Elon Musk Reveals Hyperloop Plans

Ladies and gentlemen, Tesla CEO Elon Musk's long-awaited preliminary Hyperloop plans have finally been revealed.

Musk via Twitter pointed us to this link, where we could take a look at the alpha design for his revolutionary mass transportation system, one he says that could take passengers from downtown L.A. to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes.

As he explains, the system would be comprised of pods traveling in tubes suspended on pylons that follow alongside the mostly straight California Interstate 5 highway.

Contrary to what some have speculated about the design, there is not a vacuum in the tubes to avoid high-speed drag, nor does it ride on an electromagnetic suspension system to do away with surface friction, like the Japanese bullet trains.

Keeping even a soft vacuum (much less a hard one) in a system of tubes hundreds of miles long is just not practical, so Musk's plans call for drag to be done away with by mounting "an electric compressor fan on the nose of the pod that actively transfers high pressure air from the front to the rear of the vessel."

And surface friction would be mitigated by using air bearings, the phenomenon that allows air hockey pucks to zip along. Air bearings "have been demonstrated to work at speeds of Mach 1.1 with very low friction," says Musk.

And where would the power come from to operate the Hyperloop? From the sun, of course, though the electricity produced by solar panels on top of the tubes would not necessarily be stored in batteries. Musk suggests storing the energy in "the form of compressed air that runs an electric fan in reverse to generate energy."

Just moments after Musk announcing these plans, he tweeted that an updated version, with corrections, was forthcoming.

The Hyperloop will likely have many twists and turns to come.