The crazy thing is the idea of small pod electric trains is still possible. Look at americas 99% idle railroad tracks.
Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
131–140 of 155 posts
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. Yes, because they no longer plan to use the original design proposed by Musk (pods in vacuum in tubes installed on the ground). No because long term they still plan to do hyper loop but the latest iteration of the idea is electric cars driving really fast in under-pressurized underground tunnel. See https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop That being said, Boring Company is still in very early stages. They…
Well, the Vegas loop is just a short, expensive, small tunnel that took a very very long time to build (more than 1 year per mile) in a straight line with all permitting sorted out, so I'm not sure what it proves except incompetence. Look at some Swiss alpine tunnels or the underwater Channel tunnel if you want to see advanced tunnel boring technology. Edit: to give exact numbers: boring for LVCC Loop started on Nove…
That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster. The eventual opening had a lot to do with other factors including covid. Convention centers were not exactly in high demand. Doing everything around the actual tunnel took longer. Its also the literally first project ever done by a start up company so of course its not perfect.
And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?
The investment for the kind of things like the Channel tunnel or the Base tunnel in Switzerland are 100x that of a Boring company tunnel. Those are incredibly expensive dedicated machines, years of planning beforehand.
Boring company is trying to innovate on small tunnel machines and make them more operationally efficient. Moving to electric powered drills, vertical launch and other practical improvements. Those kinds of things you could actually operate and launch in a lot a lot of places.
The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible. So we shouldn't try to improve some machine because potentially in another country they already some technology? Apparently the commercial machines that TBC bought to start with clearly didn't have many of those features they wanted on a machine of the size they wanted. So clearly the technology didn't actually exist.
So I guess that means the US will also never do Li-Ion battery as Koreans already have better technology. So why try to innovate. SpaceX doing Falcon 1, why Arianespace already has Vega. What's the point?
As long as the company is not somehow using massive government funds and they have paying costumers, what is the problem?
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#133A 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.
TBC works on Loop systems, not Hyperloops.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#134I have a theory: I think it was a hedge against politicians potentially investing in public transport. If some brave politician comes along, doesn't need money from car manufacturers and decides to build public transport infrastructure, it will be a big financial drag on the US car market. A second Trump term could have gone that way: https://time.com/4247162/donald-trump-trains-infrastructure/ . If you were also one…
Richard Branson doesn't have a car company ...
This makes literally 0 sense.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't really need to remove air resistance to beat Amtrak though.
Any new form of passenger transit isn't just competing with Amtrack, it's also competing with airplanes which fly at around 440-550 mph. Let's say you want to go from SF to Seattle, a distance of about 800 miles. If you had a typical high-speed maglev train (250 mph), the trip would take about 3 hours. On an airplane, the actual transit would take a little under 2 hours, so if you get to the airport an hour early tha…
I think investing in trains today makes little sense. We are on the verge of electric aviation.
Electric planes will not only be much cheaper to they will also be much more quiet and thus can potentially be operate in more places closer to where people need.
A major investment into a that technology seem a far better bet then trains at this point.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#136Is there another justification for the continued existence of the Boring company then?
People get this confused. The Boring company has nothing to do with this company called Virgin Hyperloop.
The Boring company is working on what they call a 'Loop', not a 'Hyperloop'. A Loop is just a tunnel with some form of battery electric pod inside of it. Its not a vacuum.
I'm sure at some point in the future when they have improved tunneling they would consider trying to do a vacuum tunnel but this is not what they are working on now.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the Vegas loop is just a short, expensive, small tunnel that took a very very long time to build (more than 1 year per mile) in a straight line with all permitting sorted out, so I'm not sure what it proves except incompetence. Look at some Swiss alpine tunnels or the underwater Channel tunnel if you want to see advanced tunnel boring technology. Edit: to give exact numbers: boring for LVCC Loop started on Nove…
That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster. The eventual opening had a lot to do with other factors including covid. Convention centers were not exactly in high demand. Doing everything around the actual tunnel took longer. Its also the literally first project ever done by a start up company so of course its not perfect. And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commerc…
> That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster.
So was the Channel tunnel. It takes quite a bit of time after physically digging the tunnel until you can actually open it to the public.
> And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?
Perhaps because other tunnels left space for potentially saving someone from the tunnel in case of an emergency?
Hopefully this never comes to pass, but it seems very hard to believe there is any chance to escape in case of a tunnel fire.
> The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible.
It's the other way around. They're just a tunnel boring company, but are constantly being hailed as some futuristic transportation solution. They're particularly a company that seems to bet on reducing costs (all the way down to European levels as far as I understand, American tunnel boring prices are apparently hugely inflated) beyond anything else, such as comfort, speed and most importantly safety.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any new form of passenger transit isn't just competing with Amtrack, it's also competing with airplanes which fly at around 440-550 mph. Let's say you want to go from SF to Seattle, a distance of about 800 miles. If you had a typical high-speed maglev train (250 mph), the trip would take about 3 hours. On an airplane, the actual transit would take a little under 2 hours, so if you get to the airport an hour early tha…
I think investing in trains today makes little sense. We are on the verge of electric aviation. Electric planes will not only be much cheaper to they will also be much more quiet and thus can potentially be operate in more places closer to where people need. A major investment into a that technology seem a far better bet then trains at this point.
I think investing in [existing tried and true technology that powers the whole world outside a bubble] makes little sense. We should invest in [technology that doesn't exist but could possibly be applied in roughly the same space for many times the cost].
It's impossible for electric planes to be cheaper than electric rail - everything about a plane is harder to achieve, the size will be smaller (since it also needs to lift off the ground, not just drive), safety is a much bigger concern (leading to much more time for boarding procedures). The only advantage air travel has is that it doesn't require real-estate.
Instead, electric planes still need decades of engineering work, and what we know for sure is that they will be less efficient than kerosene planes, as there is no type of battery even plausible today that could achieve anywhere near the energy density of gasoline (in Wh/kg, not Wh/l as is sometimes shown).
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, that is entriely false. The main product of all currently plausible fusion reactors are neutrons. Those are extremely destructive to living tissue, requiring heavy shielding. Even worse, any material which absorbs neutrons becomes radioactive itself, so the shield inevitably becomes radioactive.
The advantage of fusion is that this radioactivity is short lived compared to uranium - decades instead of centuries or millennia. However, this also means that you have to stay much farther away from it, as it's much more radioactive than a piece of uranium which you can typically hold in your hand without any ill effects (just don't hold it under your pillow for a few years).
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And hyperloop has the potential to replace millions of gas-burning cars, buses, trains and planes...
How? The initial plan was discussing something on the order of 850 passengers per hour between SF and LA. Fundamentally, such an expensive piece of infrastructure with critical safety concerns can't be a mass transit system.