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- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
- hackernews@derp.foo
It’s time to be honest about Musk’s vacuum tube to nowhere
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I have to admit I was kind of impressed seeing the way two scams worked together: the Hyperloop, and the Loop. People genuinely thought they were related projects because of the name and, I guess, the tunnels. So the Hyperloop made the Loop sound more exciting than it really was, and the Loop made it seem like there was progress towards the Hyperloop.
Of course, in reality, the Loop is just a shitty cab tunnel designed to financially and physically block local mass transit projects, while the Hyperloop is just bullshit vaporware designed to financially and politically block intercity mass transit projects.
Even though I thought the tunnel thing and the train thing were both either vaporware or useless, I have to admit that this fooled me, I am one of your people who thought they were related
I’m so dumb that even after I read their comment, I still thought they were related until your admission made me reread their comment.
As a Vegas dweller, I’m particularly pissed at this whole thing because we’re CONSTANTLY hearing “Well there’s lots of subterranean caves and stuff, so a subway or underground structures (away from the scorching heat) would be unfeasible.”
…but here we are with a stupid freaking Tesla-pipe that could have had rail cars…
Clearly the city planning here is just one big investor rug-pull on the residents. After this “Loop”, “The Sphere” and their compulsive need to put like 5 more mega stadiums in the middle of the city in the middle of the desert.
And all working-class residents get out of all this is clogged freeways and $300 nosebleed tickets from Ticketmaster.
Yeah. I also thought that the tunnels were too small for a subway (because one of The Boring Company’s “innovations” is to drive costs down by digging smaller, shittier, and more dangerous tunnels using existing technology). However, there are subways in London that have even slightly smaller tunnels. You could absolutely lay down some tracks in there and have a functional subway. Giving it to Tesla to run a taxi lane for who knows how long was just a choice.
Also, from what I found out, the Loop is going to continue to fuck over the residents, because the expansions are going to have WAY higher fares. I think right now, the Loop is $4.50 for a day pass. As a point of comparison, a New York subway ticket is $2.90, so one round trip would be more expensive than a day pass. That makes the Loop sound great! …until you realize the prices are kept artificially low to make it seem that way. Future plans for Loop service would cost upwards of $12 a ride outside of the convention center and resorts.
Also, as an aside, something I don’t think gets brought up enough is that the Loop proves that Tesla’s self-driving cars are a scam. Even on a close course, indoors, built to whatever specs Tesla could possibly want, the cars need human drivers.
This comment is sufficiently cynical that it must be on the right track
har
Dunno, I think it’s an idea and definitely a good one but not all ideas need to be built right here, right now
Hyoerloop is not a scam just because The con man proposed it with the intent of stopping a high speed rail road project.
It’s a scam also because:
- the idea is not his. It’s 100 years old and has been tackled by other before him.
- it’s impossible to be build from the technical point of view.
- even if you do manage to miraculously built it it won’t be economically feasible.
- in the lasts years it’s starting to be obvious that if it’s backed by Musk it’s a scam in some degree, shape or form. (see also Solar Cities, Tesla, The Loop and the Boring company, etc.)
it’s impossible to be build from the technical point of view. even if you do manage to miraculously built it it won’t be economically feasible.
I don’t think you can say any of this until you actually put some money into it and check. Technology improves all the time and with it economics of such project. They didn’t really try to build any actual routes. They just tried to do some prototypes and check current feasibility. I don’t see this as a scam or a bad thing at all. No public money went into this.
A very long evacuated tube hundreds or thousands of miles long - too long to ever be actively defended - is itself fundamentally untenable. There are US states where every “welcome to ___” sign is shot up with holes. You don’t think people will take potshots at this thing?
Even if you somehow made it armoured and immune to small arms (this would be the largest armoured thing ever constructed), it would never make any sense over cutting edge high speed rail that doesn’t require an evacuated tube.
This all comes straight from first principles. To change this, any number of fantastical technologies would need to be invented (maybe the tube can be made of vibranium?).
What I always thought was the worst part about the idea is pressure equalization in the event of an eventual cabin seal failure.
Yeah I think we’ve learned all we need to know about the mega-rich “MoVe FaSt AnD bReAk ThiNgS” types and their highly pressurized people-carrying cylinders…
This is totally different, the tube is under vacuum and on land.
So the pressure difference between the vehicle and the outside is the opposite. If the vehicle fails, rather than being crushed by the pressure, the occupants explode.
It wouldn’t be that bad. Just possibly popping a lung, rupturing ear drums, and/or passing out.
Yeah, that’s why we don’t have any thousands mile long tubes transporting dangerous substances. Oh, wait. We do! What happens when someone shoots a gun at them? They go to jail! (look up Daniel Carson Lewis of Livengood).
