From the lift to drag ratio(14) and cruising speed provided(110 m/s), we can compare it's performance to other forms of transportation(neglecting air drag) using the Von Karmen Gabrielli diagram[0]. Using the inverse of the L/D ratio as the specific tractive power and using the updated Von Karmen Gabrielli diagram in [1], we find that performance is expected to be a bit better than that of a commercial plane.
This is pretty promising. Although power required for stabilization and overcoming air drag should be taken into account.
But 110 m/s - that's 396 km/h or 246 mph - about the speed of a high speed train in Asia or Europe, give or take. And that is when the pods are empty. Sure, without the friction of the rails and the air you save energy, and maybe you can build the whole thing cheaper, and that's lovely and all.
But wasn't the ambition to go much faster than a train? I thought this was about reaching speeds of airplanes...
If we are at speeds around or below 200 mph when the pods are full, SF - LA would still take a couple of hours. A French wheeled TGV could have done that 35 years ago. A Japanese wheeled Shinkansen could have done that even before. A Japanese or Chinese maglev version of the last 1-2 decades could easily beat that. And that's without being stuck in a dumb tube. By the time the hyperloop becomes a reality, if ever, there will be tens of thousands of miles of high speed rails around the world.
The hyperloop is a sizeable amount of current hype and a future loop with pods that barely match yesterday's high speed trains. These high speed trains, engineering wonders that actually exist, don't receive any attention in press. I'd say that the hyperloop has been remarkably good at sucking the air out of the room.
I don't understand all these comments talking about how these prototypes are inferior to existing transportation technologies. You're comparing something completely new, that's barely started the transition from thought to physical reality, with technology that's half a century old.
The Wright Flyer was slower than a contemporary ship, let alone a train, yet this technology quickly became the fastest transportation available.
Hyperloop is supposed to average about 600MPH and hit a top speed of 760MPH. Now, that's a far-off estimate of something totally unproven and could be way off, but if you're going to compare it to alternatives you need to compare what it will become, not what it currently is. You might disagree on what it could become (I have no idea how much of the supposed specs are feasible and how much is just wishful thinking, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if it couldn't achieve its goals) but you can't just look at some first-try barely-works prototype and assume that's the end state.
People compare it to what's currently available, because if it's not any better there's no reason for customers to use it, which means there's no continued revenue stream to fund developing something better.
The Wright Flyer was far cheaper than the Hyperloop will be to develop, and airplanes had uses beyond just transporting people (namely military, which meant government-subsidized development).
Might as well complain about the lack of seats, then (somebody in this comment thread did!) since no passengers means no revenue for further development.
Your comment makes sense, when applied to the first commercial deployment. Which is years out at best and nobody knows what it would really look like. This stuff right now is not even a prototype, it's barely a proof of concept. Complaining about the specs is on essentially the same level as taking a wind-tunnel model of an airliner and saying that it's not big enough to fit any people.
> A French wheeled TGV could have done that 35 years ago. A Japanese wheeled Shinkansen could have done that even before. A Japanese or Chinese maglev version of the last 1-2 decades could easily beat that.
On very few select tracks – the Shinkansen could drive 500 km/h, but is still limited to 320 because of a lack of suitable high-speed tracks. Same goes for the TGV, and the Germans don't even bother with trains faster than 250 km/h.
Speaking of which, Germany sold their maglev technology to Japan and China in the first place because there was nowhere to put it at all. With Germany's winding railroad network it's impossible to reach speeds high enough to justify maglev.
400 km/h sustained, over tracks longer than 400km, would already be a massive improvement over the status quo.
Assuming, of course, the Hyperloop will be able to build a sufficient rail/tube network.
Assuming, of course, the Hyperloop will be able to build a sufficient rail/tube network.
Given that assumption, existing trains could also sustain something in the vicinity of 400 km/h by your own words.
Germany rebuilt and supplemented some of its railroad network for the ICE, at enormous cost (e.g. Wikipedia says the 250 km from Hannover to Berlin cost around 2.5 billion EUR, not adjusting for inflation). Of course that's nothing compared to rebuilding an entire transit network from scratch. I'm not sure any western country has even attempted to do that post-WW2, I guess China's recent investment into high speed rail is the closest modern example.
