It never ceases to amaze me - the faith people put in these supposed technological messiahs. Like they’re going to pull something no one else has or even could have thought of before them out of their magical assholes.
It reminds me of the hype surrounding the Segway before it was announced. Dean Kamen came off looking like such a huckster afterwards. The whole charade became a meme for gullibility. Anyone who was reasonably well read then should have realized there was nothing that would have lived up to the hype and anyone meeting that description now should have realized the same thing.
I like the fact that in his 57-page .pdf description where he covers the technical specs, the budget, the route, etc., there are about 40 words dedicated to how he plans to deal with earthquakes. It amounted to, “well, we’ll just build the tube to be flexible enough to be up to code”. Uh, okay.
Wouldn’t an earthquake by pretty much 100% guaranteed to cause a disasterous crash for anyone unfortunate enough to be travelling when it hit? If the tube breaks off completely, the cars would shoot out the end like rifle bullets. This might actually be a better scenario than if the tube only got bent or kinked. In tha case… well, do you remember the scene from Return of the Jedi where Luke & Leia are racing around on the speeder bikes, and the Stormtroopers are crashing into trees and getting totally oblitered?
Eh, there are elevated highways, bridges and train tracks in California already. They aren’t failure proof, but apparently are close enough that people feel comfortable with the risk. Building elevated transportation infrastructure in a fault zone is something people have already put a lot of thought into.
In some sense, I want technologies that don’t live up to the hype. It means they’re practical. The Hyperloop is a straightforward application of current technology, just like the Model S is what you get when you take a luxury car and stuff it full of batteries. It’s not much more complicated than an oil pipeline.
Looks awesome to me! I remember being a kid and going to the drive-thru bank and imagining traveling in the tube. (Hey, who didn’t?)
It’s also pretty cool that Musk offered to pay for and build a prototype if no one steps up. But I can imagine the amount of permits is probably around, what, 150,000 permits to build a real one?
The problem is a small version doesn’t really makes sense. Unless there’s enough distance for the thing to get up to speed and coast for a while, it’d be more trouble to take then its worth. So you can’t just build a short version out to an LA suburb as a proof of concept, as you could with a train or subway.
The prototype doesn’t have to be cost-effective, just work well enough to say it works.
So yeah, from the city center to the suburbs or airport might be a good first choice.
The size of the train and the much lesser energy needed to accelerate it to nearly the speed of sound. Handwaving photovoltaic cells all over the thing to provide that energy.
Because it’s so fast, it has a high throughput even with small, lightweight cars. Because the cars are lightweight, the tube is also lightweight. And because of that, it can be elevated on pylons fairly cheaply, which makes the right-of-way problems much simpler and cheaper. It also makes very little noise, which should reduce the chance of community objections and expensive lawsuits.
Bit of a hijack but the wheel chair that grew out of the Segway was pretty cool. Really really expensive, but very cool. It ran on 4 wheels and could stand up on 2 to elevate the rider.
Count me among those who rolled their eyes when the actual idea came out for a tube train. We’ll see a ramjet sub-orbital plane before that happens.
