Imagine to sit in a capsule, in a pressurized environment and be shot like a bullet in a barrel.

Imagine a breakage in the chamber and drop in pressure; and imagine what would happen to that capsule, at that speed.

Considering how many times a simple pipeline breaks, imagine how long a high mainteinance infrastructure like this, may last, without expensive investments.

It is the childish idea of a person with too much money and too much free time at hand. If he would invest money in building smarter roads, like they do in Northern Europe, we could get rid of fossil fuels in less than 2 decades. Instead the man has to play with toys and rockets....

Originally posted by Numenorean:

Imagine to sit in a capsule, in a pressurized environment and be shot like a bullet in a barrel.

Imagine a breakage in the chamber and drop in pressure; and imagine what would happen to that capsule, at that speed.

Considering how many times a simple pipeline breaks, imagine how long a high mainteinance infrastructure like this, may last, without expensive investments.

It is the childish idea of a person with too much money and too much free time at hand. If he would invest money in building smarter roads, like they do in Northern Europe, we could get rid of fossil fuels in less than 2 decades. Instead the man has to play with toys and rockets....

Someone needs to tell Elon about that.

Originally posted by therese.collins:

Someone needs to tell Elon about that.

He has been told by people that are experts in this area, but he has money so as long as he pay, he can do whatever he wants.

Accidents will happen, someone will die, and he will have a good insurance coverage to come out clean. This is America after all; the land of the lawyers and lawsuits.

Originally posted by Numenorean:

He has been told by people that are experts in this area, but he has money so as long as he pay, he can do whatever he wants.

Accidents will happen, someone will die, and he will have a good insurance coverage to come out clean. This is America after all; the land of the lawyers and lawsuits.

A truely evil man, I must say.

Originally posted by therese.collins:

A truely evil man, I must say.

There is no such thing as good or evil; there is approval and dismissal of ideas and people. When you give a job to many people, you are "good" as people approve what you do. Same is true for the opposite; so I would not say that he is evil or good.

He does what he can, in the boundaries that society allow him. My opinion is that he is not doing any favor to society; but again, he has money and social status so he is "good".

Originally posted by Numenorean:

There is no such thing as good or evil; there is approval and dismissal of ideas and people. When you give a job to many people, you are "good" as people approve what you do. Same is true for the opposite; so I would not say that he is evil or good.

He does what he can, in the boundaries that society allow him. My opinion is that he is not doing any favor to society; but again, he has money and social status so he is "good".

I agree. I must say, this is some serious philospy. Let's take a break and go nuts on Donner Pass.

The Hyperloop pods I’ve seen in artwork and animations don’t look like they would hold very many people. That strikes me as being inefficient as far as traffic control and safe spacing between vehicles.

I still haven’t seen an animation depicting how they propose getting pods into and out of the low pressure tubes. They would have to somehow close the pod in a section of tube and quickly evacuate the air from that section before opening some sort of hatch between the insertion/extraction section and the high speed main tube. The quick pressure changes would require some powerful pumping equipment and possibly high capacity tanks to allow the air to rush into to permit some of the vacuum pumping activity to take place between pod insertion/extraction procedures.

Perhaps some of the early systems will operate more like small single car subway trains at more modest speeds in tunnels filled with normal air pressure. With computer controlled acceleration and deceleration and central spacing management the smaller vehicles could achieve a higher system capacity than similar size vehicles with a human operator in each vehicle.