If they're going to tunnel anyway, why not tunnel it to loop down and back up? Get the free roller coaster gravity effect.

PairTheBoard

Plus you can go straight line rather than follow the curvature of earth and gain even in distance reduction together with gravity assist. But the depth of the tunnel would tend to become ridiculously deep that makes it problematic to work down there.

Say for 600 km distance on R=6378.5km you have an arc of 5.39 deg and a depth of about 7km below surface. We do not dig that deep yet even in the deeper mines ever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TauTona_Mine.


Would be interesting to see what the effect of gravity in terms of speed in near vacuum would be though for such tunnel.

Roughly if you didnt have many losses at the maximum speed point (7km below surface) the speed would be 448 m/sec (1.3 mach) (if i didnt do a mistake). But it would take forever to get to that speed so it wouldnt be as fast which of course can be corrected with energy assist anyway so it would be a big help overall if it werent for the problem working so deep or the even worse problem of having to remove all this mass spending a massive amount of energy in the tunnel creation process (would be fun to calculate the total work done to remove the mass but if you did a crude estimate using say an avg of 3.5 km depth you get for a tunnel of say r=20m about 10^17J or over 2 $bil in cost to extract the mass from such depths it seems- maybe even much more since its hard to imagine what system they would use to remove the dirt other than trucks). You could i suppose see it also as a science expedition to study the crust of the planet lol. But overall pretty expensive for saving likely less than 50% of the energy needed overall for the trip plus very hard to fix those far down areas if something went wrong (earthquakes?) etc.
Also isnt he suggesting that the tunnel itself is used (its top part) for solar panels?

I guess what is the capacity of trips per day for something like this (also the # passengers per day)?

Would there be any affects of this type of travel especially the startup?

Seems like there are insanely high fixed costs and really low variable costs in comparison to current tech.

If you were to built a network like highway system across most US (well very basic i suppose towards major cities) the cost would be in the trillions. Maybe 1-5 trillions if you did over 20 cities network.

You would however make a lot of money in transportation of goods this way. Massive losses for all those trucks carrying goods from various cities. Some calculation here is needed. It might be worth it though and it would help environment in terms of reducing air travel.

Try a network costing about 20-40 mil $/km. I didnt go over the paper in full close word to word detail to see if he calculated the energy needed for a simple trip of a given mass vehicle. If we have that we can compare with the cost of say moving 10 tons of equipment of goods from one big city to another via road/train or airplanes and see the savings over say 2000km trip. In terms of time saved no question about it you can have goods delivered anywhere within 6-12h (+normal mail=24h) now real cheap.

I think the gasoline/oil used in US transportation is about $600 bil per year or so. And you cant capture more than a small fraction of that anyway (<10%?). It would take a long time to recover the cost of trillions for sure just from this perspective.

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/...doesnt-add-up/

Some of the criticism can't have been written by an intelligent person. Like:
Yeah, when you are goin 760mph into an accident you will only break 0.5g. Sure that will happen. Can't see why any engineer would do anything about that. The 0.5g is for comfort, not for accidents.

Like making a stack of pods is impossible. Just make some extra tracks, some parking space and when there is a slot, off you go.

It seems that progress is being made:
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/jumpsta...oop-elon-musk/

Surely odds against anything like this being built in my lifetime (optimistically next 60 years)

http://www.thestar.com/business/2016...0-minutes.html

http://www.wsj.com/articles/hyperloo...eed-1453426042

http://www.cnet.com/news/this-is-wha...n-a-hyperloop/

This is what it looks like when traveling in a Maglev train in China (say 430 km/h at top speed) (watch for when another train passes by how fast it happens). So at the speed of sound hyperloop view would be just 3 times faster than the top speed seen in this video. Or download the video with stream capture firefox software like flash video dowloader (good for youtube lectures and cool rare videos) and run it then in 3x lol.



A mini video on Maglev trains;




Come on America the rest of the world is passing you with these trains what the hell...


