Thunderf00t has lost last of his marbles and remaining bits of credibility

[nctnico]

I disagree that comparing Hyperlink, Starlink and Apollo is crazy. Especially if one constantly has the sand shifting under your feet as you switch between technical feasibility and economic viability. Furthermore common sense seems ill suited to the development of breakthrough new ideas. Although I am well aware the idea of a hyperloop goes back more than a hundred years.

Yep. And hindsight is always 20/20. Just look at the many things that have failed and the number of people who got (nearly) killed while developing the Gemini and Apollo space programs.

I haven't followed this thread closely enough to know just how strong nctnico supports hyperlink. But I am inclined to think he just opposes the sometimes arbitrary and populist nature of the criticism of it. A point highlighted by the LOL when calling him the (only?) resident HL supporter.

Exactly!

[tszaboo]

Or take the hyperloop as another example. Basically the whole argument TF makes is 'it has not been built before so it can never be built' after you peel away the many layers of hyperbole. It is good we can't rewind the clock to the 1960's in that respect. TF's videos about how the Apollo program is a massive failure would be an endless stream of drivel. 

To compare Hyperloop to Starlink or Apollo is crazy.
Nobody with any engineering common sense thinks Hyperloop will be in any way a practical solution.

Starlink was obviously a practical solution from the get-go, especially when you have the launch capability. And IIRC Thunderf00t didn't debunk that it could work or wouldn't be a solution, his argument is it won't be financially viable, which is a fair enough argument to make, it ultimately may not be and may go out of business. Hard to get real numbers on it. It wouldn't be the first space based consumer communications company failure.

Apollo wasn't a mass transit system, it was a bold and risky program that cost lives, and succeeded with exceptional large scale large cost national engineering effort for what was ultimately a small scale problem of getting two humans to the lunar surface and back.

Stralink's profitability will change a lot, when "Direct to cell" will be rolled out to more countries, and when it will be possible to use on international waters.
It allows basic cell phones to connect to the Starlink. Standard 4G LTE phones. When the price comes down, you could sell IoT devices that don't have a sim card, and just use this by default. No roaming, no cellphone company bullshit, just one service that worldwide connects your device.
The technology is already there, the only reason it's not rolled out is those traditional cellphone companies doing everything to block it, frequency allocation.

[Psi]

Yep, there are so many avenues that will make it more profitable in the future that it's current probability is mostly irrelevant.

I'm not sure we actually know much about its profitability currently anyway. From memory the info we have about it not being profitable is from an old court case filing from years ago.
SpaceX is a private company so it's not exactly public info normally. At least as I understand it.

The 'Direct to cell' feature is huge, basically every cellular company on the planet will be paying some ongoing free just so their customers have the option to use it if they are out of range of normal cells. That's a huge amount of income that may not use much bandwidth on the sats compared to the cash it brings in.
Plus of course the fee to actually use it on top of that.

[wraper]

Practical solution it absolutely has turned out to be, and could have been readily seen at the time as being viable because space communications satellites are well proven technology, it was just a matter of how many you could put up there before the money ran out. Practically everyone who uses it loves it, says it's game changing, and it grew quickly.

It obviously doesn't apply to Hyperloop because there it will never reach the point of having any sort of public adoption in the first place for all the obvious reasons. All it took for Starlink to get successful was a few launches, some early adopters who absolutely needed it in the middle of the sticks, and bingo they had a viable working system, the rest was just scale.

I don't agree with that. It wasn't just launching them before money runs out. Proven technology? At what cost? Starlink terminal is an AESA fighter jet radar in a nutshell. Everyone and their dog ridiculed SpaceX when they said they will produce them at affordable cost, and said it will cost like $10k+ to manufacture a single unit. Satellites also use AESA arrays, ion/hall-effect thrusters, laser links, etc. It's not easy to make them chap. If it would cost say $10 million to produce a single unit (actually very cheap for a satellite like that), business would go down the drain very quickly.

[paulca]

SpaceX economics is an unknown, there are few similes to anchor with.

NASA are a publicly funded research group.

SpaceX are not.

