[TheAntiDoomer]

http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/15/45247 ... ugust-12th

What Musk has said so far is that the Hyperloop would be a "a cross between a Concorde, a rail gun, and an air hockey table," and would be able to deliver people the 380 miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 30 minutes, dramatically outpacing California's bullet train project, which would make the same trip in just under three hours. Musk has publicly bashed California's bullet train plans as inefficient, and maintains that the Hyperloop would be a better project for the state to undertake. He first brought up the idea for the Hyperloop just about a year ago at a PandoDaily fireside chat and said that he would provide further details on June 20th this year, but it looks as though we'll all have to wait until August to learn more about how his proposed system would function.

[Plantagenet]

The hyperloop is coming!

[Keith_McClary]

[ohanian]

I bet you that there are a lot of engineering challenges yet to be solved for this hyperloopy plan.

[SeaGypsy]

760 MPH cornering and hills? Better be a straight line and flat- lots of mountains to cut through.

[rollin]

Is this another one of those stupid vacuum tube transport plans?

[TheAntiDoomer]

Ignore this one at your own Peril. So far Musk has done TESLA MOTORS (124$ ashare), SpaceX, PayPal, and Solar City.

[Plantagenet]

I hope Musk builds Hyperloops all over the earth, so we can wake up and take our protein pills, hop into our Tesla "S" EVs and check the latest news on QE tapering on the smart dash, zip over to the Hyperloop for our commute to work at the solar factory.

[Beery1]

[Vineyard]

Sorry, if I take Musk annoucements with a lot grain of salt. Musk is a master of PR stunts, but lot of his doing is just hype.

There is a german blogger, who wrote a lot of interesting critical articles about Musk and specially his company SpaceX. Very interesting stuff.

[TheDude]

Feh, give me a Launch Loop:



Hyperloop, that's for pussies. If it comes with bikini babes I'm in, though.

Who's the well-coiffed vampire?

How about first we bury simple stuff that doesn't actually move, like, you know, power lines? Oh, it costs too much? Drat.

LA to NY in 30 minutes would be a real buzz.

[Plantagenet]

Who's the well-coiffed vampire?

Thats not a vampire. Thats the cat from Red Dwarf-----a British scifi TV comedy show which once did an episode on the Hyperloop---or something just like it.

[TheDude]

I've watched an ep or two of that show, put me in mind of the movie Dark Star - ultra low budget, kinda wacky. Looked like fun.

[Plantagenet]

"RED DWARF" was no "BIG LEBOWSKI" but it was a lot of fun. It started out very low budget (one of the first aliens was a frozen chicken) but the effects got really good by the final season 9 (10?).

Supposedly there was a Red Dwarf movie in the works, but the star of the TV show had some drug issues.


H stands for hyperloop hologram

[Graeme]

Revealed: Elon Musk Explains the Hyperloop, the Solar-Powered High-Speed Future of Inter-City Transportation

Almost a year after Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors (TSLA) and SpaceX, first floated the idea of a superfast mode of transportation, he has finally revealed the details: a solar-powered, city-to-city elevated transit system that could take passengers and cars from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes. In typical Musk fashion, the Hyperloop, as he calls it, immediately poses a challenge to the status quo—in this case, California’s $70 billion high-speed train that has been knocked by Musk and others as too expensive, too slow, and too impractical.

In Musk’s vision, the Hyperloop would transport people via aluminum pods enclosed inside of steel tubes. He describes the design as looking like a shotgun with the tubes running side by side for most of the journey and closing the loop at either end. These tubes would be mounted on columns 50 to 100 yards apart, and the pods inside would travel up to 800 miles per hour. Some of this Musk has hinted at before; he now adds that pods could ferry cars as well as people. “You just drive on, and the pod departs,” Musk told Bloomberg Businessweek in his first interview about the Hyperloop.

Musk published a blog post detailing the Hyperloop on Monday. He will hold a press call later in the day to go over the details.

businessweek

[Graeme]

More at GreenCarCongress.

[Beery1]

With the notable exceptions of Vision-Master and Rune, the site's usual tech utopia suspects are all over this, so I'm guessing it's going nowhere.

Cue the standard operating procedure mantra: cries of "It's a developing story" and "if you don't believe in it, go away". Or maybe not - that's just Rune's answer to criticism and he isn't here yet.

[ROCKMAN]

Beery - another hint of their understanding the unlikely acceptance of the concept by dragging out the ole straw man angle: " the status quo" is afraid of the idea and thus criticizes the concept. I don't recall seeing any stories of the airlines worried about the competition of tube travel. I 'm pretty sure they are currently more focused on fuel prices and the economy.

[Graeme]

It seems that the idea has moved much further forward than concept to feasibility. The main barrier is cost.

Hyperloop: Musk unveils high-speed pneumatic transport

Musk has released the plans as an open-source project. He stated last week that he did not have time to devote to the project at present, but in a conference call yesterday, he said that he was coming around to the idea that one of his existing, or future, companies could take it on. "I'm tempted to make a demonstration prototype," he said. Musk estimates that it would take one or two years of dedicated work to build the prototype, and another four to five years to deploy a full-scale version between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

What is even more ambitious than Musk's proposed timeline is his estimate of the cost. He projects that Hyperloop would cost a mere $7.5 billion, about a tenth of the cost of the currently planned high speed rail corridor between the two cities. He also estimates that a ticket for a one-way Hyperloop trip could cost as little as $20, about half what high-speed rail service is likely to charge. Such modest costs are partly down to his claim that Hyperloop could generate most of the power it needs using solar panels – similar to those used at the charging stations for the electric cars made by Musk's Tesla MotorsMovie Camera – on top of the tube.


Musk claims that Hyperloop can easily and cheaply be made earthquake-resistant. Others agree that it won't be hard, but are less sure about the price tag. "Given the right amount of money, we can design almost anything to sustain earthquake loading," says Scott Brandenberg, an earthquake engineering expert at UCLA. "But the question is how much does it cost?"

newscientist