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Comment by kjrose | Hacker News Reader

I’ve heard so many solid engineering reasons why this wouldn’t work on the scale that musk originally put out.

Other than the response of “we will figure that out.” Has anyone resolved issues like track expansion and catastrophic vacuum collapse and such?

I would love to see high speed rail or similar but I just don’t feel that this is the most efficient way to get it.

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I'm not sure, but I'm pretty excited to see private companies trying to tackle the issue. Plus, when you look at the relative amounts of funds being spent right now (the linked article mentions Virgin Hyperloop One raising $50 million), it's still a relatively small number compared to the billions spent on social media and advertising companies and the defense industry.

If these private early companies can prove the concept is viable, there's plenty of money out there to implement it and work through the problems.

I don't understand why these same issues get raised every time hyperloop comes up. Of course the engineers working on this are aware of the most obvious concerns and of course there are solutions. Vacuum collapse is handled with exploding gates along the track. If the vacuum ahead fails, you blow open the gates behind you to even out the pressure and you come to a stop. Track expansion seems extremely solvable with sliding joints and decent seals. Hyperloop is predicated on not being perfect vacuum so slightly leaky seals don't matter.

I think Hyperloop is not economically viable because "trains are too expensive" is not solved by making trains way more complicated. But technically it seems feasible.

I think the primary technical objection goes away if you replace the above ground tube with a tunnel. A tunnel will be more expensive, of course. On the other hand, Hyperloop only requires small diameter tunnels which are much cheaper to bore.

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