The Hyperloop: BUSTED

[beanflying]

There is no Engineering beyond the overhype to show it will work, bluff and BS that it will work is 

What a BS. As a concept, it is completely operational, actually exists and proven to work. What's is under big question is real life implementation. What works as a concept, very often is not feasible in real life. Because of financial, safety, technical, whatever reasons.

Retrofitting it into a working real city is only one of the issues before you get near the  non facts and figures Musk has offered. Smoke and mirrors and pushed out promises are not facts or Engineering.

How about retrofitting usual subway into existing cities? How it's any different from this standpoint.

Because in part of the claimed high speeds and the risk of explosive decompression in densely packed cities is part of how it is different. Try looking at what happens with decompression or a few thousand tons at high speed goes wrong. 

Retrofitting Subways into existing cities is massively expensive and the Yawning tunnel company hasn't made magic pixie dust appear to change it.

"it is completely operational, actually exists and proven to work" seriously? Pass whatever you are smoking please 

[wraper]

Because in part of the claimed high speeds and the risk of explosive decompression in densely packed cities is part of how it is different. Try looking at what happens with decompression or a few thousand tons at high speed goes wrong. 

Regardless of what happens to hyperloop itself, there won't be damage to the city since it is deep under earth. Also there won't be big explosion. It's effing 1 bar pressure difference only.

Retrofitting Subways into existing cities is massively expensive and the Yawning tunnel company hasn't made magic pixie dust appear to change it.

You don't need to dig the tunnels from top. The only difference compared with digging it in free space is that you need to free up space for stations.
Decompression:

[wraper]

"it is completely operational, actually exists and proven to work" seriously? Pass whatever you are smoking please 

How about all those test tunnels already built? Tested under vacuum with pods running inside.

[beanflying]

"it is completely operational, actually exists and proven to work" seriously? Pass whatever you are smoking please 

How about all those test tunnels already built? Tested under vacuum with pods running inside.

You mean the test railed vehicles inside a metal tunnel doing 400'ish km/hr while actual high speed rail without tunnels is doing well over this (5-600km/hr) carrying thousands of actual humans each day?

The Hyperloop Alpha concept was first published in August 2013, proposing and examining a route running from the Los Angeles region to the San Francisco Bay Area, roughly following the Interstate 5 corridor. The Hyperloop Genesis paper conceived of a hyperloop system that would propel passengers along the 350-mile (560 km) route at a speed of 760 mph (1,200 km/h), allowing for a travel time of 35 minutes, which is considerably faster than current rail or air travel times.

Over stated  and under delivered!

[wraper]

You mean the test railed vehicles inside a metal tunnel doing 400'ish km/hr

To get faster speed, you need longer tunnel. You cannot accelerate/decelerate instantly. You don't seem to have concept of what concept means. Also actual speed inside the tunnel is the least of problems. And it's not something there is any reason to debunk. Basic physics, remove friction, and your speed becomes limited only by propulsion.

while actual high speed rail without tunnels is doing well over this (5-600km/hr) carrying thousands of actual humans each day?

It's Maglev, not rail. Placing Maglev into vacuum removes speed limitation due to drag.

[beanflying]

You really need to open your eyes a little looks like rails to me. Not all technologies for high speed rail are maglev! That's 574km/hr of TGV.

It's Maglev, not rail. Placing Maglev into vacuum removes speed limitation due to drag.

  Maglev chews power to 'reduce' drag it does not remove drag.

[wraper]

You really need to open your eyes a little looks like rails to me. Not all technologies for high speed rail are maglev!

You really need to read what it was. It was test for speed record. Because that thing could easily go off rails and disintegrate. Actual top speed of TGV is 320 km/h. There are cars going 1000 km/h for a short moment to make a record, though drivers often die.

Maglev chews power to 'reduce' drag it does not remove drag.

Maglev itself does not have anything to do with drag and does not reduce it a tiny bit.

[beanflying]

It's Maglev, not rail. Placing Maglev into vacuum removes speed limitation due to drag.

You made the OVERSTATED claim not me. Own up to your ERROR of FACT.

[wraper]

It's Maglev, not rail. Placing Maglev into vacuum removes speed limitation due to drag.

You made the OVERSTATED claim not me. Own up to your ERROR of FACT.

Go learn some physics. Drag = air resistance. No air -> no air resistance (drag). Maglev removes friction to track as train does not touch anything. Maglev in vacuum means no drag and no friction. As if it was satellite in space.

[beanflying]

Drag is resistance to motion from ALL sources not just air! It is you who needs to learn your physics. Electrical/Mmagnetic drag is part of it as are the likely use of guide wheels when cornering (not used on all maglevs) Add to that the energy used to make it happen.

