>If air enters into a vacuum tube where the Hyperloop carriage is, the shockwave will do something to the carriage people ride in
This is Thunderf00t's "shock wave" argument, and it has survived frequent debunkings. Are we really so easily misled that slapping sciencey branding behind any poorly thought out claim will cause people to repeat it as truth?
The huge thing he forgot is... pipes are not lossless! A tube break would initially cause the air to rush in at the speed of sound, but after a few kilometers the backpressure from friction with the tube walls will slow the air to highway speed and spread out the pressure rise. The way it works out, if you're close enough to the breach to be killed by the pressure wave, you're close enough that you can't stop in time before derailing.
> The way it works out, if you're close enough to the breach to be killed by the pressure wave, you're close enough that you can't stop in time before derailing.
Huh? Who's derailing here? The problem is, again, that if just a seal breaks close enough to a carriage, you are dead. This is not comparable to a derailing which requires quite a bit of things go wrong on a normal train or the propulsion dying in this elderly chap's magnetic train.
I think he meant in comparison to a train track breaking up with a high-speed train on it. Read the sentence more carefully as a comparison against existing train technology.
This is Thunderf00t's "shock wave" argument, and it has survived frequent debunkings. Are we really so easily misled that slapping sciencey branding behind any poorly thought out claim will cause people to repeat it as truth?
The huge thing he forgot is... pipes are not lossless! A tube break would initially cause the air to rush in at the speed of sound, but after a few kilometers the backpressure from friction with the tube walls will slow the air to highway speed and spread out the pressure rise. The way it works out, if you're close enough to the breach to be killed by the pressure wave, you're close enough that you can't stop in time before derailing.