If we don’t need to worry about bombs, can we get rid of the TSA-style screening? Sure would help passenger flow.
Well it’s a 70 minute round trip so even if we ignore the loading and unloading times, 30 second intervals would require 140 capsules.
If we assume it takes 3-4 minutes to unload and load then you need another 6-8 cars in at each end.
As a side note, many times these “security” measures just make me think of how it only takes a slightly more determined terrorist.
Metal detectors and a couple of security guards at a school? The next Columbine copycat can just bring an assault rifle and shoot the guards first.
A big “no car zone” around the hyperloop track? Terrorists can just ram a dump truck full of ANFO right on through the barricades and slam it into one of the tube supports. No way the QRF team can have a good response time if they have to guard a track 600 miles long. Even those anti-vehicle barricades they have around government buildings now are just a tow chain and some shaped charges away from being moved.
The actual reason that terrorist attacks are rare is that legitimate terrorists are rare.
Actually, I don’t think you need to do that.
Put the pylons down in a trench. The sides of the trench are steep/vertical up for 8-10 ft, then slope up:
|
|
|
Where there is a pylon, put a simple concrete diamond on the downslope that forces a car going down the slope away from the pylon.
|/
|/
|/
Now the car can’t get airborne to jump (it’ll just go down the slope and fall into the trench). And because of the diamond barrier, it can’t fall into the trench next to a pylon.
It’s still vulnerable to a BIG car bomb, but it’s a reasonable way to prevent small ones (or even just accidental rammings of the pylons).
Still gonna inflate the costs though…
You can’t get out of an airplane, either. The capsule is the size of a smallish business jet. We know that people can handle seats without windows, and we know people can handle small tubes that they can’t leave. So you have posit that the two together puts people over some threshold, even with the contrary factors of a short duration and a very smooth ride (not to mention the “virtual windows”). I am a tad claustrophobic, but I’d ride that thing in a heartbeat if the environmental conditions were maintained well (temperature, humidity, light, etc.). Claustrophobia (at least in the colloquial sense) is as much about the environment as it is about the raw physical dimensions of a space.
Terry the terrorist will take one look at your clever pylon car-trap, go fetch his backpack bomb, toss it at the base of the pylon, and skedaddle.
I think the terrorism angle is a red herring here: Nothing makes a hyperloop more vulnerable to terrorism than existing forms of transportation. You could argue that it’s somewhat less vulnerable, since the “track” is inside a thick, sealed steel tube.
No but you can get out of your seat.
I would say it is more about perception of space than anything else. Being in a plane where (in most cases) you can walk around or use a restroom is not in the same league as being sealed into a windowless tube which is shot through another (airless) tube that is welded up solid for possibly tens of miles in either direction.
I think than anybody that thinks this will be a smooth ride has no concept of what 800 mph is really like.
Speed does not mean that a ride cannot be smooth.
Well there’s your threshold- I don’t think I’ll be riding in it.
Too crowded, too enclosed, too full of people. Single-user pods, maybe. Not with 27 other people.
I don’t see the hyperloop being built on the scale described in the OP’s link for quite some time. And I don’t think the reason has much to do with technical hurdles like expansion joints (which can almost certainly be done using existing technology). Nor, as noted above, are security concerns a big deal.
Cost obviously is. The estimates provided are seriously lowball. To take an example, the cost of pylons and tubes is said to be just over $4 billion. Each hundred feet requires a pylon and two tube sections; there are 18,480 of these, which means they are budgeted at around $220,000 each. Good luck fabricating, transporting and installing even the easiest & most accessible ones for that. Given the precision that will be required, just the fabrication of the two tubes could easily cost that much or more.
A bigger problem is that this scheme has little in common with what’s gone before, so there’s a lot to learn. To deliver the reliability and safety required of public transportation, it would be necessary to build some shorter, much lower-speed “simpleloops” and rack up considerable experience with them - very costly, both in time and money. But a “run before we walk” approach has a really low chance of long-term success - expect breakdowns, accidents, massive cost overruns, general disillusionment, and failure.
Yeah, imagine what a rough ride astronauts have in space! At 17,500 miles per hour, it must be, lessee, about 2000 times bumpier than a bicycle on a dirt road.
Dear Mr Musk,
Please forget the Hyperloop, and devote your energies towards those self-driving cars of a few threads back.
Thanks!
True, but 800 mph in anything connected to the ground likely won’t be. If the tubes are built 150ft long, at 800mph the cars will be passing through 8 tubes per second. Even if the tubes were built perfectly, any misalignment in the installation will be extremely jarring. If they are welded together as is described, then there is no adjustability in the system.
