350htrr

I vote for a transporting device like the Enterprise has... sooo much better... Takes one to the exact location one wants to go to in seconds...

Mobile 155

Now you are talking! And we know they can do it because it was in the movies.

cooker

Possibly less expensive per mile than a multi-lane divided highway, and almost certainly cheaper than the same thing built underground. However if the hyperloop comes into being it will need to have mostly straightaways or extremely gradual curves so that there is not too much lateral G force on the passengers, so much straighter than current rails and highways. They can accommodate curves partly by rotating the pod somewhat on it's side in curves, but too much of that might cause passenger disorientation and vomitting. In fact I will predict there will be some kind of interior artificial scenery display or something like that programmed to rotate in a way that tricks the passengers' visual cortices into accepting the rolling movements as not too extreme.

There already is a car train (drive your car onto the train) from New York to Florida, but I hear it is super expensive.

Mobile 155

It looks like the cost per mile is more for the Projected Hyperlink.
In his 2013 paper that set the tech world abuzz with the promise of high-speed travel via vacuum tubes, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk projected a Hyperloop route from Los Angeles to the Bay Area would cost as little as $6 billion, or $11.5 million per mile, far less than the cost of high-speed rail.Oct 25, 2016

The department of Transportation thinks the cost will be much higher however. a multi-lane road is less expensive. I got this from several sources.


Construct a new 4-lane highway — $4 million to $6 million per mile in rural and suburban areas, $8 million to $10 million per mile in urban areas. Construct a new 6-lane Interstate highway — about $7 million per mile in rural areas, $11 million or more per mile in urban areas.Mar 30, 2017

I don't know how much the tunnels will cost per mile but I agree it would be more than above ground.

Machka 

See now ... this I would get behind!!

I'd love to have a transporter. I'd love to be able to step into my (or my local) transporter machine, and appear somewhere near my parents a few seconds later.

Or take my bicycle in there with me and suddenly appear on the west coast of France ready to cycle for a few days ...

cooker

When you look at all the materials that go into them with the multilayer roadbed, and the elevated overpasses and what have you, and the massive width of the right of way, it's hard to believe the highway is cheaper, but I have no special expertise here.

himespau 

I'd settle for their food fabricator device so I don't have to cook dinner tonight.

I-Like-To-Bike

Expertise is the last thing required for constructive discussion of cockamamie proposals that emanate from critical thinking about an alternate reality.

Knowledge of movie scripts is more relevant to such discussion. Travel in re-purposed obsolete phone booths would make every trip an adventure.

PdalPowr

Admit it,you just like the snazzy uniforms.

tandempower

The general problem with big projects is that people want to make big money off them, so they can't be done inexpensively unless you can override all the social-economic resistance that keeps the price-tag high in order to extract more money out of them.

The problem with the US is that it is expensive to maintain the status quo and it is also expensive to change it, and of course this is pleasing to everyone who makes money by investing in it. So the challenge is to change it for the better while also changing the culture of greed and exploitation for the better.

tandempower

How can this:


be less expensive than this:


Why would it be cheaper to make and move huge quantities of concrete and asphalt instead of building tubes and connecting them?

cooker

It's all hypothetical projections. Some of the highway construction is just bulk grunt work of laying down rocks and gravel, whereas the tubing for hyperlink includes all the costs that went into mining and transporting the iron ore and refining it into steel and shaping it. It would also have to be high quality steel, precision engineered and welded and presumably with precise internal tracks and guides, and hightech electromagnetic propulsion systems and air pumping stations and sensors and so on. There's very little allowed variance when you're sending people down a tube at Mach 1.

Mobile 155

Very good point. Plus road building is mostly done with a government bid process. The companies bidding have gotten pretty good and simplifying costs and getting the bid. The old saying is that you are riding on a bridge built by the lowest bidder. Plus there is no payback promised on a government project. Hyperloop will be by a private corporation publicly traded. They are already estimating the return profit to a system that hasn't been built yet. It isn't so much a bid process as it is a negotiated price for one of a kind equipment specialties.

I grew up during the height of the aerospace boom in California. The companies were staffed with highly trained people that almost everyone had a degree. If not a degree they were staffed by journeyman machinists and equipment that would have been a dream just to look at. Hyperloop will not be built by people that only make minimum wage and on the job training if it is built at all. I graduated college during the first fall of that industry and can remember how many students from my school were beaten out of a job having a BA because the other applicants were laid off aerospace workers with MAs and PHDs. It took a long time for that to level out.

tandempower

Are you talking about paving lanes on the ground or building raised highways on pylons?

Idk, do the tubes have to help support the train structurally, or do they only have to seal out a certain amount of air pressure? I think the track could be supported by pylons. It would need to go very straight to avoid having embankments. Idk how much testing anyone has done on the tube-depressurization aspects of the thing. I think most engineering so far has gone into the track and showing how fast they can make sleds go with their neat electric motor technology.

