himespau 

Does Trollheim still exist?

badger1

No no ... I shall not be suckered into saying anything untoward. Evil Machka.

badger1

Absolutely; it's called 'LCF' these days.

Mobile 155

I simply don't get it. If the discussion is already in hot debate in P&R and more than likely the same resistance is being expressed why come to this thread and pretend to be interested in another subject just to rehash the turmoil from P&R?

But to each their own. Maybe it is just for attention?

cooker

All you people talking about what's wrong with the thread are just as off topic as the OP'er, or more so. No wonder his threads "go on and on", with all the side commentary. At least he is more or less talking about stuff related to "alternate forms of transportation".

badger1

Fair point. Offending post deleted.

Carry on

Mobile 155

That was very kind of you. Maybe if you could point out where the topic of Hyperloop degraded so we might know who changed the topic? Perhaps how the topic change was “more or less” transportation related?

tandempower

Mobile 155

Was the above quoted post more or less about any form of transportation?

tandempower

You asked for elaboration on a simple comment I made that I don't support drilling underground because it accelerates entropy. Then, when you don't like where the discussion you evoked went, you turn around and accuse me of going off topic.

Mobile 155

Believe what you want.

Machka 

So ....

If you'd prefer the hyperloop thing not to be built underground, and we know that building it over ground is going to be a problem for various reasons, where would you suggest it be built so that it will appear for our use "soon"?

tandempower

The way to build it 'soon,' would be to do it on half of i95 and divert the funds that would go toward highway renovations to hyperloop instead. It would be like a trade-in instead of buying a new vehicle in order to get a kickback from the dealer to pay off your old one. The i95 corridor probably has too many curves to have super high speed rail, though, so they might have to run it at around 200mph instead of faster. As it matures, they may be able to increase the average speed gradually and that may also result in straightening the routes out by adding new tubes where the curves are.

I think it is highly unlikely that people will be willing to give up half of I95, though, so I wouldn't start investing yet. Maybe after a few years of recession, people will start to see the light on moving away from ubiquitous automotive transit, but we'll be lucky if there isn't another auto bailout/stimulus program that emerges to undermine the reform consciousness that will be growing strong by that time.

cooker

If the hyperloop only goes 200 mph it would only be useful at distances under 200 miles. After that, air travel would be far more attractive. So it's not worth building it unless it runs at least as fast as air travel, but at that speed, it would have the advantage that you don't need a massive airport as a terminal.

Looking at the math I did earlier, I realized that turns are easier on passengers than vertical dips and crests, so even if it runs along the surface, it will probably need to cut through hills or ridges via tunnels or rock cuts. Which do you think is more destructive to nature - a long hidden underground route, or a series of exposed rock cuts through surface landforms?

indyfabz

The OP seems to understand little about the rail freight business and how it operates, both economically and physically.

cooker

That may be true, but this thread was also supposed to be about hyperloop passenger service, which is quite a different thing. I think most of us don't have a good grasp of how exactly it will operate and be funded. In theory, by going underground or on stilts (or a bit of both) it will avoid some right-of-way hassles faced by new highways or rail lines, but it is so hypothetical right now we are all just speculating. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

tandempower

Well, I don't think air-travel will decrease, but maybe there will be more longer non-stop trips and shorter trips would go to hyperloop routes. Some people would probably take hyperloop long distances by taking series of legs with layovers, though, the same way some people would take Megabus long distances by lining up a series of $1 fares and waiting between trips.

Both are unwise. The surface cuts are more aesthetically bothersome, but the underground cuts will gradually evolve into erosion of everything between the surface and the underground tunnels. We are talking about centuries or millennia, but at some point in the distant future there will be humans dealing with massive erosion, sea level rise, and loss of coastline not (only) because of melting permafrost but because the nature tensile cohesion of land and bedrock are being lost to entropy and not anchored and rebuilt by continous generations of biomass sediments building up through time and performing all their natural functions that they have performed since the beginning of life on Earth.

I think they need to put the tubes on pylons and run the routes in straight lines through/over forests. I think they need to be straight so all the G-force will be in acceleration/deceleration. Keeping the tube segments straight and non-structural should keep the price down, no?

cooker

Highly unlikely the underground tubes will have a big impact on the integrity of the rock around them. The tubes themselves will be pretty rigid, but even if one collapses or is abandoned, it's likely the landscape won't change much. There are already massive caverns underground all over the place due to erosion or tectonic activity or volcanic activity, many of which we have no idea are even there, and any hyperloop tunnels are never going to compare in scope.

