Hyperloop speculation – launch assist for electric aircraft
electrictakeoff.com
electrictakeoff.com
The safety reason is a big reason why I'm going with the underground tubes between LA and SF.
And I keep hearing people trying to apply Hyperloop to coast-to-coast travel, but I don't recall Elon every saying anything about that long of a distance. In fact I recall him specifically talking about "the right city pairs", which implies some kind of distance limit.
The $6 billion cost seems too good to be true for any transportation system that would require significant land acquisition. California is set to spend some $60 billion on a train between these cities, and most of that cost is for right-of-way.
Engine failure doesn't kill people, because you can typically glide to a landing. Speculatively, if you got your glide ratio perfect and launched high enough, you might not need an engine to get between LA and SF.
But yeah, flight is comparatively one of the safest ways to travel. But, in principle, it is still quite risky. A lot has to go right for an aircraft to successfully take off, fly, and land. Air speed must be maintained, the engines must remain mechanically sound, landing gear must be operating correctly, hydraulics on the wing and tail flaps must be operating, the pilot must be competent and alert. Countless systems must be working correctly. Any one of these things going wrong can result in mass casualties. Statistically our standards of operation are so high that flight is effectively safer than the automobile or trains or even lightning, as the article points out. But 1 in 12 million is still far from the effective 100% safety that Musk is promising for hyperloop.
This doesn't work for an electric aircraft, or many normal public transport methods as they are all focused on batching people up into large groups (planes, trains, etc).
Also, Elon has called Hyperloop 'another type of transport', i.e. nothing like we already use, whereas I would say this idea is just an aircraft with a new type of launch system; not as different as Elon suggests it will be.
However I agree that getting the land to build a tunnel on the surface (or a track of any sort) would cost a lot of money, and tunnels below the surface would be too costly as well.
Although I think lots of people are converging on the idea, sound waves, evacuated tunnels, all that sort of stuff, I think everyone so far has missed the big detail or breakthrough that makes it feasible, after all, these techniques have been known for a long time, just not been taken advantage of because they aren't practical.
True, but as the batch size gets smaller, so does the interval between vehicles. "one every minute, on the minute" is not much different from "It leaves when you arrive". This may not work for aircraft, but it certainly would for automated light rail systems.
I'll stick to my reasoning [1], firmly grounded in poesy, and proclaim this the strongest counterargument (slightly rephrased): Elon is simply too proud to call such a system a 'fifth mode of transportation'.
I see what you did there.
The other things that any modern engineer would never do that an 1870's railroad technician somewhere built into SOP, like mixed speed segments, frequent braked unbanked turns, single-tracking, and manual signalling / switching and grade crossings, will also be consciously avoided; the FRA regulations are built on making operating under such principles safer. Applying modern real-time at-speed routing to rail is something the PRT guys have been dreaming about for decades - the money and organizational will just hasn't been there to make it happen at a scale sufficient to make it cheap enough to justify.
My reasoning behind this is that he is open sourcing the designs. My guess behind this is that if it is a ground based system that requires right of way/property access etc. then there is tons of transaction costs & government regulation that would prevent copy cats from destroying the first mover's capital investments that would normally be protected via IP law.
If it didn't have these high transaction costs associated with it, then any actor could come and undercut your system after the tech behind the open source designs becomes cheaper. Traditionally this would be protected because of IP laws. However, he's dismissing this route & letting anyone up to the challenge take on the construction challenge with him. I'm guessing this is likely because the government won't eminent domain/allow/permit etc. extra routes between SF & LA etc. if there's already a hyperloop.
Plus, if then hyper loop can run along/beside the California aquaduct, I think that would solve the issue of terrain and land purchase. If elon can convince the gov't that the hyper loop would secure the passageway, they might go for that.
And again, the [hyperloop] is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big [plane]. It's a series of tubes.
Wouldn't a Ground Effect Vehicule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_vehicle) fit the descripton better ?
Edit : thought a self powered super-sonic GEV would be hard to pull of.
There will be a guiding rail, and the vehicles will be 2 / 4 person pods that can be accelerated in the same way railguns work.