The hyperloop is dead for real this time::Hyperloop One is shutting down its operations. The company was founded in 2014 promising pods that would carry passengers at airline speeds through nearly airless tubes. Turns out, it wasn’t really viable.
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Yes, it’s dead this time too, as it was all the other times it was mentioned, and also when it was announced.
Hyperloop was a scam from the beginning, it never had a chance of succeeding, even if it wasn’t a scam.
So Yes, it is really really dead now, and it always was.
It was literally a pipedream.Before everyone gets ahead of themselves like in the last thread on this, this is not a Musk company. This is a separate startup based on the same (dumb) idea, that was later bought by Richard Branson’s Virgin. It’s IP is going to the Dubai company that is it’s biggest investor, so I’m sure they’ll actually build one with slave labor and all that.
I mean, pretty much any engineering student who’s taken Fluid Dynamics I and a physics/dynamics series could tell you that trying to maintain a high vacuum along hundreds of miles of tube, then accelerating things inside that tube to 700mph (when KE=1/2m v^2), was probably a very very bad idea. the sheer accurate tolerances that would need to be maintained between each tube joint, and the quality of the air seals, along the entire length of tube is just insane.
For something to die it needs to be alive. Hyperloop was never anything more than a vaporware and a sabotage to proven transport methods.
The basic idea of reducing air drag with a vacuum is a good one, but there are so many practical problems with a solution like the hyperloop that it should have been shot down earlier than it was. The problem of thermal expansion across a structure hundreds of miles long while needing to maintain a near vacuum was never solved.
