In test run, Hyperloop travels almost as fast as Toyota Yaris

We should do away with the carriages altogether.

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Unfortunately, environmentally friendly travel by trebuchet can be fatal if there are problems with the net :frowning:

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And smelt of sewage…

Cause they won’t let the poors in.

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I don’t think a bullet hole would be a problem - that’s basically a drill hole and 15lbs of air pressure going through that is not a danger.

Ram it with a truck, blow it open with tannerite / anfo, melt a big hole with thermite, there’s a problem.

The solution is simple. We can put a small tube next to the hyperloop. The we put the luggage in a sort of container forming a tight seal with the tube, and force air behind that tube to send it rocketing towards the destination. Maybe it could even pull air on the other side to assist it. It can be call Pnuematube or something. Donut steel.

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The Dubai investors are talking about freight delivery.

There’s isn’t enough demand for high speed freight to make it viable.


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I could not see why it was necessary or desirable either but the investors must have a reason to think it is, perhaps for perishable goods?

Perishable goods are one of the categories that Hyperloop One were looking at, but the argument is that the potential volume for all the potential types of fast freight doesn’t add up to enough to justify building the Hyperloop infrastructure. Also, as Alon Levy explains, there is a “last mile” problem: the time spent driving cargo to and from the Hyperloop stations would undermine the time saved by using Hyperloop.

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Not just driving, but transferring multi-mode cargo. And hyperloop cars are small and circular, and can’t fit a semi-trailer or standard cargo container, so pallets would have to be unloaded from trucks onto pressurized Hyperloop cabins, then unloaded on the other end, or the expensive cabins would have to be loaded onto flatbeds…which just doesn’t make sense logistically for the length of the trip.

(There’s a larger cargo sized Hyperloop proposal, but it’s as big as a train, at which point the imaginary we can build it on pylons in a vacuum tube for a fraction of the price as rail claims look especially fraudulent.)

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Perhaps it is all a pipe dream (sorry). The delivery (in the video) is carried out by drone.
Perhaps the pylons could also support windmills to power it, or the top of the tube has solar panels.

Or none of the above.

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There were equivalent moral panics about women on bicycles, women in cars, women with radios, etc. A lot of people take the wrong message from stories like this. It’s not “haha, people were silly worriers back then”, it’s that everything is always about controlling women.

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You can always count on @anon61221983 to summarize an entire topic perfectly with a single gif. :grin:

It’s like everyone missed the entire point of the Monorail episode of The Simpsons. Maybe people need to go watch it again.

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There were, indeed, general concerns of the “haha, people were silly worriers back then” variety - as per my second link. There were also general concerns as to ‘nerve damage’ due to the constant swaying of the carriages. (It’s buried in this article, along with other exposition of the ‘madman’ problem.)

Of course, as you rightly note, there was always a segment of the male population devoted to finding yet another opportunity to control women (by proposing daft reasons to suggest they must not avail themselves of the freedoms rail travel afforded) as per the first link I posted.

(I assure you the order I linked to them in was entirely random.)

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The Pessimist’s Archive is a great podcast all about moral panics that come with every technology. I’ve learned:

A) How every technology has the same moral panic around it from the same groups of people. Like, really- every technology. It’s nuts. Novels had a moral panic around them FFS.

B) When you dig deep enough, it almost always comes down to limiting the choices of women to control their own lives sooner or later.

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True, also coupled with concern about the lower classes getting ideas above their station (so to speak).

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You are “Shoulders” O’Brien, and I claim my £5!

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