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.
Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
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Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#22I wonder if they decided that the risk model of rocketing human beings through an evacuated tube was just too high?
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#23I still don't understand why there is any interest in this concept, either for freight or passenger transport, over a regular train.
Vastly higher speeds is the reason it would be valuable if it can be made economically feasible.
It can't be made feasible from an engineering POV, not just economically. It's virtually impossible to maintain a relevant vacuum in hundreds of kilometers of tunnel. The temperature stresses alone would cause leaks unless using some very special materials (if any exist).
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#24I find it quite surprising that they only fired half and not all of them. How can this conceptual vacuum tube pod system that has been shown to be incredibly inefficient and prohibitively expensive still have some kind of business model? To be honest I thought this whole idea got scrapped 5+ years ago.
It's a bootstrap for Mars construction. Hence the undersized tunnels. Mass transit is just a cover story.
TFA has nothing to do with the boring company or underground tunnels
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#25I still don't understand why there is any interest in this concept, either for freight or passenger transport, over a regular train.
Vastly higher speeds is the reason it would be valuable if it can be made economically feasible.
How long does it make sense to investigate that question?
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#26[deleted]
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#27I still don't understand why there is any interest in this concept, either for freight or passenger transport, over a regular train.
Because the current passenger rail “system” in the US is horrendous.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#28I still don't understand why there is any interest in this concept, either for freight or passenger transport, over a regular train.
Vastly higher speeds is the reason it would be valuable if it can be made economically feasible.
I don’t think businesses care about speed but rather stability and throughput. If the vaccuum is broken how long does it take to get it fixed, the tube emptied of ”pods”, and so on.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#29This is about VIRGIN Hyperloop by Richard Bransons Virgin Brand conglomerate. Not to be confused with Elon Musks Boring Company. FTA: > Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.
Boring company has abandoned any idea of a hyper loop a long time ago, right? Did they ever even associate with it (outside the branding of their Vegas mini tunnel)?
Boring company never had anything to do with Hyperloop. The Hyperloop concept was just a Bluepaper released by Musk. It was only years after that Musk started talking about tunnels and the Loop system.
Probably at some point Boring company would like to be able to make tunnels long enough that it would make sense to with something more high speed then a normal EV can do. But that is not their focus.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#30There are a lot of reasons standard rail in the US is cargo centric. Profit and a much easier customer service case are big ones. Also, sending cargo in a new transportation system is much easier and less lawsuit prone than people. An old story in the US since the post office basically made airplane travel viable via postal contracts.
Glossing over the fact that almost all the railways in the US are privately owned by cargo companies which prioritize their cargo over transport. Huge reason Amtrak struggles so much
There is presumably a reason they are cargo companies and not passager transport companies. Unless Amtrak has a government enforced monopoly?