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
let’s take a jet plane, make it even dumber, and then put in an environment where aerodynamics no longer apply
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.
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.
???
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.
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…
the virgin hyperloop, can’t make this shit up
Alas, we humans are not yet capable of achieving lofty pursuits such as a train
if only there were alternatives to cars that could exist in the real world
