HTT Breaks Ground to Make Hyperloop a Reality | Hacker News Reader

HTT Breaks Ground to Make Hyperloop a Reality

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38 pointsdaegloe35 comments

Not even a working prototype and already planning the routes, entertainment system with AR and wifi; it tells a lot about their future success.

I can't tell if you're saying it's good or bad.

To me it shows a product-first thought process which is a good sign for me, assuming they have the technical talent to back it up.

No, it's a distraction from the problem at hand. They really shouldn't waste any effort on add-on items.

It's a distraction depending on the size of their team. The people building entertainment and ticketing systems aren't the same people as those building propulsion and safety systems. As long as they have enough manpower to implement the actual technology, fleshing out the business case and the revenue model is not a bad thing.

I disagree. Laser focus is required, and every distraction has a cost. I've seen teams scale up aggressively when their core was still weak, and it just makes bad worse.

I've seen what happens when a good product has bad business management/practices -- it goes no where. So if you've got leadership forging relationships, finding cool ways to rope people in that you have a great vision and will be the next big thing, then you have a recipe for success down the road. I wouldn't assume from those few statements that the majority of efforts aren't actually making things work.

Thoughts on this map:

* There's a route from Miami to Orlando and a route from Jacksonville to Atlanta, but nothing connecting Orlando to Jacksonville?

* Connecting Phoenix to Albuquerque and Denver to Salt Lake City is going to be really goddamn hard (mountains) for how small those cities are (but no SLC - SF?)

* Spokane-Boise, but not Reno or SLC or Seattle?

* Boston? Baltimore? Tampa? Charlotte? Cleveland?

* Why is (tiny) Concord, CA even there?

But most importantly, it's huge! Doesn't it make more sense to start with a single route (IMO, Boston - NY - Philly - Buffalo - Toronto - Detroit - Chicago)?

> Denver to Salt Lake City is going to be really goddamn hard (mountains)

There's already a traditional railway that connects the two cities. The mountains have a bunch of passes through them.

The reason everyone flies is because it takes 15 hours and costs $81 one way per Amtrak on the California Zephyr.

Relative to a one way plane ticket with Delta which costs $157 and takes 1.5 hours. And while a $76 saving is pretty nice, is a whole day of extra travel worth $76 for you?

If you worked federal minimum wage (7.25/hour) you'd pay off the difference in only 10 hours leaving you 3.5 hours to spare... So it really doesn't make cost effective sense to take the train, only if you enjoy trains/scenery.

> The mountains have a bunch of passes through them.

True, but the passes consist of winding switchbacks (impossible for Hyperloop) and tunnels (much more expensive than elevated tubes).

Let's see if they can do SF-LA in a viable way, then worry about the map. It's easy to add or remove dots and lines.

I haven't looked into this concept as much as some, I have some questions...

What happens if the hyperloop train gets stuck, or otherwise stops between stations? If I understand the concept correctly the tube is low pressure, so even if an escape hatch could be opened, it would be unlikely that people could breath.

Additionally what happens if the tunnel joint or a train leaks, and a train travelling extremely fast suddenly hits a wall of air? Would the change in volocity be potentially dangerous?

I will admit that the hyperloop is no more dangerous (on paper) than air travel. But air travel has been made safe through countless human lives, will we have to repeat that with a hyperloop?

Last question, not about safety, what is the relative energy usage of a hyperloop Vs. aircraft and or traditional (slower) trains?

Not just those passengers, the whole system has to stop if there is only one tube because nothing else can pass.

Meanwhile airplanes can just pass each other and route elsewhere.

This almost looks like a half-way solution looking for a problem.

Air travel is responsible for a very significant percentage of our pollution into the atmosphere, greenhouse gasses that are causing huge amounts of global climate change and will cost a fortune to adapt or fix. Any solution to rapid, high speed travel that significantly lowers greenhouse gas output is a very valuable thing, and certainly not a solution looking for a problem. The problem that hyperloop solves is high speed travel without gross pollution, something that no other solution has offered yet.

> The problem that hyperloop solves is high speed travel without gross pollution, something that no other solution has offered yet.

Do you have figures or estimates on that?

How much energy does hyperloop use to decompress the entire tunnel, run the air locks, and move the trains? And are we assuming a perfect seal on every joint or are micro-leaks estimated in (e.g. due to weathering and wear)?

On a related note how does one maintain hyperloop? For example segment joint restoration, do you take the entire tunnel offline?

>How much energy does hyperloop use to decompress the entire tunnel, run the air locks, and move the trains?

whether it is more or less energy than it takes to keep an airliner aloft is kind of moot. Transport systems attached to the ground can be connected to the power grid, which is legally required to be at least 33% renewable energy by 2020. Jet engines can really only be powered by jet fuel, and exhausted directly into the stratosphere.

Air travel is still only responsible for about 2% to 3% of global anthropogenic carbon emissions.