Passenger jets fly at around 500mph, don't they? All these tubes really need to do is keep the air pressure around what it is in the sky. Then what you have is basically air travel without takeoff and landing, and which can use electrical power instead of heavy and expensive jet fuel burning turbine engines.

cooker

Planes need air to give them lift. Cars or shuttles or whatever they would be called in hyperloop, wouldn't need the lift or not as much, so they could potentially travel in less air pressure, but engineers would have to calculate what works best. I saw one design where the car would suck in air in front and shoot it out the back to assist it's own propulsion.

At that speed it probably needs to have minimal wall contact so it would either need fins that support it in low pressure air, or magnetic levitation or some other system. Even so, it's weight and lateral forces on turns will push (at least indirectly) against the tube walls.

tandempower

I think magnetic repulsion provides the lift you're talking about. As for the air-pressure issue, maybe they could design the tube so that the blowers switch from suck to blow as the shuttle passes, so that the blown-in pressure pushes as wind. If the length of the tube is covered with solar panels driving the blowers, all the combined pressure-change could result in a lot of speed, maybe.

That's why I said it needs to be completely straight.

Walter S

Hyperloop is not going to work on top of most existing routes including interstates, highways, or existing rail. The centrifugal forces will be too high. When people fly in passenger jets they are subjected to a maximum of around 0.5 G force. This is actually somewhat uncomfortable. But it's a force people endure typically only during take-off and they're used to it and expect it. You're pushed back in your seat for a couple minutes and if you're smart you won't be trying to take a sip of your coffee etc. at this time. But then once the plane gets a couple thousand feet off the ground and especially when it reaches cruising altitude you're usually back to no (induced) G forces (everybody feels 1 G at rest, the 0.5 I refer to is what's added on top of that).

You might think interstates and railroads are usually pretty straight but you have to put it in context. There are regularly "significant" turns on an interstate where you can feel the sideways forces of the turn. But on a hyperloop those forces would be totally unacceptable. Instead of just feeling it you'll be outright slammed sideways maybe even to the point of significant injury or even worse. If you're going let's say 600 MPH and you want your turn to induce only 0.5 G then the radius of the turn has to be over 15 miles! Picture a Nascar driver going thru turns on a track that's about a mile wide - he's strapped into the seat tight and undergoing a lot of stress and sunk into a angled seat AND going MUCH slower. And 0.5 G is still an induced force that's the maximum airliners subject you to by policy and for in-flight they shoot for more like 0.2 or 0.3.

It's not just turns that induce G forces it's also elevation changes. So building a hyperloop in California or Florida where it's at least pretty flat is kind of tolerable in that respect. But head up the east coast thru the mountains and it's another story. It would be too expensive to build a tunnel that's 1000 feet or more under the ground but that's what you're faced with unless you want the passengers to totally lose their lunch or worse.

You could slow down for turns but you can't do that quickly either for the same reasons. So follow the rail corridor if you want to but you'll end up with something MUCH slower than people expect and also MUCH less comfortable to ride.

cooker

There is no straight line from one American city to another.

tandempower

Idk why you think hyperloop would need to entail g-force if it's a straight tube. It's not like you have to accelerate from 0-500 in 60 seconds.

The tube can go straight if there are no exits because it can just go through farmland, forests, timberland, etc. It would just be a tube on pylons; like a pipeline but without the risk of leaks.

I don't like drilling holes through rock. I think it is better to just keep it along the coast.

Walter S

Are you awake? Or did you see “G force” and stop reading?

tandempower

You understand that G-force comes from acceleration and not speed, right?

Mobile 155

I was just trying to picture the two or three climbs from LA to San Francisco. If you use 5 they would have to climb the Grapevine into Bakersfield. At 700 MPH that would be like a pilot jamming the stick into his gut and chasing a fighter plane in combat. Cresting and the drop down the back side would be interesting. as well. If the started down as soon as they crested they would be weightless. If the made the decent more gradual the pylons would have to be hundreds of feet tall as the tried to graduate the natural drop off from the top down either the north of south side of the hill.

But the more I read about it the less likely I believe it is that I will live to see it. Even Musk has shown dissatisfaction with the progress and has started his own company to see if he can speed up development. The title might give you a hint as to what he thinks a better solution is for ROW and the tubes. He is calling it the Boring company. Look it up and see what they are trying to sell.

Walter S

Yes, acceleration in a sideways direction, a forward direction, a backward direction (often called deceleration but still expressed as G force), an upward direction, or a downward direction.

Walter S

Yeah I read about that some months back. As I recall he plans to make it way cheaper to tunnel thru the earth by a factor of about 10, with a lot of the saving being a much narrower tunnel but other stuff too. We'll see. Musk is quite an innovator. As with most engineers I guess, his ability to estimate realistic timeframes sucks a big one

tandempower

Did you not read my comment about making the track straight to avoid G-force besides acceleration and deceleration, both of which can be gradual?