Comment by bubuga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bubuga | Hacker News Reader

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> But hyperloop? Nothing new really needs to be discovered.

This isn't true.

The concept of a moving load travelling over the rayleigh wave speed on heterogeneous soils is something that's very new, very problematic, and very expensive to deal with.

Let's put it this way: the french currently hold the conventional high-speed railway speed record for just bellow 600km/h, and yet they are only able to operate their TGV trains on the record-breaking track at 320km/h. They can't push it any faster due to all the maintenance problems caused by very high speed travel, although SNCF is one of the leading rail companies and the track is brand new.

If there were no technical issues to be resolved, they wouldn't be capping their circulation speeds at around half their speed record.

This is one of the many technical issues. But then there are the multitude of economic problems which hyperloop is entirely unable to offer any solution, yet alone make a case.

Strapping a rocket on a short stretch of track is not a technical solution. It's just a marketing trick.

Oh I certainly didn't mean for my comment to come off as they have nothing new to do only that all of those issues, as far as I can tell, are engineering issues where yes they'll have to come up with new stuff but that what they want to accomplish is perfectly within the realm of discovered physics, etc.

So I just wanted to say it's an engineering issue at this point. But as far as I can tell that's still true maybe I just didn't convey that very well initially though I'm certainly not an expert at this so I concede I could certainly be wrong as well.

Perhaps my comment doesn't add as much to the conversation as I thought it would. Oh well.

> So I just wanted to say it's an engineering issue at this point.

It's far more than a mere engineering issue. It's primarily an economic issue. The engineering issues are mitigated by throwing cash at them, but in the end for an infrastructure project to make sense the payoff must be greater than the investment.

Meanwhile, air travel is already cheaper than conventional high-speed rail, is far more flexible to manage, and operates on a cruise speed that is at least equivalent to the best case scenario sold by hyperloop's salespeople.

Any airline is able to transport hundreds of people at a cruise speed between 800 and 900km/h with an investment of around 200 million dollars. Hyperloop's salespeople are selling a concept whose cost is some orders of magnitude higher, takes longer to build, and competes with ticket prices that are somewhere between 100 and 200 dollars a ticket. While an airline needs to rely on those 100 dollar tickets to pay off their 200 million dollar investment, how do hyperloop's salesteam expect an operator to amortize a trillion-dollar investment by competing in a market based on those ticket prices?

Furthermore, essentially airlines only need to maintain their planes and pay airport costs. An hyperloop operator needs to maintain, in addition to the vehicle, hundeds of kilometer of experimental track sections. Where's the business case?

There's a good reason why hyperloop's salesteam only invest in marketing and propaganda, and in spite of being backed by a savvy scifi-inclined billionaire with a long history of investing in amazing projects we don't see him opening his wallet to fund a real-world project. Instead, the project is focused on convincing others to foot the bill.

Fair enough. I'll stop talking :)

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