This figure has remained constant mostly because even though air travel has increased jet engines these days are much more efficient than 25 years ago.

But it delivers them straight in the atmosphere. So you must check air travel emissions impact.

Which makes it have less of an adverse effect actually.

That has been true for any track system. There are solutions - create passing stations. two way tracks instead of one loop

... Which brings another question mark. How do you switch tracks with a tube under vacuum and with running speed of hundreds of kph?

very very carefully

As a Carolinian I can't help feeling left out when I look at their proposed map. Even if this is just fiction at this point, I would be interested in hearing their reason for completely bypassing both Carolinas.

Well, it looks like they left off Boston?!? Given their graph, they are certainly making some routes pretty foolish.

Being in North Dakota, I'm not very amused either.

I do believe someone who expects to build a tube with no stops across a whole state is going to learn a bit about politics.

> someone who expects to build a tube with no stops across a whole state is going to learn a bit about politics.

The entire thing is a pipe dream

This is the thing not accounted for in Hyperloop cost projection. It's comparing the whole cost of HSR with the system cost of Hyperloop. The bunch of HSR's cost is right-of-way and land acquisition, that requires a long and costly process that isn't going to disappear because of new technology. These costs should be accounted for in any Hyperloop cost estimate. Hyperloop isn't going to magically terminate any right-of-way and land problem. Especially in dense, urban environments. DTX, the rail tunnel access to Transbay terminal has an estimate cost of $2.5 billion for 1.3 miles. Getting to downtown SF via tunnel is gonna be super expensive for Hyperloop as well.

It's also a bit odd to me that it visits Columbus and Detroit but skips Cleveland (though that is more debatable choice than skipping SC and NC altogether).

Interesting at the first place I worked we did experiments on pipeline transport and we had a small test track in Milton Keyenes.

Sometimes when the pigs (the cars transporting the goods) got stuck the research assistants had to crawl into the tunnel to unstick them :-)

I thought the dream was SF / LA to NYC, how does that work with that map?

No. At least in the original plan[0] presented by Elon Musk, he indicated that anything longer than about 900 miles would be better served by supersonic air travel, which wouldn't require a whole new infrastructure. But for closer city pairs, you'd spend so much time not at cruising altitude/speed that the hyperloop wins.

[0] - https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/hyperloop

"supersonic air travel" is really not going to happen unless NASA's sonic boom mitigation actually works.

I like their proposal to close off the ports of San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, Richmond, and Redwood City so they can run their pipe across the Golden Gate just above sea level.[1]

The tube size seems to be increasing, with proposals now up to narrow-body airliner dimensions. That's probably necessary, but it makes it harder to put tubes in freeway medians.

Nobody seems to have a good solution to emergency escape. There's an assumption that vehicles can be pushed or driven to the next station. That's probably not good enough. Experience with subways and Eurotunnel indicates the need for escape systems. Emergency exits at the ends of cars, escape stations from the tubes, and emergency repressurization systems for the tubes will probably be necessary. Airlock doors across the tube will be needed so you can repressurize a section rapidly, without waiting to repressurize hundreds of miles of tube. That's all possible, but it adds cost. Remember, the whole point of this is that it's supposed to be much cheaper than maglev, because the tube is cheap and dumb.

This is a classic problem with monorails, too. Look at pictures of fictional monorails[2] vs pictures of real ones.[3] The real ones have bigger and heavier track. Single track sections usually have walkways, while double track sections can use a rescue train on a parallel track. Here's a list of monorail fires and evacuations.[4] Remember that Hyperloop cars are powered by lithium batteries.

At least HTT is trying to build a closed loop. Musk's prototype is just a straight run. Straight is easy for this; it's turns that are hard. Turn radius is the big constraint on high speed anything - route planning and land acquisition are very tough for large turn radii. That's why the Northeast Corridor rail system runs so slowly.

Maybe people will be more tolerant of high-G turns if roller coaster videos are played inside.

The Hyperloop system is probably buildable. It's the low-cost claim that may not hold up.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/19/hyperloop-transportation-te... [2] http://www.transfuture.net/transart/albums/userpics/10002/ci... [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Tokyo_Mo... [4] http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/KimEd3.html

surely some crafty 3d modeller has already made the plans for a hyperloop model set so 3d-printer people can play at home :-)

Not sure Americans are going to give up driving their 15mpg SUVs and F150s when gas is dropping to $1.50/gallon

Maybe millennials or their children will finally think differently though.

ps. I really hope it was a marketing idiot and not an engineer that came up with the concept photo of the tube sitting lower than the bridge so ships cannot pass.

It's more of a replacement for slow Amtrak and airplane travel than for cars.

That looks like an artist's rendering to me. They appear to have done it to keep the bridge in the picture instead of blocking it, sacrificing realism for aesthetics.

Also, I don't think this is meant to replace cars per se. It looks more like it could replace shorter flights to me. For example, people could take trips to Las Vegas on one instead of going by plane.

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