I’ve read a decent amount about the hyperloop and you’re the first person I’ve seen mention 1-person pods. I think you might be mistaken here.
As you point out, 1-person pods make no sense at all.
The one Musk envisions for Chicago,https://www.inverse.com/article/45952-chicago-boring-company-deal-announced uses 16 people cars, reworked model x’s, I think. Everything I have read says his billion dollar price tag is ridiculous. But he told the mayor that he would cover the entire cost so Rahm said “sure”.
Update:
Nobody questions the ability of a company to make futuristic capsules. The fact that they are focusing their efforts on the easiest problem makes me even more skeptical.
Show me a ten mile curved test track with a vacuum in it that can adjust to temperature swings, detailed plans for emergencies and a design for a pump that can evacuate hundreds of kilometers in reasonable time for reasonable cost. Then I might believe you are serious about building a hyperloop.
Until then, it’s just flash for the suckers.
According to the article there are now two other competitors: Arrivo and Virgin Hyperloop One and Virgin is in talks with India to build a hyperloop.
Also, this capsule is supposedly headed for a commercial track somewhere and HyperloopTT is setting up a track in China (all in that article).
I am dubious as well that it will all pan out but it does seem like some are having a real go at it. It would be weird to have three companies working on it separately if it is all a joke.
Not at all. When there is a whiff of government or venture capital money in the air and an opportunity for free promotion because ir’s the buzz of the day, the rent seekers come out in droves.
Go look at how much money the various ‘water from air’ solutions have extracted from gullible governments or NGO’s. Check out the disastrous history of the PlayPump, and all the money that got invested in it despite it’s having been a ridiculously flawed concept from the beginning.
Just recently, France wasted a whole lot of money on ‘solar roadways’, despite the obvious ridiculousness of the concept. Then there’s the Moller Skycar, which has blown through hundreds of millions of dollars by being ‘ready to fly in six months’ for the past 30 years.
There are a lot of rich idiots in Silicon Valley, and a lot of NGO’s and governments who care more about looking good than actually achieving something. These goofball ideas are aimed right at them.
I’ll repeat: Any serious engineering firm wouldn’'t have spent a nickel on fancy pod designs and terminal designs until they did the R&D to prove that the ‘showstopper’ items could actually be solved. And Hyperloop has a number of problems that there are no existing engineering solutions for, none of which involve capsule or terminal design.
Why is the capsule streamlined? I thought this was supposed to work in a vacuum?
I think it’s low pressure, not a complete vacuum. Plus, it probably looks cooler that way.
No, it’s essentially a vacuum. There is residual air pressure left over because it’s pretty much impossible to get a perfect vacuum, but it’s on the order of 1/1000 of normal sea level pressure. The difference between that and a perfect vacuum is just about nil when it comes to the forces on the tube, the car, etc. So the argument that it’s just a ‘partial vacuum’ is wrong. For engineering purposes, it’s a vacuum.
No, it’s close enough to a vacuum that the criticisms regarding breaches and such are still completely valid. The pressure in Hyperloop is about 1/1000 that of sea level, or about 100 Pascals. That’s close enough to a vacuum that all the problems of evacuating the tunnel, what happens in a breach, how the tunnel has to be constructed and other vacuum issues are essentially unchanged.
But the tiny bit of air in there does cause problems. So in a way it’s like the way Mar’s atmosphere makes it a harder place to land than one with a pure vacuum - the atmosphere isn’t thick enough to allow parachute descents, but just thick enough that at hypersonic speeds you still have all the heating issues. Hyperloop’s tiny air pressure (about 1/6 of that of Mars) causes problems with air piling up in front of a high speed pod and causing friction, but does nothing to allieviate the problems of maintaining a vacuum across hundreds of kilometers. A pressure difference between 14.7 PSI and .0147 PSI is pretty much the same as between 14.7 PSI and 0 PSI, for any realistic engineering purpose other than drawing the vacuum in the first place.
I found an interesting article linked about the technical challenges.
That link is almost word-for-word what many of us have been saying since the hyperloop was first announced.
I noticed that, actually.
From an engineering side, it seems that there’s a pretty consistent series of questions about it. Looking at it from a business side, I seriously question whether one could ever turn a profit. It looks like you’d end up with some massive throughput issues and an extemely inflexible physical design.