Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel (opens in new tab)

that is actually a competition between AI and collective public intelligence, where the first being a pure engineering problem with no limits for growth has been improving exponentially over mere decades while the second has been improving really slow over the observable millennia. So, i'd bet on AI :)

One is cool and the other brings people to their destinations.

You meant to say self-crashing?

The USA is more in debt than China, it's just been badly spent.

Yes and no.

Yes, because they no longer plan to use the original design proposed by Musk (pods in vacuum in tubes installed on the ground).

No because long term they still plan to do hyper loop but the latest iteration of the idea is electric cars driving really fast in under-pressurized underground tunnel.

See https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop

That being said, Boring Company is still in very early stages.

They made significant progress (built Las Vegas tunnel and are in building more of it; created prufrock-1 i.e. v1 of boring machine designed by Boring Company).

The hyperloop is something they want to do and most likely can do. The limiting factor is more permitting and politics (for example: they had a deal to do a long tunnel in Chicago with one mayor and then the next mayor said it's stupid and scrapped it).

Boring company never had anything to do with Hyperloop. The Hyperloop concept was just a Bluepaper released by Musk. It was only years after that Musk started talking about tunnels and the Loop system.

Probably at some point Boring company would like to be able to make tunnels long enough that it would make sense to with something more high speed then a normal EV can do. But that is not their focus.

Yes and no.

Yes: https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop

No because it's a different system than what Musk originally proposed. Virgin Hyperloop was building Musk's original idea.

What Boring Company calls a hyperloop now is a long-distance tunnel, possibly under partial vacuum, with electric cars driving really fast (600+ miles per hour).

No, they do low occupancy cars in a tunnel... Combining all of the worst things...

I'd prefer Amtrak over aircraft for lots and lots of my travel, if not for this. Hell, I'd probably travel more total, too. Even if the price were the same as flying for a given destination.

The huge trip-duration and arrival-time uncertainty due to the shared rail, and having to defer to cargo trains, is what sinks it, for me. They can vary by large double digit percentages of the nominal time, at which point they're usually much slower than just driving.

I love how relaxing and comfortable they are and not having the security circus and dealing with crowded, distant-from-the-city airports, but not at nearly-air-travel prices and a 25-75% time premium over driving.

The companies that own the railways are in the business of making money, not in the business of screwing Amtrak.

I'm sure they would be more than happy to prioritize Amtrak trains over their cargo customers if they are suitably compensated for the trouble.

If Amtrak isn't willing or able to compensate them for it... Then clearly it's not that important.

I'm not glossing over anything. If passenger travel was more profitable or even less profitable but easier, than all of the private companies would be in the passenger business.

Here we see a company that will end up building its own infrastructure deciding cargo is a better business opportunity than passenger. I think there was a certain amount of inevitability given the economics.

There is presumably a reason they are cargo companies and not passager transport companies. Unless Amtrak has a government enforced monopoly?

Yeah, but there is also a reason that privately owned companies have no interest in passenger rail travel.

Didn't hear that one, good to know. China Clipper: The Age of the Great Flying Boats by Robert Gandt talks a lot about the Postmaster General and those postal contracts in the US. I came away from the book with a distaste for Pan Am given some of the stunts they pulled. It basically details that having the postal contract was the only way to make regular flights profitable in the early aviation years. To the point, many routes started as postal only.

Most consumer goods and the containers themselves are not designed to withstand vacuum, so you cannot have the containers themselves take the role of the pods. They would have to be loaded/unloaded inside the pods. The airlocks at the terminals would also need to be cycled adding to the processing time and making the system less scalable.

The entire system is designed for sending containers one by one in pods, so its throughput is not at all impressive compared to the trains with several tens of railcars.

Not to mention the technical difficulties of reliably maintaining vacuum in hundreds of kilometers of the tunnel. And don’t forget that a single broken seal anywhere on the whole track would bring the whole system to a halt, and would require significant safety intervals between the poss.

