Have you ever gone to the bank drive-thru, used those pneumatic tubes and thought, “that’s it! That’s the way I want to travel… Like my paychecks.”
Well, now you can. The future is now… Hyperloop.
We already have this. It’s called “The Subway.” And even if it could travel at 800mph, it doesn’t really make much difference if it still has to stop every 1000 feet to pick up and drop off passengers.
They had something like that in the James Bond film “The Living Daylights.” Bond used it to smuggle a defector across the iron curtain.
These tubes wouldn’t happen to be in series and interconnected by any chance would they?
In all seriousness, I think their main competition is the commercial airline business. That is set up hubs in major cities, so the 800 mph sled can rocket its way hundreds of miles in under an hour.
I’ll admit, it’s a cool idea, and interesting to see it being put into development, but the infrastructure/maintenance scares me. Anything traveling in a tube that fast better have some serious dependability.
Peeeeerhaps. If anything, it’ll make a great data-delivery system.
There was already a pneumatic subway – in 1869.
It was the first attempt to build a subway anywhere in the world. It was only about a block long, though (it was a pilot stage) and it was killed by Tweed and his City Hall:
Actually, there seems tio have been a London Predecessor, built three years earlier:
There were other railway systems powered by pneumatic tubes, but the cars were open-air – the passengers weren’t themselves sent through pneumatic tubes. see here:
Wouldn’t tubes in series just be a longer tube?
I read the Popular Science and Wired articles. There’s a LOT of problems to solve to make it practical as they envision it and it sounds expensive.
The key to all the promised advantages is that the tubes are in near vacuum so there’s no “wind” to impede the high speed cars. Because what’s the point if they’re not high speed? But then with high speed the remaining air must pass around the powered cars so they need to understand those aerodynamics. But then at high speed, wheels and runners create friction so the cars need to float on an air cushion or magnets. So they need to develop a levitation system and means to transfer power to it. And learn how to control the “float” of a large autonomous capsule in a tube. Then learn how to maintain lnear-vacuum in MILES of large pipes between cities. And develop means to transition from vacuum tube to atmospheric at “train stations”.
But other than that it’s a great idea! 
You’d think FedEx and UPS would be all over this if it really has the potential claimed.
Or one of the major railroads. Set up a test system on a disused bit of their right-of-way.
This is the “Hyperlooop” concept that Elon Musk was flogging a little while ago.
Among its many, many problems was: what happens if some incident (earthquake, accident, terrorist attack) breaks the tube? The force of the air rushing down the vacuum tube would be like a dam bursting. It would crush any cars (and their occupents) like a beer can.
ETA: Since the tube is a piece of infrastructure, the odds that something will happen to it sooner or later are pretty close to 100%.
I’m currently living in Memphis, and this would be a huge boon to FedEx, if it ever happened. Besides the fact that FedEx Headquarters already takes up a lot of airspace which currently makes traveling by plane a bitch.
Elon Musk is one of the Execs (if not the CEO now… I can’t remember). Anyhow, yeh, for something like this to be viable, they have a LONG way to go. Both figuratively and literally. As with any form of transport, the risks are there and ugly.
I’d certainly like to see them start off with using it to ship stuff real fast, before trying it out on people. If your Amazon order slams into something at 800 mph, that’s hardly the end of the world.
When they get to the point where they’re sending stuff by tube all the time and all the stuff arrives safely, we can talk about using it for transporting people.
My very first trip was through a tube. “Fallopian” I think it was called. Don’t remember much about it, but it was apparently not very fast. It took me about 9 months to travel less than a foot.
And, if you’re male (and hetero), you spend a great deal of time thinking about and desperately trying, to get back into one of those spaces…
And, if you were breast-fed… the ironies of it all…
The Hyperloop, in any form, will come right after the 1,000,000,000th flying car is sold.
Both are equally likely to work in reality. :rolleyes:
The thing is, would you put the tubes underground or above?
Above ground would be suseptible to weather and sabotage. Underground would seriously drive up the construction costs and logistics.
Solar power + technology + green thinkin = abundance of cheap carbon fiber.
6 foot diameter carbon fiber tubes, elevated like 20 feet off the ground (so as to limit impulse vandalism and minimize disturbances to the migrating buffalo(e)s and such) would be strong and reasonably flexible.
As the capsule approaches a destination, you “break” the tube (sealing at both ends of the joint to preserve vacuum) and bend the last quarter mile of tube so that it marries up to a terminal tube. Once the capsule enters the terminal tube, perform a similar break, seal up the terminal and rejoin the main lines together.
Run it on a solar-powered maglev system (the entire top surface of the tube is solar panel).
And yeah, use it for cargo transport to work the bugs out. No real changes would need to be made for human transport–you’d have to lie down for the journey, but it’s a brief and smooth ride–take a nap.
silenus can work out the details, and Musk can pay for the build.
I don’t think you should worry too much about sabotage. Airplanes and trains and ships and big trucks are all susceptible–life contains a particle of risk.
How many people in one capsule?
Say 50 - all lying down in a 6’ diameter (ignore wall thicknesses) - unless they are really chummy, at best you can have upper and lower berths (ignore how you’re going to load them).
You now have a capsule 25-people long. For North America, you’ll want 6’4" per person.
Ignore ventilation.
That’s a really long capsule to try to maintain an airtight seal around.
Once you solve that one, go back and address all the matters we ignored to get to this point.
Musk flogging the Hyperloop pretty much destroyed any respect I had for him as an engineer.
I think the only reason he pushed it was because, as a car maker, it’s in his financial interest to undermine rail travel, much like General Motors in the 40’s conspired to eliminate street car systems.