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latenlazy

Brigadier
ougoah said:
Hyperloop tech overlap with aviation tech and maglev tech. The problem no one has solved is how to make the vacuum. Maintaining it and all the other peripheral tasks are solved matters. How do you economically create any sizeable network of ETM transport and make it resilient enough? There is no solution at the moment and nothing even close to one. It'll probably take weeks to pump air out of a tube just covering two very closely positioned cities. The whole idea is abysmally stupid sort of like the boring company idea. It's self defeating before it begins. Something a scientifically illiterate 6th grader might come up with if they didn't think about it for another few minutes. Which makes it that much more revealing that so many investors and Americans have believed in those comedy fests - boring company, hyperloop, solar roads. All Elon scam projects. Having said that, Elon knows what he's doing. This doesn't take anything away from Tesla or SpaceX though I believe SpaceX is a product of American competence and lead in space technologies rather than one man's management.
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The main innovation of the original hyper loop idea Musk laid out is that it *isn’t* a total vacuum. It’s supposed to be a partial vacuum, and the carriages are supposed to have turbines to recover some of the energy loss from pushing through air resistance. Is this a physically sound principle? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But at the very least the idea isn’t completely unoriginal.
 
The Observer

The Observer

Junior Member
Registered Member
latenlazy said:
The main innovation of the original hyper loop idea Musk laid out is that it *isn’t* a total vacuum. It’s supposed to be a partial vacuum, and the carriages are supposed to have turbines to recover some of the energy loss from pushing through air resistance. Is this a physically sound principle? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But at the very least the idea isn’t completely unoriginal.
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It should be achievable. The question is, at what cost? How much of an improvement is it compared to HSR/Airline?

These are the questions those wanting hyperloop have to answer, and then they have to convince the rest of us to believe and accept their answer. Not an easy task, I'd say.
 
O

ougoah

Brigadier
Registered Member
latenlazy said:
The main innovation of the original hyper loop idea Musk laid out is that it *isn’t* a total vacuum. It’s supposed to be a partial vacuum, and the carriages are supposed to have turbines to recover some of the energy loss from pushing through air resistance. Is this a physically sound principle? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But at the very least the idea isn’t completely unoriginal.
Click to expand...

dankris said:
It should be achievable. The question is, at what cost? How much of an improvement is it compared to HSR/Airline?

These are the questions those wanting hyperloop have to answer, and then they have to convince the rest of us to believe and accept their answer. Not an easy task, I'd say.
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I have mentioned it is not a total vacuum. That would be unrealistic. Like my original post said, even creating and maintaining a "partial vacuum" is going to be unrealistically expensive and complex. You can shut it down and slow down any vehicles in transit every time there is an act of sabotage, earthquake, or a simple fault. The problem is even a conventional subway system network is riddled with daily faults. I cannot imagine how they would make an intercity ETM system much more reliable and simple. If anything it will be far more complex. So shut it down every time there is a small issue and pump out air every time there is a loss of integrity?

This idea is only really serviceable for long distances. You don't want to accelerate and decelerate through those ranges every 100km or so. This means less money earned, lots of time and energy spent pumping out about 4Mm^3 of air just for a straight 1000km "line". China's HSR network is aimed to be nearly 38,000km long to service enough of the country to give an idea of what a "useful" network size is in a comparably large landmass (ignore density of users and distance between stops). This idea is beyond lunacy until there are better ways to resolve those major problems. I hope one day there will be but it ain't worth working only on these problems since they are currently so far beyond what's economically sensible.

So is the idea scientifically sound and scientifically achievable? Yes ... I guess that's partly why so many engineering schools participated in the PR events. But is it realistic and economically achievable with the science that is currently mastered? No, not even close. Is it a waste of time to formally organise effort at engineering those problems away? Yes actually lol. This is like trying to build a deep sea submarine out of transparent materials because it would be cool. Doable on small scale and certainly not economically sensible and totally impractical.
 
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