Vacuum Tube Company Is Building A 3-Mile 'Hyperloop' Transport System

Errm, so what is the company's relationship with Musk, other than that they are both interested in high-speed transport? Seems like copy-paste PR journalism, with the company trying to get exposure by piggy-backing of his name. :/

"It's not an evacuated tunnel" is what Musk has constantly said. (twitter link in a comment below)

"It's not an evacuated tunnel"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/224406502188916739

If it uses evacuated tubes, does it really even have to bother with being a loop? Musk's Hyperloop is something completely different.

My guess is hyperloop probably uses air pressure waves (e.g. extremely low frequency sound waves). Those would travel at the speed of sound (cross between a concord and an air hockey table). And it could use cheap mirror based solar to generate the waves via thermoacoustics.

The waves could store energy as well which was also part of Musk's picture. Frictional losses with the edges of the tube could be minimized by increasing the tube diameter. The perimeter to area ratio (of a cross section) shrinks when you do that (perimeter grows as X, area within as X^2).

To visualize, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Schematic_diagram_of_trave...

"Vacuum Tube" should be "Evacuated Tube". It took me a bit of puzzling over why a company specializing in pre-semiconductor devices would be building a transport system to realize that.

I'm sceptical of the pricing. I can certainly see their best case costs being as claimed, but what about practical realities like safety access (every how many metres?), land purchasing, endless lawsuits due to the electromagnetic radiation, needing multiple tubes in order to get reasonable throughput, NIMBYism and all the other crap that goes along with large civil projects.

Copy-paste of recent Yahoo news which was already fairly bad.

Discussed on HN 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6018064

Can't say that I like the association with this that keeps being made by the media that it's 'Elon Musk's dream.' By comparison to how old the core idea is, Musk would be a very late arrival to the scene (but as is regularly pointed out, his idea varies in design / flat out isn't an evacuated tube).

Flagged.

This article is bullshit, and is probably based on another article which conflated Elon Musk's Hyperloop concept with an existing company's proposed evacuated tunnel system. They are not related, there is no affiliation between them other than perhaps they will have similar capabilities and both be technologically advanced high-concept train systems.

the company's website: http://et3.com/

Various sources are regurgitate the claim that building such a track would be cheaper than either a high speed rail or a highway.

Maglev tracks (of any type) are much more expensive to build. Evacuated tubes safe for human transport and standing up to the rigors of catastrophic scenarios will not be cheap either.

The TCO of a maglev track and cars can be lower than the one of a traditional rail and cars because wear on the maglev track is much reduced compared to traditional rails.