In your theory, why can’t the same laws protect ‘railway tubes’ that protect oil and gas pipelines? Why terrorist don’t shoot guns at pipelines all the time? Why don’t terrorist jump on high speed rail tracks and sabotage them? Where I live there’s 5000 km of high speed tracks that are not “actively defended”. There’s just a fence. Big rock could take out a train. Why do you think no one ever attacked it but everyone would be shooting at hyperloop pipes for fun?
Oil pipelines are often buried underground, they can have up to 60’’ in diameter. Hyperloop pipe is about 90’’ in diameter. It could be feasible to put it underground. I’m not saying it’s a good idea or bad idea. I’m just saying that some guy commenting on a blog is not a good reason not to try. Get enough of good engineers to work on it for a while and you will know if it’s feasible or not. That’s what they did. I think it was a good thing to try.
Yeah, that’s why we don’t have any thousands mile long tubes transporting dangerous substances.
None of those are vacuum tubes. This is nonsense.
What happens when someone shoots a gun at them?
They leak. Literally all the time. They keep working. This won’t.
I think it was a good thing to try.
Okay well you got there eventually.
I’m just saying that some guy commenting on a blog is not a good reason not to try.
The good reason not to try is that bullet trains have proved working perfectly in other parts of the world. Sure, they would be slower than an hypothetical hyperloop but they are a working technology that would help alleviate the transportation problem.
Why invest in a project that might lead nowhere?
I’m not anti experimentation, by any means. It’s just that as the article says, the hyperloop was proposed when a bullet train was being discussed by local politicians.
Test hyperloop track was supposed to be build close to where I live, in Antequera, Andalucia, Spain. There’s a railway test center built specifically for testing new rail technologies. Since it was build decades ago nothing was really tested there because bullet trains already existed and no one had any new designs since then. The trains didn’t really change since 1980s. At the same time bullet trains still lose to planes on longer routes because they are simply too slow. Hyperloop was supposed to change this and offer rail technology that would compete with planes on long routes. It was supposed to be the next step in rail travel that would be able to compete with air travel. Now we know it wasn’t feasible but just because it’s not right for USA it doesn’t mean it’s not worth testing.
You don’t think people will take potshots at this thing?
Given that I always heard it being envisioned that the evacuated tube would be a tunnel, no, I don’t.
Just I’m clear on this the plan is/was to dig a large diameter tunnel underground, between cities?
As far as I know, yep. That’s how “The Boring Company” fit in to the scheme.
Better built on the moon than on California, no guns or people to mess it up
I’m assuming it’s probably technically possible, just ridiculously expensive to build and maintain, with way less throughput than a train.
Again, maybe it is but you can’t really be sure until you design it, estimate the cost, try to lower it by modifying the design and if it’s close try building some prototype to test it. People keep talking like you can evaluate design like this on a napkin. That’s just not how engineering works.
No, it’s just not viable. Just maintaining the vacuum is hard and takes a lot of energy. Keeping it from imploding onto the high speed train is also very hard.
It does not need experimenting, it is known already.
It is and always was a scam (or just simple stupidity, or both).
Yeah, I wouldn’t really trust any of that unless it came from interdisciplinary team of engineers that actually looked into it. I know that there’s a lot of bloggers and youtubers that like to shit on every new idea but they are often wrong and are simply trying to create clickbait content.
Why is a vacuum (holding a tube in compression and 10-14psi ) harder than pressure (holding the tube in tension at 200-1500 psi).
I used to work in a vacuum lab and one thing to consider is pumping efficiency drops as pressure drops. So everything leaks all the time right, and one strategy is to just pump harder.
However at low pressurers nothing is pushing the air into the pump for extraction, something like a bend can stop gas flowing around it dramatically where in high pressure the gas behind just pushes it through. So it gets more and more energetically demanding to keep pace with leaks.
Also pressuring a giant tube to multiple atmospheres also sounds like a nightmare. It’s hard enough to keep pool toys inflated :p
It’s not a total or high vacuum. It’s a partial vacuum like -10psig.
Just to talk in international units to include everyone: I was under the impression it was supposed to operate at 1 mbar or 1/1000th of an atmosphere. That’s into the transition between viscious and molecular flow iirc (for air at normal temps anyway). You’re probably still pumping down with something like a scroll pump but it’s not very efficient anymore.
Thinking about the number of opportunies for leaks. Every joint, every screw, every pump connection. How they all shift against each other as the sun warms and cools them, how you relieve the strain without introducing pourous materials. It’s a fucking nightmare, and even if you manage all that you need to be pumping on it every few meters 24/7 to keep pressures that low with the realistic amount of leaks/in order to be able to pump down the local area where one occurs.