Another interesting point of comparison with existing rail networks aside from average speed is efficiency. A well utilised high speed train is more efficient than a car, but it still uses a heck of a lot of energy (with corresponding emissions, somewhere). Given the reductions in drag, I'd assume -- hope -- that a Hyperloop train will use less energy per passenger kilometer than existing trains.
That's the thing: This pod could potentially go 396 km/h given that they are able to lease, buy or expropriate land in a straight enough line allowing them to construct mostly straight tubes miles after miles and given that there are no natural barriers like hills, mountains, rivers etc. that prevent this either. But those same conditions are the main obstacles for traditional trains reaching high speed. It's really hard to find land for straight rails nowadays. Railroads tend to go from city to city, not from one point in an empty desert to the other. So they have to bend and twist and turn or go through tunnels. Most of the efforts on getting higher speed in Europe is about straightening out the rails and laying down modern rails.
Maybe the hyperloop can do sharper turns at high speed, and probably next generation of the pods or the loop allows for higher speed in general. But that the winner of the first attempts promises 396 km/h and not the +1,000 km/h we heard about before, does deflate the whole idea.
You are forgetting that the hyperloop design naturally lends itself towards being placed on separate, comparatively cheap pylons, since the structural rigidity and relatively low weight of the tube sections allows them to be far more self-supporting than maglev tracks or even traditional rail tracks.
This essentially removes the requirement of flat land from the equation.
Also, remember that the hyperloop is really much more geared towards the American need: large cities are separated by much greater distances than Europe, meaning that a faster and cheaper per kilometer solution is needed than high speed rail.
Here is a map showing high speed railway connections in Europe. German ICE trains usually peak at 300 km/h on selected tracks while the French TGV can go up to 320 km/h.
> German ICE trains usually peak at 300 km/h on selected tracks
So selected, in fact, that the DB is currently procuring over 300 ICEs limited to 250 km/h, and a grand total of 17 (with an option of up to two more!) that peak at 320 km/h.
I'll call myself lucky if the train manages 180 km/h on my usual routes.
You dropped the small detail that those new ICEs are going to replace IC and EC trains first.
And those usually run below 250 km/h.
And only in a later phase they are going to replace ICE 1 and ICE 2 trains, which can only go 280 km/h.. so not a huge downgrade.
They are not a replacement for those trains running fast services (with legs with 300 km/h in them).
There's several types of ICEs, only two manage 300/330 km/h – they make up less than half of the current inventory, and are scheduled to be reduced even further.
Meanwhile, the more ubiquitous current 280 km/h models are scheduled to be replaced with a more economical 250 km/h one – and they won't even reach 200 km/h on most tracks.
Yes, ICE 1 and ICE 2 "only" go 280 km/h, only ICE 3 (403/406/407) can do 330 (320 for the 407).
ICx / ICE 4 are meant to replace the IC/EC trains first (which are slower than ICx) and later ICE 1 and 2. It seems that their slightly lower top speed shouldn't matter because of improved ac-/deceleration and relatively frequent stops (every ~70km). ICE 3 would do the 300km/h bits with longer distances. That seems like a good idea to me.
I'd like to ask on a source for your claim that ICE 3 "are scheduled to be reduced even further." The series 407 trains are just being rolled out.
Also, by definition most tracks will always be slow because there are many local / less-used tracks where such speeds simply don't make sense. Most long-distance tracks are pretty fast, and lots of upgrades are being built or in planning. I find your point misleading.
I'd say that the hyperloop has been remarkably good at sucking the air out of the room.
Could that be a positive feature, though?
It seems that in America, and particularly in CA where they're currently arguing heatedly about light rail, there are interests that have captured the industry - it's impossible to construct and operate these conventional technologies for anything short of insane amounts of money.
Perhaps it's possible to sidestep all the rent-protecting regulations, etc., by making the conversation about a technology whose regulation has not been thoroughly captured.
