Super fast travel Hyperloop transport system

[Thor.]

Hey have you ever wanted fast travel to become a reality other then Skyrim and other games that do it with ease :blink:. Well this might make that a reality, not in the same form as Skyrim and load screens lol, but fast enough to get from New York to Florida in a hours time.

 

This is a revolutionary break through if this is legit will make travel almost like teleportation, what would you see happen if this technology became a reality and has spread across the USA or Canada alike.

 

 

Would the economy collapse or would it be saved, there is so many possible outcomes with this type of super fast transport system.

 

http://www.space.com/22064-elon-musk-hyperloop-travel-technology.html

 

August 12 is the big announcement, look out for it.

 

I am actually really hyped for this, we needed something fast to replace our aging rail system.

 

The debate is what would be the implications something like this would cause.???

 

[Vindekarr]

It'll never be built. Musk and many others before him have been touting the benefits of this system going back to the beginning of the 1990s and nothing more than press-conference bluster has ever come of it. You can spend hundreds of billions, more likely trillions of dollars to design thousands of new technologies and build this. OR you can spend ten or so billion on a new fast rail network. We don't have the technology. We don't have the budget. We don't have the need. We don't have the right political climate. We don't have the need.

 

There are many other similar "revolutionise THE WORLD" projects like this every year, they all fail. The last one that succeeded was in the 1960s. Forgive my skepticism but even ignoring the most obvious and idiotic flaw to this, the US government isn't going to front up the billions required simply to design the technology-which simply does not exist yet-required to make it possible, let alone the further billions or even trillions to deploy it.

 

On a more scientific topic, I am an engineer. I spend my working days converting existing automotive technology to run better, faster, longer. The materials science alone involved in making a capsule to work in this device is centuries beyond us. Carbon-Chiral-Nano-Fiber(CCNF) is the current "hero" material, and even it doesn't have the structural integrity for this. The only craft that hit these speeds are smaller than a human torso and can only maintain them for a few seconds before shattering as a result of catastrophic structural failure.

 

And the next thing, sure, FOUR-THOUSAND MPH. Bullcrap. We don't have a jet that can hit that sort of speed reliably, and you expect me to believe some more-money-than-scientific-credentials rich guy can propel a capsule in a pipe to that speed, reliably and safetly? It's like trying to fit an elephant into a safeway bag; first you take the letter E from Safe and the letter F from way...

 

...AND THEN YOU REALIZE IT'S NOT POSSIBLE BECAUSE THERE IS NO F IN WAY. And what about G forces? a Formula One racing car hits a top speed of about 187 MPH, when they turn at these speeds, even a small horizontal turn is enough to risk the driver blacking out. Drivers have to train for years to build up the body strength to simply be able to handle the massive G forces you get at 180 MPH. Now, you expect me to believe you're going to be able to get civilians in a pod, to take corners at 4000 MPH, when men and women of incredible physical conditioning struggle to stay awake through a turn at 180 MPH? get real.

 

Either you'll need to slow down so much that you'll defeat the purpose, or you'll need to go perfectly straight, and that's impossible. given how even ultra-flat desolate countries like Australia are still so mountainous that their desert railways are wiggling snakes. This brings me to the most glaringly obvious hole in all of this.

 

4000 MPH. So what is that, average speed? peak velocity? you're expecting me to think this thing can hit those sorts of speeds? Think about G forces. Two G. That's already so uncomfortable that most ordinary people would feel faint and suffer muscular strains. Three G. This is so uncomfortable that muscular damage begins to be possible in particularly unfit people. Four G. Potential serious muscular damage, potential blackouts.. Five G. About the absolute limit of what an ultra-high tech ground vehicle can achieve. Survivable while staying conscious, but only for a very, very brief duration. Your body is subjected to five times it's own weight in pressure. Six G. About the limit of a fourth-generation fighter jet's maneuverability. Seven G. Blackout territory even for experienced ace pilots wearing G-force resistant gear. Eight G. Space shuttle during launch. Nine G. The absolute threshold of what a human can currently survive.

Now, I would put the maximum acceptable G-force load at 4 Gs. I've got a car which can hit 3.3 Gs in the corners, it's a horrible sensation. Your body weighs twice as much, it's like having in my case, 87 kilos pressing down on my ribcage. Unless I'm literally wearing a device that makes my upper spine into a single rigid structure, my body physically can't handle that sort of stress for more than a brief duration, and I'm an amateur racer, and used to it. I can't imagine a fat, 58 year old man being able to keep that sort of pounding up for more than a couple of minutes. Whenever I get out of that car, I've got the stiffest neck you can imagine, and usually a few days of muscular pain as a result. People won't ride a transport that leaves them in significant pain for days on end.

 

And 4G is a very high estimate, anything beyond that will leave you so battered and bruised that you'll be wishing you'd stayed home. To turn at 4 G, you'd only have to be going around 200 MPH. So how is this going to alter course without killing everyone on board? you can't. So you would have to slow down. This is a problem, because if you have to slow down below 500 MPH to turn sharply, then you're defeating the point of building this trillion-dollar waste of time. And what about accelerating? the G-forces of acceleration and braking are every bit as bad if not worse than those of cornering. In reality, this device simply cannot operate without any sort of artificial gravity system. You'd either kill everyone on board, or it'd be so comparable to a fast train that it would invalidate the trillion+ dollar setup cost.

Edited July 24, 2013 by Vindekarr

[Thor.]

I figured with your way of thinking you would have doubts of such transportation system. There is no g forces in this type of transportation system, it would be frictionless, without any friction the speed would be unlimited. Its in a vacuum like in space, so the speeds could reach amazingly high.

