> Can you imagine traveling that way?
Plenty of people can imagine it because they travel that way every day. Trains all over Asia and Europe reach those speeds and faster.
Plenty of people can imagine it because they travel that way every day. Trains all over Asia and Europe reach those speeds and faster.
That's higher than the maximum speed of most of Deutsche Bahn's high-speed trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercity-Express
Even those that can go faster than 300 km/h tend to do so only on very short legs, because they need long straight stretches to stay on track and have to accelerate/decelerate at the ends as well.
Note how the ICE 3 operates at 320km/h and the ICE 4 only goes up to 230km/h. I would assume they’re optimising for efficiency now.
You could fit a hyperloop pod in one of those, just seat single-file. Larger diameter is optimal since you can get by with a lower pressure, but we're in the ballpark here already.
In fact, let's do the math. For a typical carbon steel tensile strength of 370MPa, internal pressure of 1200psi with a factor of safety of 2, and a radius of 2.5ft, you'd need 3.4cm thick walls:
2.5ft/(370MPa/(2 * 1200psi)) in cm
https://www.google.com/search?q=2.5ft/(370MPa/(2*1200psi))
According to this design guide for carbon steels, and using 30psi pressure differential for vacuum (i.e. a factor of safety of 2), we get: http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/test-tm/1000/fermilab-tm-1378.pd...
1.2cm thick walls, which is much thinner than the gas pipeline.
5ft * ((1-.28^2) * 30psi/(2 * 30 * 10^6psi))^(1/3) in cm
https://www.google.com/search?q=5ft*((1-.28^2)*30psi/(2*30*1...
So those gas pipelines should already be plenty thick enough for vacuum service. My point stands.