However, SpaceX is funded with NASA, military and commercial interests.  Hard to find parallels outside of the aerosapce/military industries?

While NASA are there to set milestones and achieve them, they have no interest in "repeatability", if the research is complete the spacecraft goes to it's death such that it's impact on future research be understood.  They only send another if there is enough scientific/academic interest.

SpaceX want to turn parts of the process (satelite launch) into an assembly line process, where instead of 16 or 32 units slowly expended costing billions, they wants to make 1600 or 3200 units and drop the price per unit by 100 fold.  They are making progress... if you do NOT anchor that on what Elon says.

[EEVblog]

A product or service can be a success from a user perspective while losing money from a business perspective.
That sort of thing happens all the time while the company does rapid expansion or needs more development to cut costs.
I don't think one can call it a failure until the product/service ends, or the company folds. Especially when people are currently using the product or service successfully. (Starlink)

Exactly. I can't see how anyone at the moment can argue it's anything other "successful" from a user uptake, user happiness, and acceptance point of view. It is currently the best solution for remote area internet.
I don't know about other countries, but our largest Telco in Australia offers Starlink
https://www.telstra.com.au/internet/starlink
This is as mainstream adoption as it gets.

It's clear that cost to space will continue to fall be it from Starship or some other reusable rocket.
So even if Starlink is unprofitable currently something like Starlink (if not Starlink) will be successful. So the technology/idea seems solid.
SpaceX has put themselves into the position to make a shit ton of money if they can pull off the long term plan, which is a valid strategy (Cheap Starlink launches on fully reusable Starships).

As others have pointed out, the direct to phone message service could be killer, especially in big countries like Australia. Heck, I'll get one when I'm out bush.
Telstra are trialing it at the moment:
https://www.telstra.com.au/exchange/telstra-satellite-to-mobile-connectivity--our-latest-trials-and-

[EEVblog]

Practical solution it absolutely has turned out to be, and could have been readily seen at the time as being viable because space communications satellites are well proven technology, it was just a matter of how many you could put up there before the money ran out. Practically everyone who uses it loves it, says it's game changing, and it grew quickly.

It obviously doesn't apply to Hyperloop because there it will never reach the point of having any sort of public adoption in the first place for all the obvious reasons. All it took for Starlink to get successful was a few launches, some early adopters who absolutely needed it in the middle of the sticks, and bingo they had a viable working system, the rest was just scale.

I don't agree with that. It wasn't just launching them before money runs out. Proven technology? At what cost? Starlink terminal is an AESA fighter jet radar in a nutshell. Everyone and their dog ridiculed SpaceX when they said they will produce them at affordable cost, and said it will cost like $10k+ to manufacture a single unit. Satellites also use AESA arrays, ion/hall-effect thrusters, laser links, etc. It's not easy to make them chap. If it would cost say $10 million to produce a single unit (actually very cheap for a satellite like that), business would go down the drain very quickly.

That was because no one really had the need to it at that scale before that, so it just became an electronics engineering and manufacturing solution at that point. Could it have failed? sure, things can always fail for a multitude of reasons. But it's ridiculous to try and compare an electronics design and volume production cost problem to Hyperlink. I don't even have to explain the reasons why that's an insane comparison. One is literally the problem of keeping humans alive at massive scale 

[wilfred]

But it's ridiculous to try and compare an electronics design and volume production cost problem to Hyperlink. I don't even have to explain the reasons why that's an insane comparison. One is literally the problem of keeping humans alive at massive scale 

Good communication skills are an important factor for subject experts to explain advanced concepts to a general audience. It makes for a stronger argument even with a technical audience. That way you're not relying on an assumed common understanding. Which when trying to persuade someone is the point of bringing them to an understanding of your own point of view. Is that not the purpose of a debate?

Apart from not explaining why a comparison of two things is ridiculous you aren't even prepared to explain why you don't have too. I for one am not persuaded. I think you are required to explain.

Where does the debate go otherwise? You're wrong! No. You're wrong. Welcome to the internet.

