Yep, it was a dream too impossible for the world in the late 1800s / early 1900s too.
Turns out making a train or maglev inside of a vaccuum tube is more expensive and has insourmountable technical challenges when compared to making...
You know a train or maglev outside of a vaccuum tube.
For christs sake, Elons original napkin sketch was a train with a giant air intake on the front that would push air downward to make the train float and also propel it forward.
You know.
In a vaccuum tube. Where there is no air.
huh, it's almost like it was only barely designed enough so that it could wreck and steal funding from serious public transport proposals for parties interested in never seeing those happen
I don't even think this grift stole much funding from public transit. Its funders were overwhelmingly private sector idiots.
let's take a jet plane, make it even dumber, and then put in an environment where aerodynamics no longer apply
That image is incredible.
Its the horrifically pretentious headshot drawing style the WSJ uses, but has like the face of one of those horrendously ludicrous confederate statues.
Amazing.
I bet he didn't even consider how to deal with all the rat viscera
It also doesnt account for basic American boredom:
Nearly every time a Boeing fuselage is shipped via train halfway across the country, they have to fix all of the bullet holes in it from bored riflemen in flyover states shooting it as it rolls down the tracks.
Basically the reverse of all of the shooting of Buffalo from trains during the westward expansion.
Eventually, someone with a high powered sniper rifle or even anti materiel rifle would take a pot shot at a vaccuum tube, which would then basically rip itself apart if it penetrated.
Nearly every time a Boeing fuselage is shipped via train halfway across the country, they have to fix all of the bullet holes in it from bored riflemen in flyover states shooting it as it rolls down the tracks.
Please gods let this be true
As requested by apparently a mod...?
===CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT===
https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=276419
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/paxszc/i_id_never_seen_fuselage_being_transported_like/
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1q1ew6/boeing_737_fuselages_on_train_ride/
While my dad may be an insane QAnon adherent who believes that Tom Hank's son rapes children to death for their adrenochrome, he was at least useful in that he has worked at Boeing his whole life and would tell me something like this every once in a while.
Thanks, he is dead to me now. Probably I am going to need some therapy to uh... process all that.
But no, really, thank you for the empathy. =)
Please remove the ableist language and add a CW for the SA reference (or just remove it). Otherwise this is a great comment.
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A more fundamental problem is actually making a vacuum tubeThis is very true, I think one company spent like 8 years figuring out how to actually design an actually useful, actually reliable train tunnel sized vacuum seal, and then basically disappeared after...
...well its really expensive to just make one. And it would take even more money to be able to ramp up production facilities to be able to make the many needed for a theoretical system of them. And it would take forever to build them, in terms of 'oh no our loans are due and our investors are angry'.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Nearly every time a Boeing fuselage is shipped via train halfway across the country, they have to fix all of the bullet holes in it from bored riflemen in flyover states shooting it as it rolls down the tracks.
... dudes rock?
You technically could do that... at least on a relatively short, flat, straight track... but it doesnt make any practical sense.
First, its a ram jet so something has to get it up to speed before the ram jet starts working. Though if we just make it a scramjet, there we go.
Next problem is ... it might actually need downforce winglets on it the way drag cars do. On every car. Hope there is no sudden cross wind on your nearly perfectly straight track in a large flat area. Now you need a computer system to automatically move the winglets to counter cross winds... or you need some kind of... train... pilot...???
Biggest problem is: The speeds capable by a theoretically working scramjet train would mean it could not turn on anything other than VERY wide arcs, and it wouldnt be able to get to the speeds capable of a scramjet... ostensibly the whole point... without skipping tons of stops a slower train could make...
...unless you are going to slow the thing down at each stop with a series of parachutes coming out the back, or some how be able to reverse thrust the scramjet?
As far as I know there are no reverse thrust scramjets, fairly sure thats impossible due to the nature of scramjets.
???
The project pluto express. Beijing to Brooklyn in, like, 5-6 minutes.
Fuck... a bank can figure out how to use air to push an object through a tube and an air hockey table to float a puck, I don't know why these dum-dums couldn't have figured out how to do the same.
Turns out making a train or maglev inside of a vaccuum tube is more expensive and has insourmountable technical challenges when compared to making...
You know a train or maglev outside of a vaccuum tube
China is already eyeballing a commercial Hyperloop track between Hangzhou and Shanghai by 2035. That said, China is coming from a place where they've already ironed out much of the tech behind a maglev already, so a Hyperloop is more of a "what's next?" Instead of a pie in the sky dream from nothing.
I would very much like to read as much about that as I possibly could!
I will be honest, I still think the general idea of a train of some kind in a vaccuum tube makes basically no sense whatsoever...
... but maybe either this is not exactly that and theyre just using the name hyperloop, or maybe somehow they think they can or already have figured out the engineering/economic difficulties with the core concept.
Either way would make some interesting reading!
Here's a recentish article from SCMP. Sounds like they've got the route planning mostly done and are pushing ahead with the technical issues. Article says that Hyperloop tech is still in the early stages and many technical challenges lay ahead. We probably won't hear much more about it until the major tech breakthroughs are already made and tested because the Chinese state sector doesn't blow its trumpet until the project is almost done.
Seems like high level people from state and SOE organizations are involved so at least it's unlikely to be a startup grift.
Welp, they got a test track and a miniature capsule going 600 km/h so far, or such speed is claimed.
I am not able to find any video actually showing the test capsule moving anywhere near that fast, and strangely the SCMP article you posted makes reference to a potential 1000km/h, while their youtube video on it only mentions 600 km/h.
So basically they have gotten as far as the American hyperloop did.
Guess I'll keep my eye out for updates.
It's easy to see in hindsight that this was a dumb idea meant to steal money and resources from public transit, but it was also easy to see in the middle of it, and at the beginning, and beforehand...
Alas, we humans are not yet capable of achieving lofty pursuits such as a train
And a train going thru as such treacherous terrain as the flat farmland and gentle hills of the Central Valley of California
if only there were alternatives to cars that could exist in the real world
Even the worst, least well-planned, befuddlingly ignorant ideas can't be carried out in this country
I wouldn’t cal it ignorant. Its sole purpose was to divert public funds from any practicable public transit projects.
True, but it also proved how many people weren't aware of how difficult digging is
IIRC, the Boring Company's Boring machines were one of the things that actually worked, in that they could dig a tunnel faster than the competition. The problem is how hot the cutting head gets and how frequently you have to replace it - turns out previous generations of boring machines had more or less figured out the optimum ratio of cutting speed to maintenance interval, so going faster is a marketing gimmick.
give me and the boys some pickaxes and a case of beer and we could have done it faster
I always wondered about the engineers who worked there. They had to be either dense enough to not see it as a folly on its face, or else see it and sign up for the paycheck anyway.
or else see it and sign up for the paycheck anyway.
I mean it's probably this
Just make some fake reports every month, build whatever model or render you feel like that week. You know it'll never work, but hey, good money
but that was my fifth mode of transport.
What's the next anti-railway grift gonna be?
Magnetically accelerated pods in a tube, like a railgun with people inside?
Futurama pneumatic tubes?
Autogyros launched via a comically large crossbow? Is Elon going to discover that single passenger gyroplanes exist, reinvent the ballista, combine them and scam taxpayers to fund this fever dream?
Imagine if the US military had said the same thing about the Korean or Vietnam War
You guys won't be laughing when orbital ring roller coasters are the next grift
Hyperloop
Space elevator