Still smoke screens and mirrors to hide underperforming overhyperloop. 400km/hr on a custom test track with unstated vacuum condition is hype without actual data.

[Brumby]

What's is under big question is real life implementation. What works as a concept, very often is not feasible in real life. Because of financial, safety, technical, whatever reasons.

Which is exactly the argument being presented - and you are taking it to task!!   

The logic of your position is non-existent. 

[nctnico]

Hyperloop is basically a fancy Kickstarer project on a massive scale. Produce the hype video and all the animations and give pie-in-the-sky timelines, including "As seen in the New York Times" and endorsed my Elon Musk and Richard Branson badges on the pages to suck people into the dream, and then figure out how to make it work.

Well, Werner von Braun just sold an idea to Hitler and ended up getting people on the moon 30 years later. Elon Musk in turn has got it right a couple of times. Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX for example. Not saying Elon Musk is such a great person but credit where credit is due and he did manage to convince people to put money into what turned out to be good ideas. Having succes in the past does help to get investors on board with new ideas. That is how it works. Saying hyperloop is just another Kicsktarter sounds to me more like Musk bashing rather than really looking into the merits from a proper engineering & financial perspective. Contrary to Kickstarter campaigns corporate investors do their due diligence before investing their money. And usually the investment happen in steps so it is not like figuring out how to make it work afterwards. That won't fly because corporate investors have their own engineers to look at projects as well. The investments happen in steps (milestones) where each step moves away from the initial demonstrator en gets closer to the end project. At each milestone the investors re-evaluate the results to determine whether a project is still viable or not.

[Buriedcode]

You mean like in uBeam? Or Theranos?  High investment isn't itself proof of efficacy. Successful and wealthy people are just as easily fooled as the rest of us, in some ways more-so since their wealth is proof they make good decisions right?.  Silicon valley regularly has startups based on obvious pseudoscience that get several rounds of funding.  In this case it isn't pseudoscience, just not economically viable. 

I do think some have gone too far jumping on the bandwagon of "hyperloop?! LOL!" but I haven't read a single post here claiming it was impossible, just that it's a complicated way of solving a problem that doesn't seem to exist, and that the engineering and safety aspects will increase costs over current/other systems.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Elon Musk in turn has got it right a couple of times. Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX for example.

Please nctnico stop parroting that Paypal thing again and again, Paypal is NOT Elon Musk's anything, other than buying it then selling it to ebay and pocket in the process a good bunch of millions. Come on! 3/4 of the same story for Tesla.

[nctnico]

Elon Musk in turn has got it right a couple of times. Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX for example.

Please nctnico stop parroting that Paypal thing again and again, Paypal is NOT Elon Musk's anything, other than buying it then selling it to ebay and pocket in the process a good bunch of millions. Come on! 3/4 of the same story for Tesla.

That is true but would Tesla and SpaceX have been where they are right now without Elon Musk? A company goes through several growth stages and it isn't a given the founders of the company take it all the way up. Elon Musk is someone who can take a company from a mature start-up phase to a big company but at some point he needs to be replaced as well (which already happened with Tesla).

[wraper]

Elon Musk in turn has got it right a couple of times. Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX for example.

Please nctnico stop parroting that Paypal thing again and again, Paypal is NOT Elon Musk's anything, other than buying it then selling it to ebay and pocket in the process a good bunch of millions.

Get the facts right. Paypal resulted from merger of Confinity and x.com (Founded by Musk). He did not buy it.

Come on! 3/4 of the same story for Tesla.

He was largest investor into it. He stepped in once company was almost run down the cliff into bankruptcy in it's early days. He was there as chairman 6 months since it's founding.

Tesla, Inc. (originally Tesla Motors) was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who financed the company until the Series A round of funding. Both men played active roles in the company's early development prior to Elon Musk's involvement. Musk led the Series A round of investment in February 2004, joining Tesla's board of directors as its chairman.

Following the financial crisis in 2008 and after a series of escalating conflicts in 2007, Eberhard was ousted from the firm. Musk assumed leadership of the company as CEO and product architect in 2008, positions he still holds today. Indeed, as of 2019, Elon Musk is the longest tenured CEO of any automotive manufacturer globally.

[SiliconWizard]

I am certainly no Elon Musk fan, but it can't be denied that the success of Paypal, and then Tesla, are largely due to him.

He's no genius but certainly a clever businessman (with everything that comes with it...)