Well that boondoggle they are building in California isn't light rail. Light rail systems in many cities stifle mass transit effectiveness by sucking all the money out through build out and maintenance that would be better spent on more effective busing and other alternatives.
Hyperloop is a heavy rail competition and the one planned in California is a disaster on many fronts, it is pure political in need and desire and hasn't got a viable economic case.
The only reason I would see to support a hyperloop is that if it is commercial driven and supported. We don't need more of the same, we need a real game changer that shows true potential to replace other long distance forms of transport.
With regards to rail, for all the belly aching about the US not having a large number of people traveling by that means you need to realize that the US by far makes up for this with the freight that moves this way. Also for a much longer time the US had a much cheaper and easier transport by plane than Europe has but even now that is ramped up and continuing to do so.
On the other hand, buses can adapt to changing needs. You can easily add or move stops where the activity warrants. Rail demands that everything else conform to its physical installation.
All of the replies are missing the main point here, which is:
We are not even at the prototype stage. This is still the design stage, and of only a single design to boot. Do not expect 110 m/s to be the maximum speed limit of this technology. We're just barely getting started.
The potential to go much, much faster is still there.
Nonesense - The whole point of this tech is to eliminate air drag??
Initial idea is that some air is left in tubes, because it's easier than creating a complete vacuum and the small amount of air can help lift the pods or train.
Longer term less air more vacuum better maglev - allows UNLIMITED speed ie we're talking 20,000 kph + .
Energy efficiency vastly improvement since for high speed trains 95 % required to overcome drag.
This would of course revolutionise transport - will require a new paradigm of construction and manufacturing based on just using robots and software, I think we're close to a tipping point that will realise this sooner than most expect, probaly within 25 years.
Anyone else suspect Hyperloop is a transport technology destined for use off-planet where it wouldn't be plausible to pave roads everywhere, where there isn't sufficient atmosphere to support flight nor oceans to float boats?
Evacuating the tubes would be far easier on the moon or on Mars.
Something along the lines of a hyper loop is the kind of shower thought anyone would have while they're stuck in traffic. "What if we just made super fast tunnels to get us places so I don't have to sit here and deal with this shit right now." Only in this case it was Elon Musk having the thought.
This article is terrible, it explains the Hyperloop as just an evacuated tunnel, which is not what it is at all.
The Hyperloop uses a low pressure tunnel, that's critical and the system would not work with a vacuum tunnel. The air in the tunnel is blown below the car to provide a low friction interface, much like an air hockey table (but with the puck providing the air, not the table). Linear induction motors in sections of the track accelerate or decelerate the cars, with gliding in between.
This is a new idea, and it's a highly useful idea because the vast majority of the track is just a pressure vessel, while the friction reducing components are fairly low tech and on the pod and the acceleration components are only on small sections of track, and potentially solar powered during peak hours. This lowers the cost of construction enormously while enabling speeds approaching that of commercial air travel.
I don't have a source on hand, but I've seen him say this was pretty much exactly it. Has to go back and forth between LA and the bay twice a week for SpaceX/Tesla, and had the thought for the Hyperloop while sitting in traffic.
I would be astounded if he drives that commute. I used to do the same commute two to three times a week and 35 minutes in the air beats 5 hours on the road hands down. If you're smart about it and flexible in your schedule you can shrink the airport time to around 20 minutes.
I could go door to door from my house in Santa Clara to my office in Burbank in about an hour.
Is that with a private jet or something? The commercial flights between even SFO and LAX seem to take over an hour of flight time alone. Which isn't surprising, since it's 300 miles to cover.
No, just Southwest. At the time they'd run a flight every hour between SJC -> BUR and after a while it became really easy to gauge exactly when I could show up and hop onto the next flight out. Cut it too close and miss a flight? They'll just put me on the next one. No big deal. The smaller airports help enormously in getting in and out fast -- I could walk into SJC and be on a flight in a matter of minutes. SFO and LAX are gigantic time sinks.
Though in Musk's case I imagine he can do the private jet thing and have the plane wait for him.
Yeah, SJC and BUR seem way better for airport time, I'm just surprised they run a 35-minute flight. I'd have assumed SFO and LAX get faster airplanes. Maybe half the time is lost to taxiing?