Unfortunately, the system can’t do this. You’d have to load and fire off one person per second, while unloading and re-loading and reversing course in the same span. Note that Musk requires something loading times even beyond this during the busier portions of his day. Usually in transportation it’s not possible to load people as fast as the Hyperloop would require according to Musk.
It’s not completely impossible, either, but he’s definitely shoved his passenger load calculations to the utter maximum. We’re talking efficient as in “Disneyworld’s most efficient rides at their best, with guests who’ve already been well-trained, in a low-security environment, with no baggage, and where there are still long lines at the rides so there’s never any downtime.” Basically, the only way I can see this working is if there’s a way to load a dozen (or two) sleds at once, and it may still require attendants to give the passengers a hand in and out. This then makes for some complications as you’d have to have a system to onboard each car as it loaded to keep the system load near 100%
A note as well regarding Musk’s passenger estimates. There’s no way in the Abyssal Inferno this system can work the way he suggests. Yes, it’s technically true that he only requires an “average” of one car every two minutes. Hence a total of 720 carloads per day. OK, it’s a stretch but doable. The issue is that’d have to run about 6 hours at absolute complete maximum capacity. Why? Well, people are going to almost all show up during the morning and the evening weekdays. Apart from that, it will be much, much slower and there may be significant periods with little-to-no ridership. But this is likely exceeding the system capacity if his ridership is true, whereas if it he overcount ridership then the system capacity will be much more expensive even at his optimistic assumptions. Then Saturdays you’d likely get more flexible tourist traffic, but not as much, and Sundays’d be dead, which hurts the ridership again…
I’ve been assuming this all along, you’d load capsules off-track in some sort of station.
Never seemed plausible to load them while they are waiting inside the tube like train cars on rails.
More like loading airline passengers then taxiing out to the runway.
Because otherwise, loading 28 people in 2 minutes is the obstacle to overcome.
Which gets back to his budget numbers being…understated.
He says 40 cars at X each. Even assuming X is true (and I don’t think it is):
- He needs way more than 40 just to deal with peak loads - assuming cars are in the tube and shot straight away every 30sec/2min (whatever).
- Per your comment, it’s unlikely this is the case and he really needs that larger number plus a bunch to deal with load/unload staging times.
None of this appears in his budgets - which doesn’t kill the budget itself (even at 2M per car, we’re still only talking about 200-300M, peanuts in a budget this size) - but it does make you wonder where similar shortcuts have been taken…
I mentioned this upthread. I figured a 70 minute round trip at 30 sec intervals means 140 cars. Plus extra cars at each end for loading and unloading.
This.
I think that is why so many of us feel the need to criticize this plan. When even a casual glance shows so many things that don’t add up, it is hard to take it seriously.
There’s no physical contact between the cars and the track. It’s air-cushion like an air-hockey table and magneto-levitation for the drive guide. Although I think it will take a demo model to confirm the right tolerances to keep the ride smooth.
There’s no reason it can’t take 30 minutes to process a car for the return trip. It just takes a station that can independently process and load vehicles and a large number of cars. Of course, the longer each car takes to process, the more stations are required to maintain the flow rate, and that means larger stations. But it isn’t impossible or impractical.
I think you’re underestimating the weekend commuters, go one way on Friday evening and the other Sunday evening. Not that I have a reasonable estimate for what that traffic load would be, but when travel times drop and fees stay reasonable, people do weird things. I met a lady whose family lives in Dallas and she was working in Houston, making the trip every weekend. She’d been doing that for over 6 months. That’s pretty ridiculous at airfare costs, but if the travel time drops and the price drops, it becomes more sensible to some people.
My brother lived in Boulder and worked on the far end of Denver for a couple years, while his wife was in school at the Univ of Colorado. 2 hour trips each way suck balls to me, but he did it for a long time. People make weird choices for a variety of reasons.
Fair enough, I don’t think 40 cars is a reasonable number.
The cushion of air the car rides on is proposed to be only .020-.050" thick, so there won’t really be any cushioning effect from it. The cars will no doubt have some kind of suspension system. The problem I see with the drawings is that they only show the cars being supported from below. I don’t see where it says how much clearance there is between the cars and the walls of the tube, but at 800 mph the cars are going to need something on the sides and the top to assure that the cars don’t contact the tube.
Does anyone know how disability access law is going to apply?
Does every pod need to be wheelchair accessible, or is it enough to provide that service in some cars?
Is it legal to limit passengers by weight or height? Age, health status?