Smartcookie, I really like you but I am deeply disappointed by your non-answer. Really, "he's a naysayer, I place no store in what this guy says." is your argument? What if I called you an Elon fanboy? Jay would pick us both apart for fallacies, and rightfully so.
Call me what you like, I don't care - I have a hide of a rhinoceros when it comes to name-calling in the internet.
Thunderfoot has a grasp of both engineering and physics (I'm merely a physicist). He provides back-of-the-envelope calculations which he uses to support his points. That's more than the average fan boy does or can even understand (not directed at you, I like you, space era brother).
The only thing I see Thunderfoot using is mockery to support his claims, for example, using snippets of
"The Simpsons", and excursions into misleading holiday resort ads to take the piss - I don't find that either funny or particularly erudite - its the sort of crap that flat earthers and moon hoax deniers do in their videos. If he wants his viewers to take him seriously, then he needs to cut out the smart alec crap he puts in his videos, and treat the subject matter seriously.
Unlike you, I am not at all impressed with his
"grasp of both engineering and physics", for example he claims that the occupants of the pod would not be able to breath and would die because the tube is at vacuum...he clearly hasn't heard of
"pressurization"..... Oh wait he has, and he tries (and fails) to explain that too. He claims that an aircraft is sealed up at sea level pressure and while flying at 40,000 feet, the occupants are breathing sea level pressure air. This is completely wrong! Aircraft are pressurized at a pressure ratio usually about 5:1 to 7:1. An aircraft flying at about 40,000 has a cabin altitude of between 6,000 and 8,000 feet, i.e. the occupants are breathing air at the same pressure that they would be standing on a 6,000 to 8,000 foot hill.
So, why don't they just pressurize aircraft at sea level? Because the differential pressures between the aircraft and the cabin interior would be too high, and that would cause the aircraft structure to have to be much stronger (and therefore heavier) to be able to cope with the higher pressure differentials, reducing the aircraft's performance. However, in the case of a hyperloop tube and pod, weight and mass are not as important. A pod could be built strong enough to be pressurized to sea level with a very low pressure inside the tube. Someone with any kind of grasp of engineering would know that - he clearly doesn't.
He buys expensive equipment to demonstrate in experiments (empirically, WHAT A CONCEPT!) what it takes to use cold gas thrusters for car levitation. Musk should go with his tail between his legs. That was one of many moments he let the 90% snake oil salesman out. If you feel otherwise, please argue (preferably with maths and physics), why you believe, flying cars can and should be built with cold gas thrusters to move a little bit around.
We weren't talking about flying cars.
The thing is, the history of engineering and physics is replete with people who have had their ideas called stupid, crazy, infeasible, physically impossible... and then, they actually do it and make it work.
Heavier that Air flying machines (The Wright Brothers)
Rockets to the Moon (Wernher von Braun)
Power distribution using Alternating Current (Nikola Tesla)
Electric Lights (Thomas Edison)
Bringing rocket boosters back from space and landing then vertically (Elon Musk)
The inventors of these these were all told that these things were impossibilities from a physics and engineering standpoint. They were mercilessly mocked for continuing to waste their time and effort trying.
Then there are people who were brilliant in their fields of science and engineering, who got some of the fundamental principles completely wrong.
Robert Goddard put the nozzles of his rockets at the top because, as brilliant as he was, he didn't understand The Pendulum Fallacy.
Fred Hoyle (an otherwise brilliant astronomer) held a belief in his
"Steady State" theory of the universe, despite the fact that it violated a fundamental principle of physics, - that matter cannot be either created or destroyed.
Simon Newcomb, one of the greatest scientific minds of his time....
."aerial flight is one of the great class of problems with which man can never cope.... even if a man flew he could not stop. Once he slackens his speed, down he begins to fall. Once he stops, he falls as a dead mass.". Of course, Newcomb, brilliant as he was, did not understand the concept of an airfoil.
Just because an idea might seem crazy, does not mean it should not be investigated, because you never know what might be learned from trying...
"Many hypotheses proposed by scientists as well as by non-scientists turn out to be wrong. But science is a self-correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all new ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence. The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that his hypotheses were wrong or in contradiction to firmly established facts, but that some who called themselves scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky’s work. Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights."- Carl Sagan, circa1980