Yes. Most (or almost) most of the commercial flight time is spent at not cruising altitude and speed - I've taken longer to get to the airport than the flight, and then once you're there there's security (although Burbank is usually a breeze), passenger loading, taxiing, take-off and climb...
Then just enough time for a drink service and you head back down, to do it all over again in reverse.
I didn't read that as name recognition, but rather that Elon Musk is one of the few people with both the resources and the drive to turn ridiculous shower thoughts into real projects. If it was Bill Gates, he'd just dismiss it as silly and get back to wiping out malaria or whatever, and if it was me then I wouldn't be able to make it go anywhere.
If I had a boatload of money, I'd make an electric car, but like, make it awesome. Give it like a really big battery so it can go really far, and make it like a proper car. Oh no we're out of towels
> Anyone else suspect Hyperloop is a transport technology destined for use off-planet where it wouldn't be plausible to pave roads everywhere, where there isn't sufficient atmosphere to support flight nor oceans to float boats?
If it's not plausible to pave, why would it be plausible to build an elevated, evacuated tube on stilts?
> Evacuating the tubes would be far easier on the moon or on Mars.
During design weekend someone asked the question, if Hyperloop could be used on other planets like Mars, to Elon Musk. He dismissed the idea, saying the atmosphere on the planet was already low enough that you didn't need a depressurized tube since that would just increase costs.
You're right. The concept is easier in off-world use where the atmospheric pressure is lower since that brings down the costs of the tube construction and pressurization.
The atmospheric pressure is so low that you don't need a tube at all (<1% of Earth). And you'll have to use wheels instead of hovering because you can't suck in enough air to eject out the bottom. At that point, you no longer have a Hyperloop, you have a car (or train).
Any hints about how a broken down hyperloop train would be evacuated? Or what happens if the tunnel suddenly pressured (e.g. aircraft/lorry hit a section dislodging it)? Also how resistant is the design to earthquakes given the high negative pressure (i.e. how will the flexible joints be built to both withstand the pressure and move enough during an earthquake without derailing the train)? How will maintenance be done on the system?
No idea, but I'm sure people had similar thoughts about airplanes when they were experimental. I, for one, am very happy to see bold experiments like this in transportation.
The guys from the team from Delft told me there would be a shockwave which the pods can easily resist and after about 30 seconds the tube is pressurized and the passengers can escape. The idea is that there will be hatches every [n] meters to allow an exit from the tube if needed.
Hatches with ladders down to the ground? Great way to increase cost and diminish reliability exponentially. Let's put a failure point every [n] meters.
Notwithstanding, this is a distraction from the biggest problem, which is that a decompression of one vehicle will require recompression of the entire segment of the hyperloop, stopping all vehicles in the segment.
At the ambient near-vacuum pressure inside the hyperloop, humans cannot survive for more than a few seconds even with supplemental pressurized oxygen masks. There is absolutely no way to deal with the decompression of a single vehicle other than (a) recompress the loop or (b) plan for the occupants to be dead by the next stop.
The problem is not even decompression itself. Any failure of a sensor or failure of communication with the vehicle for more than about 1s must be interpreted as a decompression, with shutdown of the loop, because to do otherwise is to plan for the death of the occupants.
Commercial travel at very low ambient pressures has significant caveats. A plan to deal with these is going to be central to wide acceptance of the system. This is the greatest design challenge of the hyperloop.
I think it is funny to hear the objections of all the armchair scientists and commentators. I'm sure glad we have people like you who can see straight to the problems with the Hyperloop that no one has ever thought of. You're right. Let's just give up on this whole idea :|
Solving problems is not ignoring them and wish they go away. One of the biggest problem with transportation infrastructures in the US is the cost of the right-of-way. This is barely touched by Hyperloop (the project doesn't account for these costs) because it focuses on the technical solution, that is actually the easiest part.
The PG motto is more relevant than ever: make something people want. In that case, make something that people will want in their backyard. Selling is the hard part.