[Psi]

Starlink terminal is an AESA fighter jet radar in a nutshell. Everyone and their dog ridiculed SpaceX when they said they will produce them at affordable cost, and said it will cost like $10k+ to manufacture a single unit. Satellites also use AESA arrays, ion/hall-effect thrusters, laser links, etc. It's not easy to make them chap. If it would cost say $10 million to produce a single unit (actually very cheap for a satellite like that), business would go down the drain very quickly.

A lot of space stuff is expensive because no one wants to risk putting non space-grade hardware into space and risk it not working. Or risk trying something radically new that might not work.

There's vast gains to be made when you abandon that and take risks to see what works.
The Ingenuity helicopter NASA put on mars is a good example. It's using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor from a phone and other off-the-shelf hardware, not the crazy expensive radiation-hardened CPU used in other missions, and it worked great! It proved you don't need to spend that money on radiation hardened hardware to have a successful mission on mars.

SpaceX is all about trying new things and seeing what is actually needed vs what is not. Or combining various systems to eliminate others. Having a tight-knit team working on things and collaborating rather than developing each systems separately. Just look how they optimized the Raptor engine. Another company would stop and say 'that's good enough'. Now granted that is more optimizing for performance and reliability rather than cost. but it's all the same. It just takes hard work and repeated test failures which most companies are not willing to pay engineers to do once there's a workable/sellable/usable solution.

We don't really know Starlink sat costs because they are a private company, but I would put money on the current gen Starlink sats being much cheaper to make than you think.

[EEVblog]

But it's ridiculous to try and compare an electronics design and volume production cost problem to Hyperlink. I don't even have to explain the reasons why that's an insane comparison. One is literally the problem of keeping humans alive at massive scale 

Good communication skills are an important factor for subject experts to explain advanced concepts to a general audience. It makes for a stronger argument even with a technical audience. That way you're not relying on an assumed common understanding. Which when trying to persuade someone is the point of bringing them to an understanding of your own point of view. Is that not the purpose of a debate?

Apart from not explaining why a comparison of two things is ridiculous you aren't even prepared to explain why you don't have too. I for one am not persuaded. I think you are required to explain.

This is an engineering forum.
If I did a poll on whether or not Hyperloop will ever be practical I'd be willing to bet it's close to 100% say it's impractical.
It's like Thunderf00t's chocolate frying pan argument. Yes, you can make a chocolate frying pan, it's just not going to be practical.
If I was going to spend the crazy amount of time required just to try and convinced a couple of people, I might as well make a video on it to share with a million subscribers. But I won't, not because I can't, but because it's old news, Hyperloop is dead, and dead for obvious reasons to any engineer with a functioning brain.

If you are that keen, there are threads for it, just count me out:
The OG Threads IIRC:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/musk_s-hyperloop/msg275881/#msg275881
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/the-hyperloop-busted/msg990077/#msg990077

Plus:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/tum-hyperloop-a-3-5m-boondoggle/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1498-transpod-fluxjet-hyperloop-$550m-boondoggle/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1588-virgin-hyperloop-one-goes-bust/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/dodgy-technology/hyperloops-not-dead/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/dodgy-technology/new-hyperloop-without-hyper/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/dodgy-technology/its-2020-sf-to-la-for-$25-on-elon-musks-hyperloop-are-you-buying-it/

[BU508A]

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1498-transpod-fluxjet-hyperloop-$550m-boondoggle/



https://www.eevblog.com/forum/dodgy-technology/its-2020-sf-to-la-for-$25-on-elon-musks-hyperloop-are-you-buying-it/

Ah, I can see, that the $-issue (and similar ones with e.g. the "!") in the URL / hyperlink hasn't been fixed yet.

Sorry for the off-topic.

[wraper]

Practical solution it absolutely has turned out to be, and could have been readily seen at the time as being viable because space communications satellites are well proven technology, it was just a matter of how many you could put up there before the money ran out. Practically everyone who uses it loves it, says it's game changing, and it grew quickly.

It obviously doesn't apply to Hyperloop because there it will never reach the point of having any sort of public adoption in the first place for all the obvious reasons. All it took for Starlink to get successful was a few launches, some early adopters who absolutely needed it in the middle of the sticks, and bingo they had a viable working system, the rest was just scale.