Like imagine if you needed a phat motor on every block to make roads work. The infrastructure demand is just unreal
That makes no sense. It’s been repeatedly tried and failed for very obvious reasons.
Technically it’s very very hard unless you spend so much it’s uneconomic and takes too long to develop.
Secondly, its investors who were scammed. Yes they could have done better due diligence but they were still scammed.
No it’s that it hasn’t been executed properly yet, as for whether it’s an actual scam is another issue
Don’t forget the “Hyperloop” in Las Vegas, which is just a tunnel where Teslas are driving people around. IMO that’s the stupidest and the least efficient use of this tunnel.
The cars are not even self-driving, and mind you this is a closed system and easier to implement self-driving. So far with his self-driving copium, and robo taxis bullshit.
That’s more about Elon hating mass public transportation. Probably because it involves being close to poor people.
Don’t forget the “Hyperloop” in Las Vegas, which is just a tunnel where Teslas are driving people around.
Isn’t that The Loop, not a Hyperloop?
whatever it is, its a human barbecue waiting to happen with how tight and coffinlike the tunnel is from what i’ve seen of videos.
Yeah he was supposedly building a hyperloop but we got cars in tunnel instead and our dumb ass politicians took our tax money to pay for it
Why do you still like him after he has shown who he really is? The quality of his products?
I didn’t say I like him. I find the companies he is affiliated with interesting.
this is a closed system and easier to implement self-driving
Lol, they tried and it didn’t work well, even in a closed system. There was a whistleblower among the drivers a while ago. They were officially in the cars just to keep an eye of things but in reality they had to take over constantly, and they all had contracts that tried to keep them from talking about it. Oh yeah and they got scripts they had to follow if passengers asked questions about Musk or the project. 😄
Edit: here’s some articles:
I didn’t know about that. Good one.
Don’t forget the “Hyperloop” in Las Vegas
Isn’t that literally what they’re talking about in the article?
No, the news here is that Richard Branson’s Hyperloop One company is shutting down. I don’t believe that is related to the Loop (not Hyperloop) project in Las Vegas.
The moment he proposed it, but was not interested in implementing it and let others use that idea, was a clear sign that he himself didn’t believe in it.
That’s an interesting concept. After the shit he’s pulled with twitter, and in general, I now wonder if he was genuinely dumb enough to believe the hyperloop would be economically viable, and deferred because he had 5 young projects in flight… but he’s also too egomaniacal to defer a project he believed in, so maybe it was a scam from day one, because he is a con artist.
During the peak of his fame I always thought this was a money laundering scheme from Musk. Only recently I’ve learned about the (not so much) theory that it was all an effort to screw with high speed train.
Going to run a turbofan in a vacuum chamber for propulsion and use air bearings to float on the surface. Like any of it ever made sense from day one. Fever dreams of an idiot.
Yes. Adam something pointed this out two years ago: https://youtu.be/CQJgFh_e01g
I remember when thunderf00t dunked on this idiocy like, 10 years ago or something.
I fully believe the accusations that Musk only proposed the Hyperloop to derail the California High Speed Rail project because an actual high speed rail service poses a serious threat to his car sales. The entire point was to overpromise and deliver absolutely nothing while sucking funds away from projects that actually stand a chance of replacing cars.
i don’t think it would have done anything to his car sales. you still need a car everywhere in california outside maybe half the bay area
Good point, but in the long term, a successful large scale transit project can and will sway opinions and cause other transit projects to crop up nearby. In the mind of a car exec it’s probably best to nip it in the bud in case more people get a taste of what car-free ground transportation can do and start getting ideas about transit expansions in their cities, and it’s not like he’s shy about his vehemently anti-transit stance in general either.
california cities outside the bay are spread out as fuck and the infrastructure is planned around car ownership. it would be a very long time before people would start going carless.
But his car sales are shit. And compared to the sales of all the major manufacturing is a pitance. Not saying its not the reason he did it but he’s such a little wanna be fuck boy I couldn’t help butpoints out how shit he is. What a mammas boy the soon to be Enron is.
Yes, putting as much effort into actually making Tesla better would have paid off more in the short and long haul.
Now he’s a punchline instead.
Musk is a scam artist, founder my fucking ass
The hyperloop was my wake up call that he wasn’t a good person, it felt like every reporter became dumb overnight to buy what he was saying.
Folks be thinking air resistance doesnt exist
There wasn’t going to be any air resistance. They were just going to build a vacuum chamber 1000 times larger than the biggest one ever engineered, then contain it in a thin metal tube snaking hundreds of miles across the heat of the California desert. So simple. /s
Good thing California is geological stable, otherwise it would never have worked… /s
Right, that was the whole point. I think folks arent appreciating air resistance. The ISS is an example of what vehicles are capable of without it. Speeds incomparable to anything on earth, with little fuel usage. Its the largest source of inefficiency in travel. And the engineering science of reducing it is wholesale a scam for people.