As for the speed - the hyperloop’s main advantage - there is relatively little cargo in the world for which shipping time makes a critical difference between 100 km/h train and 2000 km/h hypothetical hyperloop. Reliability, throughout and an established network are much more important, hence why the bulk of world’s shipping is done slowly and reliably by sea.

They have very little in common besides the name and the fact that they both are transit systems involving tubes. Hyperloop's main goal was to provide fast intercity transit, TBC's goal is to provide convenient intracity transit

have you seen the size of that Vegas tunnel?

Now google Tesla's battery fire and imagine it happens inside that tunnel.

Those tunnels are death traps.

TBC works on Loop systems, not Hyperloops.

You don't really need to remove air resistance to beat Amtrak though.

Japan is building a maglev between Tokyo and Osaka. The Nagoya stretch will be done this decade.

The Shanghai maglev is kind of a pink elephant, it doesn’t even go to downtown Shanghai. I took it once for the novelty l, but a cab is much better time wise and about the same price.

If you have a helium 3 reactor, yes.

> The leak would start an implosion

Depends on the materials, but most materials have very different characteristics and won't implode. Leaks are seen in modern vacuum systems all the time, and implosions are rare. I've personally caused a leak in a vacuum system when I disconnected the vacuum hose from the pump - air rushed into the hose and no implosion!

> in particular thermal expansion of steel. The only way to deal with thermal expansion is by using expansion joins

After some thought (I've been thinking about them for a while), there are two solutions: first go far underground where the temperature is stable year round. Put the tube inside something that you do careful HVAC in to ensure there is no temperature changes. Both make the whole system even more insanely expensive than what it already is. I have zero confidence in expansion joints unless we replace them yearly which means the whole is even more insanely expensive.

Throw enough money at it and I think engineers can solve the engineering problems. However nothing changes the fact that it is insanely expensive no matter how you look at it.

The real problem isn't engineering though, the real problem is political: you can't get enough money to build the thing, and if you even try you will discover that nobody will let you build it in their backyard.

> The leak would start an implosion

This is a science fiction trope with no basis in reality. The pressure differential is one atmosphere to zero atmospheres which is functionally equivalent to one atmosphere to two atmospheres or what you get from diving 10 meters into the ocean.

The Apollo LEM had a shell that was pretty equivalent to aluminum foil in places. One atmosphere to zero atmospheres is the sort of thing you can plug up with duct tape.

Musk's involvement appeared to have had some undercurrent of sabotaging investment in mass transit by generating a constant stream of overhyped futuristic schemes. Promise 'em monorails in the future so you can keep selling 'em Teslas now.

TFA has nothing to do with the boring company or underground tunnels

Underground habitats

I don't think you're necessarily wrong, but how does putting a train in a vacuum tube solve the problems we currently have with passenger rail?

The limitations are financial (both building the tracks and acquiring at some new right of ways) and geographical (a lot of distances in the US are quite big and most people won't take a train if it's a lot slower than flying).

So.. maglev?

It can't be made feasible from an engineering POV, not just economically. It's virtually impossible to maintain a relevant vacuum in hundreds of kilometers of tunnel. The temperature stresses alone would cause leaks unless using some very special materials (if any exist).

I don’t think businesses care about speed but rather stability and throughput. If the vaccuum is broken how long does it take to get it fixed, the tube emptied of ”pods”, and so on.

It's a fine research project, but in terms of offering actual transportation services to people, there are a thousand more effective things to do to make high-speed rail services available, convenient, and economical.

High-speed rail is slower than a plane, sure, but it's way faster than a car.

Does freight need to go that quickly? Quicker than a normal high speed train? Is there enough value in the freight going faster to fund the infrastructure?

How long does it make sense to investigate that question?

Fusion has no waste products except ordinary elements, low on the periodic table. It's an entirely different beast. You could theoretically have a little Tony Stark reactor powering your home, safely.