Hyperloop. Let’s talk about.
Apparently the followers of Elon Musk (one of the best science fiction salespeople in history) got angry over my comments on Hyperloop. Their objection is "he is rich so everything he says is reality". The Pope is also rich, and the author of Harry Potter is rich. I wouldn't bet on the existence of Hogwarts, nor on that of "God" just because the writers are rich.
Hyperloop is a technology "invented" by Elon musk, and then passed on to various research projects. The most advanced managed to get a "train" going at 175 km per hour for two minutes. Disappointing, but they believe it.
I would like to divide this post into several parts: why the USA needs to believe in Hyperloop, why science fiction needed trains in the tube, why the idea is a fucking idea, because gradually evolves it seems more and more clear that it is a fucking idea, because even if they did it it would be uneconomical and it would be a waste of money.
Let's go in order.
Why do Americans need to believe Hyperloop?
The American railway network has remained at third world levels. High speed is a bull's-eye, and everything that puts the rail network on the same footing as pathetic US public transport: "under the greyhound, nothing". There are no recent investments and the most modern subways were renovated in the 1970s.
But some Americans travel. First Japan humiliated them with its super efficient trains, but the US feels superior because it defeated them. Then those who came to Europe began to notice the high-speed trains and come back to tell how easy it is to get around the continent. And the excuse that "but we won the IIWW against them doesn't work", since China has overtaken them too. And they never won the war with them.
Second, after 9/11, boarding procedures made it difficult to use the plane for short journeys. The Americans were led to take a plane for half-hour flights (with catastrophic ecological impacts) but now the checks are really too long and meticulous, and the TSA seems to be managed by the Vogons. With hemorrhoids.
Faced with the failure of their railway infrastructure, Americans need to keep pride in saying "but we have Hyperloop". Too bad it doesn't exist.
The science fiction of Elon Musk is very functional, therefore, and is valid in every sector. After FIAT went to rescue Crysler by explaining them how to make cars, the humiliation was so great that they NEED Tesla. They have a catastrophically slow internet, but Elon Musk offered them Starlink. Which, for heaven's sake, works, but the density of connections in the cities makes it technologically prohibitive, so it will only (or almost) deal with rural or low-density areas. Not a bad business case on a global scale, but not all that cool. But it is for pride.
After paying the Russians for decades to take them to space, they NEED a private space sector. And so on.
The current American dialectic is about having something to respond to when asked why they are so backward in so many infrastructure fields. And science fiction lends itself well: do they have crappy health? No problem, now Bezos arrives and makes you live 50 years more. Are they polluting to suck? No problem, now they will go to Mars to live. For every problem, the solution is a science fiction book.
This created a huge demand for science fiction passed off as a commercial product, and Elon Musk realized that bag chickens pay.
Nothing to the contrary, I would do the same if I were him. But I'm not into him, and I wouldn't want any government to invest money (from my taxes) in this stuff.
My prediction is that when Americans realize the distressing state of their electric grids, Elon Musk will come up with a super, domestic power source from a science fiction book. I don't know which one.
Why does science fiction make trains run in tubes?
Well, science fiction illustrators obviously have requirements, and the first is "don't tell: show". To give an example, Larry Niven had imagined that on the planet of puppeteers there were individual platforms, where a person would climb, and according to the step he took (right, left, etc) he dematerialized and rematerialized in the first platform (at several km) in the direction of that pass. Star Trek teleportation, automated and wholesale as a public service.
It's cool, but for an illustrator it's a nightmare: all you show in a drawing is a guy who gets on a record. The functionality is not seen. You can't see the movement. Representing this platform according to the "don't tell, show" principle was very complicated.
If the illustrator shows a train, however futuristic, full of antennas and high voltage insulators (which must have been in the old science fiction), it is always "roughly a train".
But in the 1960s, the top of organized public transport was the subways. Going into a tunnel. And Giulio Verne had talked about shooting people at the moon with a cannon. If something comes out of a pipe, it may look like it was "shot". That is, it goes fast.
So the train in the tube (which must be transparent to show the train) was "papabile" for the illustrator. People enter the train, and then they are shot, "as fast as a bullet", to the next destination.
For this reason, many science fiction artists represented cities with trains inside the tube. They were simple aesthetic requirements.
The feasibility of supersonic speeds inside a tube was not their problem. Then the writer maybe explained that since there is a vacuum in the tube, exceeding the speed of sound was easier. But he never made calculations, otherwise he would have understood that the opposite is true.
Why is Hyperloop a fucking idea, uneconomical and dangerous?