A large part of the reason for how hyperloop is structured the way it is, is exactly because of right of way: The proposal calls for pylons and for the route to largely follow the highways in order to be able to take advantage of existing right of way to minimize those issues as much as possible.
It might very well be that they should have spent more effort on that aspect, but they didn't ignore it.
And the PG motto is great if you want to make money as fast as possible with as little risk as possible. It's not nearly so great if your goal is to make a major change to society.
NIMBYs on the San Francisco Peninsula (Palo Alto, Menlo Park...) got their pitchforks out for a High Speed Rail project that would use the existing right-of-way and they managed to downscale the project dramatically. HSR wouldn't disturb them in any way, it would even make things better compared to the existing diesel CalTrain operation. Do you think they will be happier with a series of concrete pylons? Rail viaducts exist, and people are not exactly thrilled to have one in their backyard.
Following the highway network is great (and Germany largely does it for HSR) but the highway system is designed with very different constraints. That might be possible in largely desert or rural places without a lot of topography, but highways have curves and slopes incompatible with high speed as soon as you hit a significant topography.
The cost of right-of-way skyrockets in urban and dense environments that are exactly the ones you want to serve with HSR/HyperLoop. Both systems are on par in the regard. The mile-long tunnel to bring HSR in the heart of San Francisco is expected to cost several billion dollars. The cost of the technical equipment of that infrastructure for conventional rail is marginal compared to the cost of digging the tunnel itself.
Sure we could solve that, with strong eminent domain powers for the state for instance. But I'm not sure anyone wants that, nor that the Supreme Court would let it happen.
I'm guessing (hoping?) that these things are going to be a hell of a lot quieter and less pollutant than diesel trains so perhaps it would be something I wouldn't mind living next to or around.
Hyperloop is an armchair scientist's back of the envelope engineering. Every single one of us is exactly as qualified to shit on the Hyperloop as Musk was to suggest it. There is no long history of detailed engineering and feasibility studies by thousands of civil and mechanical engineers.
This is the first result of any actual serious thought being given (well actually a bunch of college senior projects) and the winning design already apparently had to cut the speeds by a third (which makes it no faster than a train) and has no space for passengers or cargo.
Let me repeat that: the first serious proposal is no faster than a train and can't actually be used for transporting anything. Making it, as a suggestion for high speed transport, completely useless.
> Let me repeat that: the first serious proposal is no faster than a train and can't actually be used for transporting anything. Making it, as a suggestion for high speed transport, completely useless.
Yes, although this can be handwaved away by saying it's not a full-scale model and the test track is too short for higher speeds.
What I find more interesting is that the winning design isn't even true Hyperloop, as the air hockey suspension is replaced by maglev. There's no air intake on the front because magnets are used.
The winning design doesn't validate the Hyperloop concept since it replaces a critical element and becomes just a maglev in a tube with a rail. It wouldn't surprise me if the tube disappeared in the next iteration.
Having a worse throughput than a lame of highway is bad, though.
Hyperloop is a low-latency low-capacity transport method.
It's not much better at latency/cost than a VacTrain or a regular MagLev, but basically has less than 10% of the capacity.
Basically, the Hyperloop will be a transport method used by a bunch of rich people, not by the ten thousands or hundredthousands of people who'd use a HSR or MagLev on the same route.
The guy makes assumption of single 28 person pod leaving every 30 second to get 3360 passengers/hour throughput. But these parameters are not set in stone. Pods could be joined into platoons that move together to form "trains". With 10 pod platoon you get 33600 passenger/hour -- neary 3x throughput of California High Speed rail when it's built. Pods could also be made wider to accommodate multiple people along cross-section.
There have been some comments, but I'm not sure I've seen this excellent take on the issue.
From the linked document:
> So what’s the value of getting the vibration mode shapes of this little section of the Hyperloop? Simple: it makes pretty pictures you can put in your proposal.
and
> Nothing in this section of the proposal has “demonstrated the capability of the Hyperloop,” nor was it intended to. This is not simply an error. This is eyewash for the rubes, the surest sign you’re dealing with a snake oil salesman.
And now the winning design from MIT drops the air hockey suspension for conventional magnetic levitation.
