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The Hyperloop was always a scam (www.disconnect.blog)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

97 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It's time to be honest about Musk's vacuum tube to nowhere

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 11 months ago (25 children)

Hyoerloop is not a scam just because The con man proposed it with the intent of stopping a high speed rail road project.

It's a scam also because:

the idea is not his. It's 100 years old and has been tackled by other before him.
it's impossible to be build from the technical point of view.
even if you do manage to miraculously built it it won't be economically feasible.
in the lasts years it's starting to be obvious that if it's backed by Musk it's a scam in some degree, shape or form. (see also Solar Cities, Tesla, The Loop and the Boring company, etc.)

[+] [email protected] -18 points 11 months ago (23 children)

it’s impossible to be build from the technical point of view. even if you do manage to miraculously built it it won’t be economically feasible.

I don't think you can say any of this until you actually put some money into it and check. Technology improves all the time and with it economics of such project. They didn't really try to build any actual routes. They just tried to do some prototypes and check current feasibility. I don't see this as a scam or a bad thing at all. No public money went into this.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (13 children)

A very long evacuated tube hundreds or thousands of miles long - too long to ever be actively defended - is itself fundamentally untenable. There are US states where every "welcome to ___" sign is shot up with holes. You don't think people will take potshots at this thing?

Even if you somehow made it armoured and immune to small arms (this would be the largest armoured thing ever constructed), it would never make any sense over cutting edge high speed rail that doesn't require an evacuated tube.

This all comes straight from first principles. To change this, any number of fantastical technologies would need to be invented (maybe the tube can be made of vibranium?).