Trying to build evacuated tube maglev trains in a country with no existing train infrastructure :geordi-no:
Experimenting with evacuated tube maglevs in a country where you're already maxing out speed using simpler methods :geordi-yes:
Oh hey look it's that thing elon promised us that China might actually deliver on.
Or not, it might just go the way of that weird grifter bus
Theoretically. It was a scam. Probably the closest a Dahir Insaat-esque idea has come to fruition.
Have they considered pitching it to the Saudi king for The Line?
lol Time Magazine rated that bus one of the top 50 inventions of 2010. I guess back then it was ok to like Chinese things.
Given all the pictures of space craft in the background, I'm going to guess they're looking at this as a potential method of space launch, not intercity transport.
Not like that, you build a ~100 mile long vactrain into the side of a mountain, accelerate ~10 g for ~10 minutes, and then you only need a little delta v to circularize the orbit.
swear to god china is one of the only countries that actually cares about materially advancing our world to the next stage of development through long term planning and strategic investment
as humans we naturally tend to try to progress and improve our tech but capitalism really is just running around with its head cut off at this point
Just to be clear, the problem with Hyperloop and related infrastructure plans isn't that Elon Musk wants them so they are automatically bad, it's that 1) the cost per kilometer to lay "track" (vacuum tube with a maglev rail inside along with all of the necessary vacuum pumping hardware) like this is comically expensive and 2) the fundamental concept of a hyperloop is extremely difficult to design any failure tolerance into, meaning that small problems can lead to mega-million dollar damage and loss of life events.
It's still safe to assume that if Elon likes an idea, it is a bad idea. But this one is bad for a more fundamental reason than just because he likes it.
I admitI haven't looked into "Hyperloop", but I thought it was something different from the VacMagLev that Gerard O'Neill and others talked about.
Searching for it now, I see references to a "cushion of air", so it's a different thing. https://www.reddit.com/r/hyperloop/comments/6rph81/hold_up_hyperloop_glides_on_a_cushion_of_air/
The fundamental concept is a vehicle traveling in a vacuum tube. Making this a high vacuum tube is too much of a joke for even Ol' Musky to suggest, so the consensus is that these hyperloop-family devices use low vacuum just because it's more feasible. Air resistance is only one major source of friction though, the other is the friction between the car and the track. The air bearing idea, which is to essentially fit the car and the track together with tightly toleranced metal and pump a small amount of high pressure air in the gap to keep the rail and the car isolated, is a viable way of getting a low friction interface, but for various reasons magnetic levitation, where the train and the track are isolated by magnetic or supermagnetic forces, has kind of rendered it obsolete afaik (also, maglev and air bearings are mutually exclusive unless they're doing something really weird).
