• fresh@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I think there needs to be some disambiguation.

    Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop One is literally a train. They themselves call it a train. I guess the idea is that they’re small individual cars (called pods) instead of a chain of train cars connected together, which seems really energy inefficient.

    Elon Musk’s Hyperloop is a train for automobiles, which has all the inefficient downsides of a personal car, with none of the energy benefits of a train. It is the worst of both worlds. And it relies on car infrastructure at both ends, so it will bottleneck just like a highway on/off ramp. Completely nonsensical.

    • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      That sounds like a very Muskrat idea. Don’t worry though, he never builds his own ideas. When someone smarter comes along and invents something better, Elongated will buy it and claim to have invented it, just like every single one of his other accomplishments.

      • sin_free_for_00_days
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        1 year ago

        I remember mentioning that Popular Science had an article on vacuum tube travel way before Muskrat starting bloviating about it, and so many Must sycophants just rose up in anger that I would even suggest he was unoriginal. Even if it had been talked about for over 100 years prior.

    • mondoman712@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Musk “invented” the hyperloop and said he didn’t want to develop it and others should. One of the companies that picked it up was virgin. The car tunnels are the “loop”.