Let's start with the first concept. A railway network is, mathematically speaking, an oriented and colored digraph. If I add a path, I have not added ONE possible path between nodes, but the number of new possible paths I have added is huge. Or rather, it grows VERY fast.
I can also add a node, but if we consider that a node is a city, we must ask ourselves if it is cheaper for the railway company to add a city or a new city station, or an additional section (if nothing else, a doubling) of a line.
In detail:
- if I put one track next to the other, and put some switches in between, I have enormously increased the capacity (on a single track it is necessary that the track is empty to put two trains in opposite directions, or the switches are needed at the stations, in order to allow the crossing of the trains), but I have made the railway redundant, so if one breaks / maintains one, I can momentarily divert a train to the other track.
- if I connect two non-parallel sections to each other, I have offered a further route: since A-> C can be less than AB – BC, I have introduced a saving for ALL the routes that pass through A and C. This is scalability .
- if a train (not a track) breaks, I can still divert the others to another path without necessarily involving the stations.
Hyperloop doesn't scale for shit. It's a point-to-point system, and a mechanism like "swap" is simply impossible.
The Americans don't care because they take the plane (which is point-to-point) or (in the cities) the subway, but the point is that the plane has a MUCH freer route. He can change the destination point in case of problems, so to speak.
The idea that a bullet fired at 1200km / h can change direction in that way inside a tube (which should double) is simply infeasible.
If a hyperloop train is broken or stopped, all those following are stopped. The whole section is stopped. You cannot put trains in opposite directions on a stretch. Doubling the section does not make it redundant: in case of maintenance, the section is stopped. Be prepared for delays.
But besides not having the merits of a normal train, hyperloop does not even have the merits of an airplane. A plane can change its destination in case of problems, hyperloop cannot. But beyond that, a plane flies through the air. Even if there were an obstacle (like a bird, which is already dangerous for the plane, even if there are few birds at 10,000 meters), the chances of hitting it are few, and after the first impact (a less than hitting a turbojet of the plane) the obstacle goes away.
In a hyperloop, no. If a train loses a piece (because the stress is enormous) or a piece of "tube" falls off, the debris stays there. And it doesn't go away at first impact. What happens to the next train, if a piece of a train loses a piece of metal bodywork, or a sheet comes off the tube?
From the outside, you will see the tube that has a red stripe, then a white stripe, then the tube explodes. Because the harassing object CANNOT leave the tube and keeps all the impact energy inside the tube itself. When it slips between tube and train it changes its aerodynamic profile in an asymmetrical way, and the result is that, at supersonic speeds, a few seconds later you have plasma between train and tube. Congratulations.
Passenger safety. Hyperloop, for obvious reasons, cannot have emergency exits. Aside from the fact that they are mandatory (even planes have them), the point is that in the event of ANY breakdown, the passengers will keep them inside. It also has the flaws of a submarine, in short.
Fire? You keep them. Sickness? You keep them. Crime? You keep it.
Can we make emergency openings from time to time? We can, but in case of breakdown you will pass the passengers in a tube with electrified rails (ah, I forgot the current comes from there) in a circular section tube, without walkways and without atmosphere. Why do you need a vacuum?
Apart from the fact that if I were a terrorist I would buy a sturdy steel deckchair, force one of these exits and throw the deckchair into the tubone, the problem of high vacuum is that in case of loss of integrity of the train, passengers find themselves in a vacuum, devoid of oxygen. So the train must also carry oxygen . Fantastic. New requirement: In the event of a fire, prevent oxygen cylinders from helping the fire to ignite. Congratulations.
I don't know what else to add, but in general the idea of doing something like this for thousands of miles is NOT attractive.
Hyperloop has:
- all the defects of a train, amplified. (it cannot change direction / section, delays affect the entire network, the next train is affected by the state of a hyperloop train)
- all the flaws of an airplane. (hypersensitive to impacts, between departure and destination there are no emergency exits)
- all the flaws of a submarine. (either it's airtight or the passengers die)
- all the defects of an industrial oven. (once lit, firefighters need to cut the surface with a blowtorch to get you out)
however it does NOT have:
- none of the advantages of a train (adding a stretch the value of the network scales less because there are no switches)
- not even an advantage of an airplane (it cannot change course, it has no space to avoid objects or adverse conditions)
- not even a merit of a submarine (it is not even clear what merit a submarine should have to compensate for its pneumatic defects)
- not even an advantage of industrial ovens. (and it is not clear what merit he should inherit to compensate for it)
It is, in short, the classic fucking idea. If you are expecting the future of rail transport, a catastrophic, obvious, glaring fucking idea. She is so stupid that in the competition for stupid ideas she would come second because if she came first she would have at least one advantage.
