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Comment by Karlozkiller | Hacker News Reader

Was Elon Musk really the one first posing this idea?

Hyperloop yes, however this is just an evacuated tube which is a very old idea. His idea is closer to an electric aircraft in a tube than a train in a tube.

After all if you are going to use a train just add cars to increase capacity.

It's not quite an evacuated tube, which makes it different enough from the old concepts to be interesting. The pressure in the hyperloop tube is very low, but it's not a vacuum. This means that the tube can be relatively leaky, and the air that it does contain is also used to lift the vehicle.

It's very very close to vacuum - 0.015 psi (99.85% vacuum). For all practical purposes, calling it vacuum is very reasonable.

Being able to have a leaky tube and use the air for lift seem like practical purposes to me.

All vacuums are partial. It's not a binary quality, rather vacuums are graded by how close to absolute vacuum they are. Much like 0 kelvin does not exist, but cryogenic systems are making things colder.

I'm well aware. The traditional evacuated tube is a pure vacuum for all practical purposes, with any remaining air being undesirable and having no important effects on the machine. Hyperloop requires a certain amount of air in the tube.

Early vacuum systems where actually using steam that was then condensed. So, it's not particularly high and only a 'pure' vacuum for relevant purposes.

Don't forget vacuum cleaners are hardly high vacuum systems.

Is there a point to this besides pedantry? My actual point is that the Hyperloop is something new, not just a rebranding of previous evacuated tube systems. If you have something to dispute that point, then by all means go ahead, but if you just want to quibble over me being insufficiently specific in my explanations then I'll let it be.

Adding cars affects throughput, not latency. For goods that doesn't matter much (hyperloop seems like a bad idea for goods anyway) but for passengers it could make a world of a difference.

Sure, but adding cars does not increase the latency either. So, everything stays the same but if you can send 5x the people for significantly less than 5x the price. Personal Rapid Transit is a great when there are lot's of destinations, but this is going to have minimal stops.

No, and different versions of the concept have existed for not only decades, but over a century.

But he was the first with a marketing budget for it.

>But he was the first with a marketing budget for it.

Only if you count the SpaceX student competition, but that's not marketing, it's recruiting.

He certainly popularised this idea.

Or was it the other way around. What did the Hyperloop thing do to his image?

I think it elevated him to a visionary status in quite a short time. So in a way, it worked quite well for him, even if the idea itself ends up not working at all.

Hyperloop came after Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City. Musk was already very well thought of before this idea was made public.

You are missing the point. He was elevated to the status of a grand visionary from just an billionaire entrepreneur, with these big, grand "ideas"...

No, he's not missing the point. He was already elevated thanks to SpaceX and Tesla by the time he described Hyperloop.

SpaceX and Tesla are not doing anything really new..

Not sure how it elevates him from yet another billionaire entrepreneur...

You've missed the whole "first mass-market fully electric car that actually makes sense" thing and the whole "kicked the space industry in their lazy butts" thing, but the one thing that actually does the elevating is that he's not doing it for profit, but for forcing the electrification of transport and getting humans to Mars.

Landing the booster stage of rockets is really new. Building mass-market electric cars that are supported by continent-spanning fast-charging networks and can drive themselves is really new.

And with that, I'll stop feeding the trolls.

>Landing the booster stage of rockets is really new..

Wait a minute. Was there any new, ground breaking tech involved in it. Will you call delivering pizzas using drones ground breaking, even if it was not done by anyone else before?

>Building mass-market electric cars that are supported by continent-spanning fast-charging networks and can drive themselves is really new...

Same thing...Wait a minute, can drive themselves? Ok. I am done here.

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