I mentioned in another comment that there are a couple different designs for levitation and all of them do not need a compressor system anymore. Even the air bearings can rely on on-board tanks of compressed air (even at full scale). The compressor is too expensive to implement and would require high power which isn't feasible since it adds cost and weight to the batteries.
Evacuated tunnel. And actually it is a big deal considering the speed of travel which presents new problems. Also all designs are focused on scalability of system
That's not how the hyperloop works. The air isn't for moving, it's for reducing friction using the air hockey table effect. The acceleration is provided by linear induction motors in accelerator sections. It's that combination which results in a high speed train at low costs.
no, the hockey table thing is a convenient (but unnecessary) side effect.
Moving the air from front to back (with a pump) is needed to compensate for being in a partial vacuum rather than a true vacuum. Without the air pump you don't have a hyperloop. You just have a maglev in a tunnel.
I never implied that moving the air provided the motion.
Virginia Tech, 4th place team, will soon release its full pod design at www.hyperloopvt.com. Several of the top 5 teams had similar designs to the MIT pod. The teams at the top were all very close in quality.
Why? Cargo is what we do best in the US and it doesn't care how fast it gets to the destination. Further, the car shown is far too small to replace the 125 car unit trains we send around the US. We have a larger, harder to replace cargo infrastructure than any passenger system.
It doesn't care about speed? I think UPS, FedEx, Amazon Prime, yadda yadda, would all disagree with you strongly. Moving cargo quickly across the world is probably a multi-trillion dollar industry. And the car shown is just a proof of concept prototype.
Musk himself said this is inefficient over distance so talking about the world is wrong. Speed in the local we are talking is not that important and the current system is efficient. FedEx, etc. needs supersonic aircraft more than tubes. The car size is limited by the tech.
There are many intercity distances for which a plane is sub-optimal but could definitely benefit from a faster terrestrial solution. This thing doesn't need to get to 30000 ft to achieve high speed. One could leave every X minutes because you don't have to fill a whole jetliner to make it cost effective.
> There are many intercity distances for which a plane is sub-optimal but could definitely benefit from a faster terrestrial solution.
Can you explain the benefit of faster solutions to package delivery over the proposed network? Coast to coast is not likely given the layout. Many of the regions shown already have a network of supply centers that serve the local area. It seems like a much better investment would be automated delivery vehicles for the terminal delivery phase.
> you don't have to fill a whole jetliner to make it cost effective.
Is there a reference in any of the documents that show the cost of shipping good via the hyperloop? Is there any references to maximum capacity of the hyperloop given safe distances between cars?
Automated delivery would be perfect within a city. Coast-to-coast suits planes. Distances of 50-300 miles with high-volume commercial package traffic could easily benefit from something more like a subway than an airport experience, that doesn't bring the energy requirements of raising a 75-ton object tens of thousands of feet in minutes, or require an hour-long wait before it starts to move.
You said "cargo doesn't care how fast it gets to the destination". Well, some cargo does. You also said the cargo system is larger than the passenger system. Well, that just means there's obviously demand and maybe Musk should have put that in his white paper.
You're sure it'll never happen, I'm suggesting it might. Not that it will, just that you're a bit too confident in your position, considering it's a bet against out ability to innovate around problems.
Are the current domain of trucks that have a lot more access than any hyperloop is going to have.
> You said "cargo doesn't care how fast it gets to the destination". Well, some cargo does.
The speed difference between truck and a new hyperloop-based system is not going to be enough to justify the complications involved in including another element. Automation is going be the governing innovation, not a hyperloop.
> You also said the cargo system is larger than the passenger system. Well, that just means there's obviously demand and maybe Musk should have put that in his white paper.
Yes, its much bigger and the US has been optimizing for it for a long time. The demand is being met in a variety of ways with self-driving and drones being the next, more flexible step. I am pretty sure that's why its not in the white paper.
> You're sure it'll never happen, I'm suggesting it might. Not that it will, just that you're a bit too confident in your position, considering it's a bet against out ability to innovate around problems.
