Unconvincing bust. He simplifies things quite a bit, takes several cheap shots, and doesn't allow for any obvious or less obvious solutions to the fatal problems he mentions.
Perhaps you like to explain those solutions in detail then?
I'm not saying the Hyperloop can work, and I certainly don't have the skills do design the whole system, but I also don't make absolute claims, like Thunderf00t does. If you make claims, back them up with solid evidence. I don't know why you're calling me out here, since this is exactly what you did in your various busting videos: let them have every detail that you can't 100% show isn't possible, and still show it doesn't work. Or is it just that because Thunderf00t can make a fancy video that he's more right? Hyperloop's videos are even fancier, you know...
But hey, if you like I can go into the details.
Expansion of tubes, station shifting by hundreds of meters: as mentioned earlier in this thread, wouldn't rail tracks have the same problem? You don't see those shifting around all the time. Steel on this scale has quite a bit of elasticity to it, it can be compressed. Or if that's not an option, you can use sliding seals. Shock absorbers use those, and they hold up to a lot more than just 100kPa. I'm sure there are other solutions as well.
Lot's of vacuum seals, and implication that it's impossible to get them all to seal properly: probably true, but Hyperloop claim the distributed nature of the vacuum pumps will handle leaks, which even they acknowlege are unavoidable. So is it possible to make the seals reliable enough? I don't know, Thunderf00t certainly doesn't show any evidence that it isn't.
The video segments showing those interior designers: what are they doing in the video, they're supposed to show that Hyperloop consists of idea people with little background in engineering? I'm pretty sure they have engineers too. This is a cheap shot at ridiculing Hyperloop, an ad hominem attack (well, ad company), when otherwise the video is meant to show that the engineering is impossible. It seems out of place.
Massive buckling problems due to temperature differentials: Couldn't you just make the pipes strong enough to handle it? Maybe that'd make it economically unviable, but that's not what Thunderf00t says - he says it's technically impossible. But it's clearly not, otherwise gas pipelines would buckle all the time. There's really very little in the way of technical limits as to how strong you can make something, as evidenced by submarines (military ones handle thousands of kPa, research ones tens of thousands even) or, say, dams and tunnels. And if the steel pipe on it's own really is too weak, welding in some rings as shown in th picture above should do it? Or does that make it too expensive already? I don't know, but I do know that there isn't a technical problem here.
A catastrophic accident of a single car causing destruction of every other car in the system: Yeah, no. First, even if you open the pipe to its full diameter and let air rush in, that shockwave is going to die down, question is, how quickly. Now I'm not sure how to calculate this situation (but I have a COMSOL simulation running over night) but we could get a very rough idea by using the formula for calculating pressure drop from a compressor in a pneumatic system with constant flow. The numbers say, after about 66km there's about a 100kPa drop, after 37km (average car distance according to Hyperloop) there's a roughly 60kPa drop. Now clearly, that isn't the definitive answer since the actual situation isn't static, but it's enough to make me think that friction plays a role here and the pressure wave is not going to travel through the whole system at full strength, destroying everything, as Thunderf00t claims.
Second, why would the whole system have to be one open, connected tube? You could add a pressure lock every 1km that opens for cars and closes behind them, which would thus contain a catastrophe.
The engine: actually, that turbine is not meant for propulsion. Hyperloop say that the cars are powered by external linear actuators, the turbine is there to avoid the cars pushing a column of air in front of them, which even at 0.1kPa, will add up. So it doesn't have to produce any noticeable thrust. Of course, it might still be possible that even just moving the amount of air involved is impossible, I don't know. The parts of the video are based on a misunderstanding and aren't really helpful.
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