to watch the stuff they do, there's very little SpaceX is doing that's revolutionary as opposed to evolutionary. So of course now SpaceX can come in and…
I wouldn't be so sure on that. The R&D transfer and ready human capital was definitely profound in SpaceX's case, but if it was that incremental, why didn't NASA or anybody else do it before? I think almost the sae can be said for Hyperloop. There's no fundamentally new technology that needs to be engineered for it to work. Maglevs are common in many countries, evacuated tubs aren't complicated. All that said, the US…
There's a palpable excitement around Hyperloop and I can't wait to know if this will reshape our world or not. One of the largest problem I can see is not technical. The consensus is that a "standard" Hyperloop track (between 2 cities, 300 to 800km apart) would have a ~1,500 passengers/hour max capacity. High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour. Even if Hyperloop managed to get built…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX received uncounted billions' of dollars worth of R&D for free thanks to the existence of government-funded space programs, which already solved many of the difficult fundamental problems in the field of rocketry so SpaceX wouldn't have to. And while it's neat to watch the stuff they do, there's very little SpaceX is doing that's revolutionary as opposed to evolutionary. So of course now SpaceX can come in and…
I wouldn't be so sure on that. The R&D transfer and ready human capital was definitely profound in SpaceX's case, but if it was that incremental, why didn't NASA or anybody else do it before? I think almost the sae can be said for Hyperloop. There's no fundamentally new technology that needs to be engineered for it to work. Maglevs are common in many countries, evacuated tubs aren't complicated. All that said, the US…
Why haven't we gone to the moon since the 1970s? Because there wasn't the political will to keep funding the programs that went there. Why was the Space Shuttle such an awkward and ultimately non-viable way to go to space? Because there wasn't the political will to fund genuine reusable launch technology. SpaceX's big advantages are in having the hard up-front R&D already done for it by someone else, and in not having to rely solely on political decisions for the existence of its market; even if there are no more nice-PR resupply missions to the ISS, there are still going to be private actors who want to launch satellites.
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Cheaper != better. It's important to look at the hyperloop in the context in which it was proposed. This is California and environmental aspects need to be taken into account. Airlines are a major source of CO2 and California wants a more environmentally friendly solution. There is a proposed high-speed rail project with a $10B initial estimate that's sure to at least double by the time the project is complete. The h…
What does "better" mean? Outside of governmental regulations, the market is what determines progress and there isn't much push by consumers for environmental impacts. They just want cheap and reliable transit. Price also wins over speed (and it's been show things like wifi have a greater effect on travel comfort than speed). Unless you cut down the travel time significantly, it just doesn't matter. And at those speed…
That's only because externalities haven't been included in the pricing. What about the $14t that it will take to relocate people displaced by rising oceans? The repair costs from the increasingly-common severe weather events? There are real costs of climate change that aren't being accounted for and will have to be paid by future generations.
I know Elon Musk has a lot of goodwill around here, but is no one else cynical about the notion of a smart, ambitious automobile CEO coming up with some plausible-seeming science-fictional FUD to torpedo a high speed rail project that may very well compete with his interests?
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The MIT prototype, and some of the other proposals, are really a maglev system. The original Hyperloop proposal called for aerodynamic support, with very tight tolerances, but that turns out to be iffy. A maglev system needs a much more expensive track and/or a lot of energy from the vehicle to power the lift. This is the big problem with maglev - track cost. Maglev works fine; the Transrapid system in Shanghai has b…
Ah that explains all the maglev. I could have sworn that the original version rode on air and used its electric turbine for propulsion. Anything good you've read that explains why they've abandoned that route?
The "flying height" in the original proposal was to be about 1mm, so this thing has to be really well behaved aerodynamically. And the tube has to be really smooth. (Expansion joints, emergency escape hatches, pressure doors, and switches would be problems.) The whole point of the Hyperloop is that it's cheap because the tube is simple and dumb.
When you look at the MIT design [2] it's really a maglev monorail that operates in an evacuated tube. (Or outside of one, as they've demonstrated by sending down a rail). It doesn't have any of the fan propulsion or air cushion lift or tight tolerances from the original Hyperloop proposal.
[1] http://www.ansys-blog.com/20130925hyperloop/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiyPQU48Ef0