I don't agree with that. It wasn't just launching them before money runs out. Proven technology? At what cost? Starlink terminal is an AESA fighter jet radar in a nutshell. Everyone and their dog ridiculed SpaceX when they said they will produce them at affordable cost, and said it will cost like $10k+ to manufacture a single unit. Satellites also use AESA arrays, ion/hall-effect thrusters, laser links, etc. It's not easy to make them chap. If it would cost say $10 million to produce a single unit (actually very cheap for a satellite like that), business would go down the drain very quickly.

That was because no one really had the need to it at that scale before that, so it just became an electronics engineering and manufacturing solution at that point. Could it have failed? sure, things can always fail for a multitude of reasons. But it's ridiculous to try and compare an electronics design and volume production cost problem to Hyperlink. I don't even have to explain the reasons why that's an insane comparison. One is literally the problem of keeping humans alive at massive scale 

I'd still like to see who could pull off ~$300-350 (even $1000) phased array terminal produced in volume. Most of mundane 5G routers are priced higher than that, and HW complexity is more than an order of magnitude apart.

[EEVblog]

I'd still like to see who could pull off ~$300-350 (even $1000) phased array terminal produced in volume. Most of mundane 5G routers are priced higher than that, and HW complexity is more than an order of magnitude apart.

That's why Starlink built the biggest  electronics manufacturing plant in the US, they don't muck around. Raw material in, finished dish out, 15,000 units per day.

[EEVblog]

Musk taking about Starlink production, they actually bought the production online before the design was finished. That's brass balls level commitment.
And the satellite costs less than the launch cost, and that was 4 years ago.

[Psi]

There's a lot of high tech products and components that are expensive because they're annoying or complex to design so they carry a high cost. Not because they're actually that expensive to produce. The really high margin stuff that is usually pretty low volume and where there's only a handful of people in the word who know how to design them.

If you have the money, as Elon does, you can pay to have your own chips designed and side-step the issue of having to pay for someone else to get rich as part of your products BOM cost. You pay the 1-off design and fab costs, which are indeed huge, but then you have a cheap part to use at volume.  Usually the industry catches up eventually and publicly available versions get cheaper if there's demand but you have a huge head start.
The lowest possible price for a part is the raw material cost. You start there and figure out what else you actually need.

Pretty sure this is what SpaceX did to get the phased array stuff cheap enough.

[tszaboo]

There's a lot of high tech products and components that are expensive because they're annoying or complex to design so they carry a high cost. Not because they're actually that expensive to produce. The really high margin stuff that is usually pretty low volume and where there's only a handful of people in the word who know how to design them.

If you have the money, as Elon does, you can pay to have your own chips designed and side-step the issue of having to pay for someone else to get rich as part of your products BOM cost. You pay the 1-off design and fab costs, which are indeed huge, but then you have a cheap part to use at volume.  Usually the industry catches up eventually and publicly available versions get cheaper if there's demand but you have a huge head start.
The lowest possible price for a part is the raw material cost. You start there and figure out what else you actually need.

Pretty sure this is what SpaceX did to get the phased array stuff cheap enough.

I agree, the starlink terminal looks expensive, and it's quite a design challenge to make something like that.
If you want to build a phased array out of digital delay lines, it's expensive. Because they don't make many of them. So you cannot sell it, because your produt is expensive, because the parts are expensive, because you can't make many of them. Chicken and the egg.
Once you have an IC designed for yourself, and you buy the parts by the reels, and you are willing to burn through a billion of investors money, it's not expensive. It's just an IC in a package, no different than a DC-DC converter or an opamp, that you can buy for 10 cents. Since the phased array, Spacex must be buying these ICs by the reels,   and nobody else can buy the IC. Which means that the entry for this market is a lot, need to have the sattilites up, and you need to sell the terminal for the price of a mid range phone, with dozens of these ICs in it. And get back your money with subscription later.

It would be interesting to see where they are in the scalability. Like how much % of their total bandwidth is used, and how many extra connections can they handle?

