What Hyperloop Really Is
May. 12th, 2016 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsDoes anyone else grok that the Hyperloop is really Elon Musk's clever way of exploiting America's weird transportation politics for his own uses?
The Hyperloop is being sold to politicians and tech bros as a sweet, quick way to get from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the time it takes to get from the Financial District to Japantown by the San Francisco MTBA, when in fact it's a way to test out the viability of the Gigafactory's power supplies united with linear induction motors to power a Clarke Mass Driver.
Elon Musk never does anything without getting multiple bits of data out of it. Self driving cars are a way to test various machine learning techniques against geography until the best one presents itself. The barge landings involve a hard restart in re-entry conditions of a thin, violently fast atmosphere, the kind encountered when landing on Mars. Hyperloop is a way of testing the viability of linear induction motors for insane acceleration rates with heavy payloads.
Hyperloop is how Elon Musk has tricked investors into giving him the money to experiment with yet another way to lower the weight and cost of his first-stage rockets. They may, with some probability, get the trains their Atlas Shrugged-addled minds want. Musk will, with all probability, figure out if LIMs are a way to boost a launch vessel to a significant fraction of escape velocity without having to have the fuel on board the launch vehicle.
The Hyperloop is being sold to politicians and tech bros as a sweet, quick way to get from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the time it takes to get from the Financial District to Japantown by the San Francisco MTBA, when in fact it's a way to test out the viability of the Gigafactory's power supplies united with linear induction motors to power a Clarke Mass Driver.
Elon Musk never does anything without getting multiple bits of data out of it. Self driving cars are a way to test various machine learning techniques against geography until the best one presents itself. The barge landings involve a hard restart in re-entry conditions of a thin, violently fast atmosphere, the kind encountered when landing on Mars. Hyperloop is a way of testing the viability of linear induction motors for insane acceleration rates with heavy payloads.
Hyperloop is how Elon Musk has tricked investors into giving him the money to experiment with yet another way to lower the weight and cost of his first-stage rockets. They may, with some probability, get the trains their Atlas Shrugged-addled minds want. Musk will, with all probability, figure out if LIMs are a way to boost a launch vessel to a significant fraction of escape velocity without having to have the fuel on board the launch vehicle.
