Remember when Elon Musk used hyperloop and boring company to build nothing in the US as a way to shut down public transportation efforts?
Some people are skeptical this technology can ever work, but it appears CASIC’s Phase 1 testing in a 2km tunnel has given them the confidence to proceed to Phase 2 testing in a 60km long tunnel.
Chinese railway engineering leads the world so I have a hunch that if any nation can pull this off, then it’s China. However, lots of questions remain. A back-of-the-envelope calculation says that to achieve those speeds in the 2km test tunnel deceleration would have been about 3G. That’s the same as a rocket at lift-off and not many people’s idea of comfort.
The concept and technology isn’t the issue. It’s just not economically or technically feasible at scale.
Its literally just not worth it, all while being stunningly dangerous. When a zero pressure vacuum ruptures, it violently contracts, generally crushing itself.
This will require a zero pressure vessel as wide as a train, that is hundreds or thousands of miles long to be viable. One hole in the thousand mile line will shut the whole system down while it’s repaired and then depressurized. This strands any other trains in the tunnel until this is done, so your “superspeed” tunnel is really super slow. Even if they have some kind of "safety valvue at set intervals that means the whole line doesnt go down on pressure gain, you still cant use the rest of the line.
So for this to work, you need multiple redundant tunnels, all of which can be taken down by one person with a gun at any point along a long, long track.
So you can spend just endless billions, literally hundreds of billions, making these redundant train tunnels that still aren’t redundant, or you can spin up 10x-100x as much HSR that goes 300km and actually interlink the country with truly redundant and fast transportation.
The technology problems can be solved. However I don’t see how anyone can afiord to build it.
I got an acceleration of 1.5G for the test, did you forget a factor of 2 or something? Still certainly not an enjoyable experience for passengers, but I assume it would accelerate over a much longer distance if a full track was built.
I think I’d probably be fine with 1.5Gs as long as the jerk and snap were low.
Did you also factor in that the train needs to come to a full stop in that 2km as well?
Hyperloop? You mean a vacuum tube train. Hyperloop is Elon Musk’s name for it when he claimed to have invented it over a hundred years after it was proposed.
To be fair, Socrates envisioned the TV and Jules Verne hypothesized space travel, yet you don’t see people giving them credit for inventing those things
The vactrain proper was invented by Robert H. Goddard as a freshman at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the United States in 1904. Goddard subsequently refined the idea in a 1906 short story called “The High-Speed Bet” which was summarized and published in a Scientific American editorial in 1909 called “The Limit of Rapid Transit”. Esther, his wife, was granted a US patent for the vactrain in 1950, five years after his death.
I feel like I’m going fucking mental.
I was certain for about a year the idea was pneumatic tubes like in a bank but for trains. Which I though maybe, but probably too much friction.
Then it turned into a bog standard vacuum tunnel that was all over youtube and the Internet before Musk. But everyone acts like that was the original idea.
Pneumatic tubes use a constantly generated vacuum and air pressure to move objects. It would take forever to pump out a tunnel for a single train.
No you have two loops of constantly moving air. The train then goes in and out of that tube at stations.
It’s a fucking shit idea and trains are great. But I remember that and seem to be the only one. No one ever mentions that idea
After everything I’ve seen with tofu-dreg construction like that bridge collapsing this last week, I think I’ll pass on riding a nearly supersonic Chinese train.
For reference, if atmospheric pressure at sea level is about 1 bar, “low vacuum” is between 0.3 and 0.001 bar.
Huh. Insane they actually build that. It’s basically impossible to ever make it economical though. Just go slower, build more trains and lower prices. Way more benefit to society.
The US should be having a rail-measuring contest with China, not a hype®loop-measuring one.
Yeah China is doing real well in that department.
I mean if we lived in a post-scarcity utopia and build these hyperloops under ground it might be a worthwhile investment. If we had more advanced tech for tunnel digging robots and maybe 3D printing the walls out of the material we take out etc. But if you include the energy for just maintaining the vacuum against small leaks it’s probably not better than airplanes. Maybe with some kind of genetically engineered bio-crete that automatically seals small cracks. But even when we’d advanced to that level of tech and automation to make it viable, it would still have to compete with a fleet of ultra cheap vertical take of electric aircraft.
