[vwat]

It’s not legit at all. I’ve always been a fan, and all his busted videos in the past featured one very important feature: the violation of thermodynamics. He always showed why a product was physically impossible. But he doesn’t do that with a hyperloop. And ultimately, if you see through the repetition and downright nastiness, you see that his argument is essentially “hyperloop is very expensive, it would be unsafe and render artists don’t know science.” I wouldn’t have minded if he hadn’t taken that low shot at Elon when a rocket blew up on the pad. Honestly, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he started targeting Elon, with the sudden and notable lack of violation-of-physics, around the same time he started pushing his channel to have more engagement and make more money.

TLDR: I’ve seen all his videos and his hyperloop videos basically lack substance. Scott Manley is a much better source of opinions on such things.

[jcranmer]

The problem with criticizing hyperloop on technical grounds is that there often isn't even enough substance to really criticize. There are several designs, which only really have "you put it a vehicle in a vacuum tube and go zoom!" in common--and even then, there's contention about vacuum.

So the only way you can really criticize it is on gadgetbahn grounds: it's shiny new technology [1], that's safer, cheaper, faster, better, stronger, etc. than the stodgy old infrastructure plans. It'll come in sooner and cheaper than them, we just need a few years [2] to finish designing them, and a couple million dollars [3] as well.

And if you've read all of my footnotes, you'll realize why this pitch is too good to be true. I'm personally not bothered by that so much as I'm bothered by the argument to stop investing in infrastructure because gadgetbahn is the future.

[1] Except "put trains in a vacuum tube" is a really old concept. But hyperloop is something "new," and the differences from vactrains is, uh, see above about the difficulty of pinning down any technical details.

[2] Looking to be 2 decades from "initial" concept to first implementation at this point.

[3] If you tot up all the grants so far, we're past $1 billion at this point to just study how to build this thing.

[_ph_]

Perhaps then wait with critisizing the hyperloop on technical grounds until there is enough with substance instead of making up fake technical facts? Currently the Hyperloop is basically just a concept and a couple of startups which are not connected to Elon Musk in any sense. Of course, as with any new startups, there is a lot of marketing and little substance. And yes, as with any startup in a completely new technological domain, one should be highly sceptical about their success chance. These kind of tech startups do have a huge chance of failing indeed. If it were trivial to pick up a completely new technology and bring it to the market successfully, everyone would be doing it. Also, there is quite a bit of shady business going on. A lot of startup companies are run just to finance large salaries, while the investment money lasts and to vanish after investment money ends[1]. But all of this is not a valid technical criticism of the hyperloop. There are certainly valid points to be made against the feasibility of the concept, but then these points should be made and not artificial ones invented.

1: I could once watch this from close-up. As a grad student, I was involved in optical data storage. We were able to store a few gigabytes in a small crystal. This work was financed by a startup company created by a consulting company. This startup would collect money - largely from state research investments to match to the private money promised to be invested by the consulting company. This did finance our work for some years and paid a couple of salaried employees of the startup - related to the consulting company. When the public investments ran out and no third party investments had arrived, the startup would fade away. And with that the project in spite of what we had achieved so far.