 

That last video explained it :smile:

Edited July 24, 2013 by Thor.

[Lisnpuppy]

Even if he could pull this off... an issue that has nothing to do with the functionality of this. Its building tunnels. He mentions underground and really..to be an actuality it would need to go underground much of the time. Our tunnel building is..well still pretty bad...expensive, unsafe and did I mention expensive?

 

The cost alone for the necessarily tunneling would be astronomical. It is estimated that the current US interstate system which is about 47,000 miles of road cost upward of $128.9 billion dollars. Look how long it took. To build tunnels would be....we might need to use 6.02 x 10 to the 23rd to describe it.

 

Money is always the final deciding factor in idea tech. I don't think even if it could be proven to work....that there could be funding for it.

[Vindekarr]

Thor, buddy, I'm an engineer. That's how I'm approaching this. I spend my career basically being the party pooper who says "that can't be done" The engineering standpoint is one of cynicism maybe even derision, because ultimately our job is to make ideas work in practice. And most people have no idea what a hair-tearingly maddening process that is, making their stupid, poorly thought-out, or downright insane plans which defy logic or physics or common sense work, when by all rights they shouldn't.

 

Alright let me try this again with fewer big words. Costs. Big problem here, They're the bane of all engineers. When you solve one engineering problem, you tend to create another one. And here you have a HORRIBLE flow-on effect.

 

See, air can exert INCREDIBLE force on any sort of vacuum chamber, and the more surface area is involved, the more that force scales up. This means you'd need to use some form of exotic "super-alloy" with incredible strength and probably using an Iridium base. This alone kills the project on expenses, since these metals are jealously horded by countries since they're used in missiles, nukes, reactors, and that sort of stuff. It's also got the flow-on effect, of being HORRIFICALLY expensive to make and maintain. The stronger the material, the harder it is to shape. These "super alloys" like Rhodium, Inconel and so forth, by dint of their strength, have to be manhandled into shape with immense precision, since they all have a tendency to shatter. This is horribly expensive-even more so than the metals themselves.

 

Then you've got labour. Mass-producing the alloys you'd need to make this would bankrupt any country. We're talking about trillions or even quintillions of dollars here. And then you've got to lay the tunnels(hundreds of billions or more) and then you've got to maintain the tunnels(more billions) and then you've got to make sure it doesn't leak(I can't even calculate that) and then there's paying the running costs of the lines, and the unbelievable power costs.

 

That's the other issue. This is based on a Railgun. Do you have any idea how much energy a railgun needs? To fire a single 20mm shell, the US Navy's railgun needs to charge itself for more than a day, and then when that's done, it can only fire a single shot before charging for another three days. And that's while being powered by the most efficient generators we have. So, that's three days of charging to fire one single shot that in and of itself is only a foot long and weighs about as much as a football.

 

Now can you see why I'm skeptical? the thought of building something like this-I've got to say it, from an engineering perspective, it gives beyond audacious, it goes beyond insane, it's just stupid. Elon Musk, is an idiot.

Edited July 24, 2013 by Vindekarr

[Vagrant0]

I figured with your way of thinking you would have doubts of such transportation system. There is no g forces in this type of transportation system, it would be frictionless, without any friction the speed would be unlimited. Its in a vacuum like in space, so the speeds could reach amazingly high.

 

That last video explained it :smile:

Erm, that's not how Gforces work...

 

As for mitigating the effects of Gforces, I would imagine a good deal with it deals with gradual acceleration/deceleration much the same way as bullet trains can get to speed without causing adverse effects. Bullet trains are gradual enough to where they can have concession services during travel, on tiny carts pushed by pretty girls, and they go at similar speeds to an F1 racer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_1

 

Controlled speeds and banking allowed by magnetic control can easily achieve very high speeds without causing particularly high Gforces. The 30 minute time between LA and SF compared to 1 hour NY to LA is probably based around the fact that a good portion of shorter trips are just accelerating then decelerating with very little time spent at high speed.

[JimboUK]

To take care of the G-Forces involved you'd not only have to accelerate and decelerate very slowly if you didn't want to kill people but you'd also have to make the thing dead straight, bends at that speed would cause terrible lateral forces. Concorde passengers could travel at 1,300 MPH comfortably because it didn't accelerate like a fighter and didn't turn at those speeds, if it had then those sipping champagne in the passenger compartment would find themselves wearing that champagne. Building a dead straight tunnel either underground or overground would be horrendously expensive because you would have to go through everything in the way. It would also have to be a vacuum, air causes friction and thus heat, maintaining a vacuum is far from easy, maintaining one for thousands of miles would be damn near impossible. It's one of those ideas that's great in theory but falls apart when it meets reality.

[Vindekarr]

LOL Jim, typical.

 

I go on for hours about something, then you and Vagrant come and sum it up in three paragraphs :laugh:

Edited July 24, 2013 by Vindekarr

[Lisnpuppy]

*kicks dirt* I said stuff about the tunnels too. *grumbles* (joking guys)

[HeyYou]

Considering this would be for long-distance transport, very few, or extremely gentle turns wouldn't be a problem.

 

It IS doable.... if we throw enough money at it...... Trouble I see is, we can't build pipelines that don't leak now..... nor can we build a pipeline that doesn't break...... with the speeds the capsules would be running at, ANY failure, no matter how minor, would spell the death of everyone in any capsules in the vicinity. (and that 'vicinity' could reach for miles in both directions.) Should a failure occur where it runs under the ocean....... well, any one in those thousands of miles of pipe would be dead in very short order. There would be nothing left but a very thin smear of organic material. Which you would never find.

I don't see this technology coming about any time soon......