Not to mention things like the CDB / BACC. Modern trains warn each other (of their proximity) by injecting an electrical signal onto the tracks. The train approaching it senses the current on the track, and stops immediately if it "senses" that that segment is busy.
The stretch where another train CANNOT be (km in front of the train and km behind the train) is called "track circuit". Obviously, high-speed trains need a huge clear circuit (5Km or more if I remember correctly) because the reaction time of the human driving is what it is. Obviously this reduces the number of possible trains on a route. In the case of such a supersonic, you should give it tens and tens of kilometers in front, and as many behind.
The economy of this thing, apparently, sucks.
You can at best do point-to-point stretches, ok, but an entire network that works day and night for billions of passengers / year, you dream it.
This is NOT the future of mass rail transport. And making a prototype that does a kilometer for a few minutes does NOT suggest otherwise.
The technological history of this thing is even more ridiculous. The tubone obviously comes from the world of science fiction and is an obstacle to the development of such fast trains.
In the initial idea of Elon "Leonardo" Musk, the train had to move using a rear pressure (like rifle bullets do, in short) and a minimum quantity of gas in front had to be sufficient to make it fly on the tube.
The world hailed Elon "Zweistein" Musk for his creativity: 1960s SF law. A genius.
When someone (with numbers) took it over, they immediately realized that such a thing was a fucking idea. Apart from the rear pressure (which would reserve the entire section of pipe for a single train) which required "extreme" pumping, with sufficient gas expansion to freeze the pipes, or heat them, the energy consumption was prohibitive. .
So the idea was discarded (but no newspaper wrote "Elon Archimede Musk has fucking ideas", of course. If Musk says so it must be possible) and in the experimentation phase they switched to a propulsion with a normal MagLev.
This obviously reduces the speed (let's say, so far, that it halves it), but that's the idea by now. Clearly, the tube cannot be transparent (no known transparent material has those mechanical capabilities: a train carrying a thousand people, let's say 12 carriages plus two engines, has a tare weight of ~ 1000 tons) and therefore the firefighters who they will come to help you, they will first have to find the train "by ear" and cut it in the right place. With half the vacuum tube. Congratulations.
But by now the chickens have pulled out the money, and so we have to move on. Until the first prototype is reached, capable of doing 175 Km / h for a couple of minutes (including acceleration and deceleration). There are 400 km / h tests, but without people on board. They trust so much.
Running it at 400km / h is so dangerous that the only test conducted had no human beings on board.
Then, the tube gets too hot (because obviously between the train and the tube the enthalpy enjoys) and the train too. Furthermore, air must be pumped behind the train very quickly, to prevent the expansion from creating a vacuum behind the train, and that the collapse of the air temperature produces ice and condensation behind the train.
A normal MagLev does the same speed without a tube, and it already exists. And people get on it.
The tube should be removed, but without the tube you are just studying another fast train. It doesn't look that cool and sci-fi.
And Elon Musk sold science fiction. It takes the tubone. That because of the maglev it is useless, that because of the maglev it is just a problem, and that it slows the train in every possible way.
As I have already written, there were other approaches. The tube is not needed and if you really want a vacuum you can give the first carriage a shape such as to create an air stall on the wagons afterwards. But this is already done by Japanese trains. Why reinvent the wheel?
In general, if you want to make a random guy rich and then worship him because he got rich, that's your business: whole religions do. Musk will not be the first Kolosimo in history to sell science fiction, and he has the advantage of being able to monetize much better.
And if the objection is "but important entities are financing it, it doesn't have to be a fucking idea", I can point out that "Tinder for dogs" ( https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article232274033/Das -Start-up-Patzo-funktioniert-wie-Tinder-fuer-Hunde.html ) had a VC in the order of MILLION euros ( https://patzo.org/ ), while the veterinary authorities are struggling to control the population of dogs and cats.
The same is true in the case of tinder for cats: https://tabbydates.com/
So no, I don't give a fuck how many idiots finance it.
But who's to blame if these fucking ideas (living on Mars, shooting trains in pipes, keeping a flamethrower in the house for self-defense, etc) are considered the stuff to be financed?
It is yours. Exactly like for Otelma's third beach house: it is you who adore these insane ones. It is you who, by feeding the Hype, ensure that they can get money from as many "you" in the stock market.
But please don't tell me about how cool Hyperloop is.
It's a fucking idea, which Americans need to respond to those who point out to them that they have a rail network between the pathetic and the ridiculous.
You make point-to-point transfer railways, but it's not "the future of rail networks".
I hope Musk starts watching manga. So maybe someone will be stupid enough to try to do this:
That's all.