Above ground tubes will only work in very flat areas, if you don't want to cut into hills or ridges. At the speed they will run, the curves and elevation changes would have to be so minimal that any variation in the landscape will pose problems. Look at how highways in hilly areas have lots of cuts through low ridges. The hyperloop has to be much straighter and flatter. If there is a 100 foot high ridge coming up, the tube would have get up onto almost 100 foot high pylons miles before the ridge if you didn't want to cut a channel for it, and didn't want the passengers to feel like they are on a roller coaster.

Mobile 155

I have been looking at just about everything I could dig up on the Hyperloop and it gets more confusing as it goes along. It seems as if the G-force isn't the hardest thing about turns, your suggestion could make those easier, it is the effect on the passenger's inner ear. The movement at speed will make some people sick because of the lack of visual aids. But that is something they might be able to work around. And of course underground would allow for grassland type of planting over the tunnels to mitigate erosion. But none of that worries me about the possibility as much as this link suggesting some of the engineering problems.

https://interestingengineering.com/b...y-of-hyperloop

I-Like-To-Bike

Good article, thanks.

Not to worry though. The proposal makes perfect sense to anyone thinking about material for sci-fi scripts about an alternate reality where the real world engineering and economic issues and societal priorities are easily overcome/ignored by so-called critical thinking, day dreaming, and willful ignorance of reality.

Extract from the cited article:
"The Problems Plaguing the Hyperloop

Constructing a tube hundreds of kilometers long would be an engineering marvel in of itself. However, introducing a tube hundreds of kilometers long that operates at a near perfect vacuum which can support the force of capsule weighing thousands of kilograms as it travels hundreds of kilometers an hour is nothing short of sci-fi fantasy.

Small scale experiments reveal the fundamentals of the idea are sound. Although, in the real world, there are too many factors that cannot be accounted for with a small scale design.

In the real world, there are tens of thousands of kilograms of atmospheric pressure which threatens to crush any vacuum chamber. There is also the problem with thermal expansion which threatens to buckle any large structure without proper thermal expansion capabilities. The Hyperloop would also be stupendously expensive. There are many unavoidable problems facing the Hyperloop that threaten the structural integrity, and every human life on board. The problems can be addressed, but at a great cost."

cooker

Good article.

tandempower

You're thinking short term. This is the same reason people don't realize how much radioactive waste can build up in 10,000 or 50,000 years. If we start drilling tunnels in bedrock and continue fracking, it is going to speed up the erosion of those deep underground areas. Water is going to seep into those underground caves and press toward the ocean, forging rivers. Rivers always carry eroded sediments and so those pathways will gradually grow and widen through time. Eventually sinkholes will give way from the surface and there will be large valleys.

There is a zip line canyon park in Ocala that is built over such valleys that were formed by limestone mining about 100 years ago. Now the slopes have reforested and the area is very pretty and natural looking, but when you realize they mined all the way down to the aquifer, it doesn't take much abstract analytical thought to realize that they also accelerated a process of erosion that might otherwise have taken millennia to occur, if it ever did.

You see, water is not just weathering and eroding and washing debris out to sea. It is also growing biomass, which drops sediments and builds up the ground an inch or so per year. If we allow it to do that instead of accelerating erosion processes, we could actually end up with more land in the distant future instead of less and that would be a good thing for future humans.
(Waterworld Cosner 1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterworld )


Unless they set a precedent that results in multiplication of such underground tunnel systems through time. How long has it been since the first underground train systems were built, i.e. NYC, London, Moscow, etc.? 50-100 years? How many will be dug/built in the next 500?

What would be really smart would be to have trains that go up a mountain and then launch out of the tube before extending wings and gliding to a landing destination, or using VTOL tech to land on a pad. Musk piqued my interest a few years ago when he mentioned the possibility of electric VTOL planes, because I thought batteries would be too heavy for flight.

I know this is sci-fi, but it is a good example of how landing pads (and other inhabitable architecture) could be built above thriving forest canopies in order to restore natural biomass ecology to the land.



As I said, allowing them to launch out of the tubes and then gliding before landing would be a good solution.

BillyD

Thread has lost it’s way.