A simple measure of inefficiency is how much noise a system makes. All the noise heard is vibration and all that vibration is energy lost. That sucker was noisy as hell. I’ll assume for now, the focus was on other things besides making the ride smooth, but I was really expecting something far quieter, even for a research system.
Yeah you’re totally right– we already have a ton of rail technology, without need for costly R&D. Not to mention, there are actual competitors in the manufacturing pipeline… Need replacement parts? They’re already being made. It’s a mature technology with most of the unknowns worked out.
It’s disheartening that Musk has so criticized the CA rail project and proposed this nonexistent tech solution; it’s grossly self-serving and fans the fire of the critics who already want to scuttle the project at all costs. Sometimes going with current, “inferior” tech is better than waiting for something unproven down the road.
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AFAIK, the vacuum is only partial and local around the car. It is not maintained in the entire tube.
While I don’t think that there is ANY WAY that Elon is going to make tunneling suddenly cheap enough to make this especially feasible… My main reservation is what happens during a breakdown. How do you get people out of the cars? It’s not like they can step outside into the tunnel into an evacuated tube. Because in the event of an earthquake, you’d have to stop the vehicles in case the tube had become miss-aligned. You’d have to have some sort of “slow enough to not die in an collision” mode to clear the vehicles from the tube in that case. Since the outside pressure is too low to breathe, we’re basically talking about an underground space capsule as far as life support is concerned for passengers. What happens when that fails? Do you re pressurize the tube. so that people can breathe outside air? How do you get people in and out without letting air into the tube during normal operation?
None of these problems are theoretically insolvable, but these are the sorts of difficulties i want to see some planning for before I think this is practical. And solving them is going to add expense. With the very high fixed costs of the tube being handwaved away, I just don’t have much confidence that he is considering how to fail-safe this, and the attendant costs of doing so.
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I think that “controlled flight into terrain” is more common than mid-air collisions. Of course we DO have a huge Air Traffic Control infrastructure to avoid mid-air collisions.
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o_0
The white sheet says its something like 99% of a vacuum. Which, for all intents and purposes, is a vacuum.
Second. HOW would you have a vacuum around just the car and not the tube??? The whole point of the vacuum is to be able to reach high speeds with no air resistance or heat from moving through said are. So yes, it has to be the whole tube.
I haven’t seen anyone or anything suggest this, but I imagine they will need air locks to be able to keep the majority of the track in a vacuum and not have to pump the whole thing out each time. But I have yet to see that mentioned in their official docs.
Thus far, the concept images show it above ground. Though below ground would probably make it work better.
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So many naysayers here.
Landing an eleven story rocket on a dinky boat in the middle of the ocean use to be unthinkable, now they do it all the time.
Driving a little car through a pipeline seems to be trivial in comparison.
Every technology needed is already well developed: maglev, pipelines, tunnel boring, train switching and safety, acceleration and deceleration. Heck, all they are really building is a really lame flat roller coaster.
It ain’t rocket-(landing on a teeny boat)-science.
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Although at some level, the thing that is innovative about this plan is that 1% Atmosphere is significantly cheaper to achieve than the greater vacuums assumed in earlier vac train proposals.
Really a deep tunnel is the only way to get the right-of-way straight enough for the speeds envisioned.
This might be technically achievable, but the capital costs look SO high, that I don’t think that there is ANY WAY that investors would get all of their money back, much less a profit. Still, it is conceivable that this might be more efficient than air travel and faster than steel wheels on steel rails.
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That would also make it harder for terrorists to sabotage the thing.
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All these comments and no shout-out to the TUM?
Ahem.
Minga, oida! Geil gemacht!
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Every time I say that, I get slapped!
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YOU LOVE IT!
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I think it is more than 99%, but still. Yes easier than a true hard vacuum, but still prone to all the dangers and practicalities.
IIRC, he owns a drilling company. Maybe this is all a ploy to drum up drilling work 
And nigh impossible to get to people quickly if something did go wrong in the middle of the track.
Unthinkable? Hmm, seems it was what everyone pre 1960s THOUGHT space travel would be like. That hurdle was definitely more feasible to overcome than building a giant vacuum tube. If this was just a maglev or car in a pipe, I’d be must more inclined to believe it would work.
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Putting trains underground isn’t exactly a new thing. You’d still need regular access ports for rescue and maintenance whether the tube was above ground or below.
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Well, yeah for subways and the like. They usually have various stops and access points down the line, and share a line with other trains. This is supposed to be a vacuum tube. Adding access points every X number of miles is going to be X more areas for it to fail.
Depending where it is going to and from, you’re looking at some areas of nothing and quite some time to get there, even if it is right by an access point.
And again, everything I have seen so far has it above ground…
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That’s what I meant by “(sounds like one of those statements…)”
However, we have enough knowledge today to be informed skeptics.
Maybe this should be called the HypeLoop?
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This is technically very feasible. Musk has stated that the actual difficult part will the dealing with various bureaucracies. That said, shouldn’t there be some kind of trigger warning for that video?.
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The people who really got rich during the gold rush weren’t the miners, it was the people who sold the shovels…
Roddenberry - Genesis II
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