The ISS travels at a constant speed in relation to the earth. People have to get on and off a train
Yes, acceleration is a thing, but trains a)reach a top speed and spend a lot of fuel maintaining it, and b)reaches much, much lower top speeds, with any effort to increase it requiring exponentially more fuel to reach and maintain. Air resistance is an absurdly important factor to travel efficiency.
Whoooosh
No, without air resistance , you don’t get that sound.
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Yeah i seen the rest of it, i was short on time. Thats not how engineering tubes works, we use them because you can add as much length as you want, the balancing of pressure forces occurs cross sectionally. A 2 foot pipe carrying 100 psi is experiencing the same stresses as a 2 mile pipe at 100 psi. You might as well be adding a /s to the idea of distributing water through pipes.
Very long pipes use expansion/contraction sections that may not be possible for a vacuum sealed system that has to be incredibly straight to allow the passage of a train, and can flex pretty significantly for earthquakes, seasonal temperature changes, etc.
Earthquakes keep getting brought up as if they’re not devastating to absolutely everything we already use. What if an earthquake hits a regular train? Or a bridge, or a house. only a vacuum tube is susceptible to earthquakes.
I really don’t think they want actual science or logic, this is the five minute hate for the day.
I think it really boils down to capitalism being really bad at things like this, look at the UKs high-speed rail project - hugely over budget and behind schedule AND not getting any of the important bits that actually make it usable. There’s no way we could do anything actually cool like a passenger vacuum tube.
I was actually a little excited by some of the stuff musk was saying back in the boring company days because it briefly sounded like he was investing money in technologies that would be huge, narrow bore vaccum tunnels especially… Sadly I think he didn’t really understand the science fiction he was reading, or rather he didn’t get the importance of intermediary steps. Or he remembered me owns a car company.
What would make a huge difference in reducing vehicles on the road is rapid hands free cargo delivery through automated vacuum tunnels - but he wanted to skip micro tunnels and instead just go to ever so slightly smaller tunnels which is basically pointless. We needed a totally new boring technology not a slightly shrunk one, it should be doing city infrastructure and micro cargo transit then when we’ve perfected the mechanisms we can scale up into passenger sized networks to complement the developing passenger rail system (which rapid micro transit would really help as the need for cargo transit is the main reason that stops the subway being feasible for certain people)
If any part of the hundreds of miles of tube suddenly stops being a vacuum chamber, every train all along the tube is going to be hit by air rushing in, at the speed of sound, with all the turbulence that implies, while its already moving at full speed. It might be possible to engineer a capsule that will keep the people inside alive when that happens, but it is not at all the same as e.g. rail, where “stop moving fowards” depletes essentially all the energy in the system.
You deal with thermal expansion the same way you do with continuous welded rail.
The major strategy on CWR is pretensioning, but there are also multiple kinds of expansion joints used in different circumstances. I’m not saying it’s impossible to do the same with a vacuum chamber, but I am saying there’s no simple reliable answer, and certainly no answer so obvious and bulletproof that it doesn’t even require testing before you could start construction.
Elon Musk either didn’t know or didn’t care that his company wasn’t doing the required engineering and testing to make a real functioning hyperloop.
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I think a better example is airplanes. You run at high altitudes to increase efficiency due to reduced atmosphere.
The idea isn’t crazy. Shithead Musk didn’t come up with the idea, it’s been floating around for a hundred years or more. It’s just society isn’t there yet, technology wise.
Plain old subway does the job better, cheaper, and faster.
My imaginary train is even faster.
Literally a snail is faster by virtue of actually existing.
If you are ever in LA, you should take a drive around SpaceX campus and see the “Hyperloop prototype” they built outside(don’t get out of the car, Hawthorne is a run down industrial zone and not the safest place)
There is nothing that shatters the illusion of Musk’s genius faster than seeing that sad, short gas pipeline looking thing on an run down street next to their overflowing employee garage.
Street view link?
In other news, water was always fucking wet. World shocked.
i mean news flash and shit, but you can’t make a good product at this point under capitalism. there isn’t a single product on the market, in any category, that is not a scam. Enshittification won capitalism and the game is over.
IDK man my toaster oven works pretty well
Are you TIRED of having to buy a new toaster oven every ten years? Try Toastee, we’ll send a new toaster to you every month so you never have to wonder if you’re going to have a working toaster oven! Only 169.99 per month.
Nah you can always make new things that aren’t toasters lol just harder to be more imaginative
I would go into such extremes. Just on top of my head Brother printers are nice, cheap, and do the job well.