Simulating traveling at that speed to offer passengers inside the underground vacuum tube an impression (illusion) of the external environment is actually less desirable than showing the real thing in your "window"/screen, provided you want to be realistic about it and faithful to them. All you have to do is connect inside the tunnel wirelessly with external cameras signals along the path. The cameras are connected to the tunnel with eg fiber optics from the surface and then this signal/video wirelessly goes to the train as it is passing to be broadcasted on your screen/window.

So you have along the route recording in real time what is happening outside. Then you see a movie where every frame is taken at every few meters from a different camera (say at speed of sound 340m/sec its like one frame, in a 28 frames per second type HD video, every 12 meters) across the path to create your movie and you feel like being indeed outside and traveling at that speed, because after all this is exactly what you are doing. The window has become instead of glass an optical/fiber cable/wireless interface monitor system to your eyes (even if you are 10-20-100 meters below ground level whatever the tube turns out to be like).

With proper software manipulation you may be able to actually not need a camera every 12m but every 100-200 m instead that records and reconstructs POV from a different nearby assumed location for the same external landscape working as the train passes only and then maybe recording for other reasons (eg if a passenger wanted to go back and see something they passed again lol in real time maybe). So instead of creating 1 frame, each camera creates 10-20 frames, each one adjusted for a different position, scanning from left to right the landscape view and then the next camera picks up from a later point so say every 200 m one camera takes ~16 frames at different angles and the software corrects them for perspective. Given how expensive it all is what is another 5000 cameras along the path and the computers that manipulate the feed in real time (for a 1000km distance path say traveled in less than 1 hour ).

Its probably only $10-20 mil type system if the stations are already there for other reasons (related to the safe operation below, its powering and other support functions) to offer the passengers an actual very close to the real thing experience of viewing outside world as it was only fractions of the second ago, exactly outside where you are currently moving. So who needs a simulation virtual reality crap. Plus this method allows the customers/passengers to connect to the outside world too if they needed since their smartphones service wont be working inside unless assisted with some infrastructure inside the tunnel.

You can also have other views options from a larger say distant perspective that see a greater view of the current area as if from above it (eg plane). This allows you to see the broader general neighborhood of the area you are just moving through, rather than only experiencing the very fast/blurry motion effect looking only just outside your window seeing the immediate trees move at the speed of sound passing you lol.

Still a speed 3 times faster than the above video provides a reasonable understanding of what you are passing (even then) that your brain can still process without losing the core information of how the landscape is changing, missing only very small size geometry details. Eg a home and its garden that may be 30 meters long passes in 9/100 of a second (the time it takes to click a stopwatch to start and stop it fast with your finger). 10 cars stream in a nearby highway that are moving at 100 km/h and are separated each from the other by 20-30 meters would take only 1 second to pass through lol (still enough time to roughly count and understand them as ~10 cars ).

Camera's are so cheap these days, even top HD quality that if external stations are along the path anyway to support the system, adding a few cameras on them, some computers and the connections to tunnel is little added expense if the infrastructure is there for other more important reasons anyway already. Such feeds may be important for security reasons. Of course the technology for "windows" on the train seats is another cost. The point is even if its 100 mil or something it can be recovered fast from the tickets.

https://www.wired.com/story/hyperloop-one-test-success/

It annoys me that in the UK there is currently a massive rail project with an estimated cost of £56 billion going ahead, when there could be a game changer just around the corner.

The estimated time saving for the journey is pretty negligible too considering the cost . 20/30mins iirc.

Changing the journey from 2hrs to 15mins.. now that's worth some money!

http://dailyhive.com/toronto/montrea...s#.Wbv6YddLHDs

From above link:

Toronto to Montreal picked as finalist for world's first hyperloop train route


If the system is built, commuters would be able to travel from:

Toronto to Montreal (640 km) in 39 minutes
Toronto to Ottawa (450 km) in 27 minutes
Ottawa to Montreal (190 km) in 12 minutes


I find it particularly silly that anyone would build a system to move idiotic Canadians at great speed between their lackluster cities. What a colossal waste of energy.


Of course other finalist cities/regions are in India, USA, UK, and Mexico. This may prove useful, especially the Mexico City to Guadalajara (532 km) route. I've been to both cities and getting people from one to the other faster so they can plug up the overstressed streets even more is a marvelous idea.