Hyper Loopiness
Well. Billionaires love to piss money away. Hey Branson and Musk if you need anyone to debug your plans I am not only available I am very good at it.
The “test track” of a big steel pipe pulling a vacuum for passengers to ride in has carried actual living and still breathing humans for a few hundred meters.
I am a fan of science fiction. One of the classic transport schemes from stories going back 60 years is a subway system run in vacuum conditions so there is no air resistance to overcome meaning that it is very energy efficient and capable of high speeds. They are trying to build it. Good luck! I mean that sincerely.
What is wrong with the idea. Oh where do I start.
First it is quite dangerous. Fires and accidents can happen in the passenger cars and evacuation of people is not possible in an air evacuated tube.
It will be low capacity. One of my old jobs was calculating operational capacities of passenger carriers based on loading and dispatch systems. Big systems can be surprisingly low capacity.
The vehicle will be an actual space ship. It will need very dependable life support and emergency pressure protection. You could think of them as submarines too, but rescue from those is just surfacing by dropping a weight. An air leak will kill the passengers. No help until the next station. This can be engineered. But redundancy is expensive. Commercial operators hate expense.
It may be “fast” but it is about the same speed as a plane. They claim advantages in travel time, but you still have stations with huge airlocks to enter and leave the air depleted tunnel and that will not happen quickly. Not that much better than air terminals.
In the picture above there is a big square door thing that is probably part of the air lock.
It will take lots of power. You have to make and hold the vacuum. You have suck the air out of the air locks at the stations. BIG vacuum pumps. Acceleration to high speeds takes power. E= M*V*V/2. The energy goes up with the square of the velocity and linearly with the mass. Planes have this too as well as lifting to altitude but these hyperloop vehicles will be very heavy. Planes are light.
That said they will be electric. That is good. They may be able to recover the kinetic energy with regen braking.
They brag about mag lev drives. So far those take superconductors to work. Extreme cold is required for that. That cold is so far maintained by evaporation of liquid gasses like nitrogen in the current warmest classes of superconductors. So you have to evaporate gasses inside of a vacuum tube. Hmmm interesting. Making those gasses liquid takes lots of energy.
In the Sci-Fi stories these things were buried. That is a good idea as steel pipes under vacuum are vulnerable. Trucks love to hit things so if it can happen it will happen.
I know this is just a test, but.......
I aint holding my breath. Open the pod bay door Hal.