I not betting against innovation, I'm betting against the premise that we have a problem that further automation (e.g. self driving vehicles) and drones won't take care of. I see it very much like putting a generator on a bicycle to warm the handlebars[1] as opposed to just wearing gloves.
The picture depicts one car though. That would likely imply that you could send multiples though the tube, kind of like rail cars are sent along the rails.
The big thing is that these will travel much faster.
Look at the volume of the car, it is tiny compared to rail. Faster isn't a big help since we already have efficient air for that. Heck, we still use barges for cargo. Plus, the whole evacuated tube would play hell on cargo loading because of the added requirements. Speed buys very little given cargo is fine with traveling all night.
It's not a loop. Musk's test track is straight. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is talking about a 5-mile loop. That's more interesting, because cornering is hard.
The MIT system is maglev against a passive track. The Transrapid system, used in the Shanghai airport maglev, requires an active track, which is why it's so expensive. Maglev with a passive track means a simpler track but high power consumption on the vehicle. Power has to be supplied to the vehicle in some way. MIT is using batteries, which is fine for a 1 mile run, but doesn't scale.
The Incheon airport maglev just started service yesterday. It's not high speed rail, but it's much faster than most airport trams.
If only there was someone related to this project that had experience building a business based on using batteries for transportation where other people have previously thought wasn't possible ...
Tesla is based on not using expensive batteries, but instead the common "same as in every laptop" type.
They can't magically increase battery lifetime, and that's why Hyperloop will either end up as Transrapid in vacuum (VacTrain, concept for many decades) or not at all.
This is HSR done on even larger scale. It will travel nonstop for 600km+. Recharging is an issue there.
(I don’t know if you have ever used High Speed Rail, but usually it’s a direct city-city transport, only connecting the largest cities in the region, and often going for a long time uninterrupted. Many countries, like Germany and Japan, even decided to put HSR onto completely separate rails)
I was thinking that while this will never work for people, at least Americans (just watch a group of us on a bus or plane) that this could work for same-day delivery for Amazon and others and it would only have to be a fraction of the size tube.
You'd still need a last-mile delivery but you could do warehouse to warehouse transfers in an hour instead of days.
There were a couple designs at Design Weekend including MIT's design where they use passive magnetic system instead of the active magnetic systems (Maglev) found on most high speed trains. By inducing Eddie-currents, they don't have to rely on embedded coils, just permanent magnets. Supposedly the teams using the passive magnetic system say the costs are low enough currently since you save power (no high power usage) and don't need to lay out specialized coils on the track.
There are couple difference designs that will be tested at Design Weekend, including the air bearings proposed in the alpha paper along with magnets and wheels.
For fuck's sake, can people at least read the wikipedia entry on the topic before commenting on it?
It uses an air cushion to reduce friction, it uses linear induction motors to accelerate trains along a route, most of the time it will cost. That means the fixed costs of the whole thing are low. The cars are pretty simple and low cost. The accelerators are also simple and make up a tiny fraction of the length of a track. Most of the track is just a partially evacuated tunnel, which is cheaper to build than a maglev track.
> "The MIT pod has magnet skis that lift it during high-speed cruising"
So, in your own words, "For fuck's sake, can people at least read the article before commenting on it?"
The was the whole reason I brought it up. The original design called for air bearings; the MIT team did something apparently far more expensive. This is concerning.
Air bearings require a fairly tight tolerance as to the design of the tube for the entire run no? So I don't think it's a given magnets could be more costly if it means you use more expensive track materials but not a high precision construction.
Any with air bearings or magnets both being a passive track on-going costs might favor the one geological events disrupt less.
From the lift to drag ratio(14) and cruising speed provided(110 m/s), we can compare it's performance to other forms of transportation(neglecting air drag) using the Von Karmen Gabrielli diagram[0]. Using the inverse of the L/D ratio as the specific tractive power and using the updated Von Karmen Gabrielli diagram in [1], we find that performance is expected to be a bit better than that of a commercial plane.
This is pretty promising. Although power required for stabilization and overcoming air drag should be taken into account.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n%E2%80%93G... [1]http://www.ingenia.org.uk/Content/ingenia/issues/issue22/Imp...