[PlainName]

The Ingenuity helicopter NASA put on mars is a good example. It's using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor from a phone and other off-the-shelf hardware, not the crazy expensive radiation-hardened CPU used in other missions, and it worked great! It proved you don't need to spend that money on radiation hardened hardware to have a successful mission on mars.

It proved you can beat the odds, which we already knew anyway. But it is one thing to try something that doesn't really matter if it fails, and another to have to rely on it working 100% regardless. That's why we have medical-grade stuff instead of shoving cheap but perhaps OK things in our bodies.

With the helicopter, suppose it failed: well, good try but the stuff the project was really for got done. Now suppose the point of the project was to fly a helicopter on Mars and it failed: that's a different kettle of finish and something of a showstopper. Fast forward to Musk running his Mars day trips and suppose you send your kids a Mars helicopter which fails: oh well, <derogatory country du jour> make shit so not a surprise. Get another off Amazon.

For each of those scenarios, the  choice of materials cost would be vastly different because the result of a possible failure has different consequences.

[Psi]

The Ingenuity helicopter NASA put on mars is a good example. It's using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor from a phone and other off-the-shelf hardware, not the crazy expensive radiation-hardened CPU used in other missions, and it worked great! It proved you don't need to spend that money on radiation hardened hardware to have a successful mission on mars.

It proved you can beat the odds, which we already knew anyway. But it is one thing to try something that doesn't really matter if it fails, and another to have to rely on it working 100% regardless.
Fast forward to Musk running his Mars day trips and suppose you send your kids a Mars helicopter which fails

It lasted pretty long, months, how long does it need to last to be considered human safe for say 60min on mars?
It's simply about the test data. The more the better.

If you want to add human safety into the mix you test things unmanned as many times as needed until you have the data to show the design is reliable. Which is exactly what SpaceX is doing.
Building stuff cheaply doesnt automatically mean it's unsafe, it can be unsafe, but it can also prove that everyone else is overengineering their designs out of fear to try anything else.

[nctnico]

But it's ridiculous to try and compare an electronics design and volume production cost problem to Hyperlink. I don't even have to explain the reasons why that's an insane comparison. One is literally the problem of keeping humans alive at massive scale 

Good communication skills are an important factor for subject experts to explain advanced concepts to a general audience. It makes for a stronger argument even with a technical audience. That way you're not relying on an assumed common understanding. Which when trying to persuade someone is the point of bringing them to an understanding of your own point of view. Is that not the purpose of a debate?

Apart from not explaining why a comparison of two things is ridiculous you aren't even prepared to explain why you don't have too. I for one am not persuaded. I think you are required to explain.

This is an engineering forum.
If I did a poll on whether or not Hyperloop will ever be practical I'd be willing to bet it's close to 100% say it's impractical.

But you'd be asking the people who actually don't know. There are large teams of people working on hyperloop and similar large projects. The chance of a single person finding a fault an entire team of people (including the due diligence investigators hired by the investors) has overlooked is next to zero. Thats why debunking videos typically get stuck in fear mongering / ridicule and offer no real substance. You might have a chance if a project is run by a single person who didn't got the math or basic principles right. Like the space solar mirror thing. Personally I much prefer to watch an informative video from Veritasium (who leaves the verdict to the viewer) rather than a video which is set to axe down an idea right out of the gate. In the end nothing good comes from negativity and ridicule.

[paulca]

Lets say HLoop works.  Lets say they can get a vacuum or low pressure pipe that long etc etc.

The world is not flat.  Not even remotely.  So when you come to inconvenient things like hills, mountains etc.  you have a limited set of options.

Go over, go through, go around.

Going through is going to EXTREMELY expensive. 

So just go around them or over them. Okay.  Anyone want to do the g-force calculations on change of direction at 600km/h+ for a given corner radius?

If you look at the track that an airliner will follow at 400-450knots to maintain 1-1.5g vertical with no yaw or lateral (or you make the passengers violently ill), it would take them about a mile per 15* of course correction.

So we go over?