[soldar]

This is what you end up with when you design point-to-point systems:

And that is why the pneumatic tube would never work or even make sense as a point-to-point system. But it might make sense as a local star switches with tubes to every large business and residential building and trunks connecting the local offices. In the suburbs you could have a local office for a whole neighborhood. The carriers can arrive at boxes and the user opens it with a code.

The traveling carriers could be marked with bar codes and switched automatically to arrive at their destination.

In densely populated cities the tubes could use the subway tunnels or other utility tunnels or tubes.

Heck, if I owned the Madrid metro I would be looking into it. Place a sending/receiving station in each lobby. Thousands of small packages are sent daily across town. Spare parts, replacement parts, medicines, signed documents, etc.

If it can all be automated and require very little human intervention it could make economic sense (which is the only sense that counts).

Anyway, I don't want to hijack this thread any further. If there is any interest in discussing this further we can start a new thread.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

I am certainly no Elon Musk fan, but it can't be denied that the success of Paypal, and then Tesla, are largely due to him.

No Sir, you got that wrong, the success of Paypal is due to ebay.

[PlainName]

And that is why the pneumatic tube would never work or even make sense as a point-to-point system.

A local point-to-point system. But their plan is (or was) to have those points 600km apart or so. That is, it would compete with inter-city rail rather than intra-city metro. For that it makes lots of sense: long enough to accelerate to a decent speed, no stops en route (that's an explicit feature if you care to read their blurb), far enough that cutting the time is appreciable (1hr instead of 2hr is more effective than 1min instead of 2min).

It would be the connection between local stars, in other words, not a star itself.

For local metro use there are a different set of problems and solution.

[soldar]

My throwaway comment about the pneumatic tube was prompted by the comment that in Dubai they might plan on using the hyperloop as a cargo delivering system. If using the hyperloop as a people mover makes zero sense, using it as a cargo mover would make negative sense.

[nctnico]

My throwaway comment about the pneumatic tube was prompted by the comment that in Dubai they might plan on using the hyperloop as a cargo delivering system. If using the hyperloop as a people mover makes zero sense, using it as a cargo mover would make negative sense.

I don't think so. The problem with cargo trains is that the wagons need to be assembled into a single long train. This takes time at each stop. What I understand from the information from Hardt is that they picture a hyperloop system where each pod can have a unique destination. I looked up some numbers about the biggest port of Europe (Rotterdam) and less than 10% of the goods arriving or exiting is transported by train. The division between ship (up river) and truck is about 50/50. But these are distances of up to several hundreds of km. I too don't see how a hyperloop can be beneficial for a small place like Dubai. Stopping every few km for letting people in & out kills the speed. In London and Paris I can easely beat the effective speed of the subway system using a bicycle.

[Tepe]

It's not aerodynamic at all unlike Shinkansen

I was just pulling your leg with that picture of the steam locomotive.

First generation Shinkansen had front ends looking more like those of passenger planes, btw.

[iMo]

I read Ashlee Vance's book about Musk. I take my hat off..

[mnementh]

I am certainly no Elon Musk fan, but it can't be denied that the success of Paypal, and then Tesla, are largely due to him.

No Sir, you got that wrong, the success of Paypal is due to ebay.

No, sir... you have that bass-ackwards. The only reason fleaBay hasn't gone swirling down the drain years ago is due to the thin veneer of respectability and trustworthiness that the PayPal name brought to their steaming cesspool of fraud and thievery. PayPal was a force in international banking and commerce long before Musk bought them; their business model brought secure international banking and purchasing to everyday people, not just the wealthy. For many people, PayPal is still the only banking option available.

eBay TRIED to do the PayPal thing on their own. People stayed away in droves; founding member eBayers like myself told them in no uncertain terms that if they tried to force us to use THEIR payment services we'd close our accounts. Literally thousands and thousands of eMail and support messages. We didn't (and most of us still don't) trust eBay as far as we could sling a piano.

That said... eBay and PayPal NEEDED each other. eBay needed the boost to their reputation; PayPal was overextended internationally and needed the huge cash influx that eBay represented to stay solvent while they completed their expansion. Musk's genius contribution was in SEEING how much these two arch-rivals needed each other, and fixing PayPal's obstinate board so that a deal with eBay could be made.

For most PayPal cardholders, eBay is literally the smallest portion of their PayPal spending. It is everywhere ELSE that PayPal is accepted and still provides their buyer protection that everybody relies on; and without them forcing the change, all the major CC companies would STILL be selling and charging extra for similar purchase protection.

As for HyperLoop... yeah, sure. About the same time as we resolve the technology for the Space Elevator. Oh, and resolve the moronic quibbling over pieces of paper and lines on a map... and basic elements like stupidity and greed... 

mnem
*back to my usual insanity*