Again, same problem different axis.  If you want to remain out of "roller coaster" land you need to stay under 1.5g vertical and ideally as close to 1g as possible.  The rate you can "rise" or deflect upwards at 600km/h+ is significantly reduced.  If you want to climb over something like the Alps, you will need a good 10 mile ramp up and if you don't want people bouncing around like Buzz Aldrin another 10-20 mile down ramp.

Little old ladies travelling, trying to walk to the bathroom will not be capable of standing under 1.5g.  On an airliner the only time they are going to put your under that 1.5g is during turbulence or landing/take off when they have already told you to be belted in.

Some basics here for calculating:
https://code7700.com/turn_performance.htm

[nctnico]

This is not the place to start another hyperloop discussion; this has been debated enough already. The subject is how to approach such projects as a Youtube (or similar) content provider. TF's yelling from a soapbox approach is obviously not working.

[PlainName]

The Ingenuity helicopter NASA put on mars is a good example. It's using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor from a phone and other off-the-shelf hardware, not the crazy expensive radiation-hardened CPU used in other missions, and it worked great! It proved you don't need to spend that money on radiation hardened hardware to have a successful mission on mars.

It proved you can beat the odds, which we already knew anyway. But it is one thing to try something that doesn't really matter if it fails, and another to have to rely on it working 100% regardless.
Fast forward to Musk running his Mars day trips and suppose you send your kids a Mars helicopter which fails

It lasted pretty long, months, how long does it need to last to be considered human safe for say 60min on mars?
It's simply about the test data. The more the better.

If you want to add human safety into the mix ...

I think you missed the thrust of my post, perhaps distracted by the 'human safety' thing. It was about being reliable, not safety. Medical stuff needs to be reliable; a one-shot must-work effort needs to be reliable; a "let's try it and see what happens" can play the odds.

[tszaboo]

But you'd be asking the people who actually don't know. There are large teams of people working on hyperloop and similar large projects. The chance of a single person finding a fault an entire team of people (including the due diligence investigators hired by the investors) has overlooked is next to zero. Thats why debunking videos typically get stuck in fear mongering / ridicule and offer no real substance. You might have a chance if a project is run by a single person who didn't got the math or basic principles right. Like the space solar mirror thing. Personally I much prefer to watch an informative video from Veritasium (who leaves the verdict to the viewer) rather than a video which is set to axe down an idea right out of the gate. In the end nothing good comes from negativity and ridicule.

There has been a large number of people working at Theranos, ubeam, or a large number of people over the centuries that tried to do Alchemy. I've interviewed someone for a job, who worked on those pseudo-science alternative "medicine" lamps. His reasoning for working there was, that even though the lamps "probably" don't do anything, at least he did a good job developing the electronics controlling it, so at least it's not unsafe.
People do all kinds of things that make no sense. I think most of Elon's businesses have been a failure, he just launched so many. Which is not  exceptional, I think only 1 in 5 businesses make it

[nctnico]

But you'd be asking the people who actually don't know. There are large teams of people working on hyperloop and similar large projects. The chance of a single person finding a fault an entire team of people (including the due diligence investigators hired by the investors) has overlooked is next to zero. Thats why debunking videos typically get stuck in fear mongering / ridicule and offer no real substance. You might have a chance if a project is run by a single person who didn't got the math or basic principles right. Like the space solar mirror thing. Personally I much prefer to watch an informative video from Veritasium (who leaves the verdict to the viewer) rather than a video which is set to axe down an idea right out of the gate. In the end nothing good comes from negativity and ridicule.

There has been a large number of people working at Theranos, ubeam,

These less than a handfull of edge cases prove very little compared to the tens of thousands of companies putting new, innovative products onto the market every year.

[wraper]

I think most of Elon's businesses have been a failure, he just launched so many. Which is not  exceptional, I think only 1 in 5 businesses make it

What? None of his businesses have ever failed. His first business Global Link/Zip2 - merged with CitySearch, sold to Compaq, X.com - merged with Confinity -> Paypal. After Paypal was sold, invested all the money into SpaceX and Tesla which were the only businesses for a very long time. Founded OpenAi (ChatGPT) nonprofit which he left after a few years because saw it going rogue/for profit. Lately started The boring company, purchased Twitter, started xAi and Neuralink. All alive and well.