Agronox posted:

They’re even backtracking from that (because a prototype should at least work). Now the cultists are calling it a “proof of concept” (though what it’s supposed to prove is still beyond me)

peepeepants posted:

OH MY GOD

a tunnel for every garage


perpendicular tunnel to a tunnel where cars do 150mph
this keeps getting better
lmao

shiksa posted:

its almost as if this was an incredibly huge embarrassment and the entire media is still covering musk with kid gloves while coming to the realization that he's already well into becoming howard hughes?

oystertoadfish posted:

also the source on that image is SpaceX. are they making the elevators? or is this whole enterprise just hopelessly mushed together? i guess we already know SpaceX is footing the bill, or at least however much of it elon stole from his investors to put in his other company

it'd be funny if elon murdered privatized space travel for a generation by losing his shirt on this other poo poo

pushpins posted:

Rockopolis posted:

So did he halfass the tunnel because he's using it to launder the equipment rental and dirt from digging another drug tunnel under the border?
Hm. Or if it's an escape tunnel he's probably going to end up drowning in a river of poo poo.

oystertoadfish posted:

also the source on that image is SpaceX. are they making the elevators? or is this whole enterprise just hopelessly mushed together? i guess we already know SpaceX is footing the bill, or at least however much of it elon stole from his investors to put in his other company

it'd be funny if elon murdered privatized space travel for a generation by losing his shirt on this other poo poo

Rockopolis posted:

So did he halfass the tunnel because he's using it to launder the equipment rental and dirt from digging another drug tunnel under the border?
Hm. Or if it's an escape tunnel he's probably going to end up drowning in a river of poo poo.

Lokar posted:

A Tesla director of investor relations just left the company

pushpins posted:

Main Paineframe posted:

spacex probably paid for the graphic

which, it turns out, was made by a professional freelance infographic consultant

Tuna-Fish posted:

Running at a loss would not in itself be weird. However, when SpaceX raises money, they have to make public releases about the financial obligations of the company and about how it's ownership is structured.

From those, it's possible to see that SpaceX has to date raised a total of $2.5B capital, and has less than $500M of debt. Comparing this against estimated yearly labor costs of >$1B for the workforce, there is simply no room for them to sell rockets substantially below cost. The alternative is that they have lied on official financial releases, and for that Musk wouldn't get a fine like he did for his twitter trolling, he'd actually go to prison.

On top of that, they do not claim to make a small profit; they claim to make money hand over fist at current prices. Most analysts believe this is credible, partly because they get to re-use landed boosters, but frankly more because it's believed that they can build rockets for cheaper. The reason it's believed to be able to build rockets cheaper than their current competition is that their current competition has never really attempted to build rockets cheaper, because it wasn't really in their interests.

The space industry everywhere arose from tools of the cold war, with the "get this done right, cost is no object" mentality. In the US, this meant cost+ contracts with a million subcontractors for every rocket. The main thing that makes SpaceX different is that they try to vertically integrate everything about launching things to space. Elon has boasted that his factory takes unrefined raw materials out of one end and spits out rockets out of the other. Their competitors don't really build rockets from scratch, they assemble rockets from parts made by dozens of subcontractors. The reason this is relevant is that for someone working on a cost+ contract, the overhead of his subcontractors provide additional profit to him. So there is no desire to drive down the cost of parts ordered from subcontractors.

Almost every part in a SpaceX rocket is suboptimal compared to their competitors. You can find a million long diatribes on the internet about how, for example, the upper stage engine is ridiculously heavy an inefficient compared to just putting a RL-10B up there. All of these are right, about the very specific subject of a given component being bad compared to what others use. But they miss the point that a Falcon 9 is not optimized to get the most performance out of every part. It's optimized to be cheap to mass-produce. Part of that was choosing to use the same engine for both stages, even if that's really suboptimal in performance, simply because it means they only need a single production line.

Bip Roberts posted:

South Africa is down

MelancholyMark posted:

https://twitter.com/Attack/status/1075457030620569600
Elon RTed that lol

AnimeIsTrash posted:

LMAO

Skellybones posted:

For some reason this reminds me of the nightmarish insane warp drive room from Event Horizon

Bear Retrieval Unit posted:

So I haven't been following the dumb tunnel thing too closely, are they still planning on depressurizing the tunnels? And if so are tesla's even designed to withstand a 1 atm pressure difference? Because from what we've seen of their integrity so far I'm pretty sure the windows are gonna pop out.

Iron Crowned posted:

I would take back every bad thing I've ever said about Elon Musk if he did open a gateway to hell

bird with big dick posted:

that’s the hyper loop.

in this one the tunnels are super pressurized so it shoots your car along like those tubes at the bank drive through.

oystertoadfish posted:

ok that makes sense thanks

i wanted to make that post but i figured i should add some content, so here's an interesting post from the SAL space industry thread about SpaceX's business model. there's a bit of back and forth in that thread, it seems like they end up agreeing that spacex earns a profit from each launch but whether the whole company is profitable is unknowable


just in case people here care

Iron Crowned posted:

I like how Elon Musk apparently doesn't realize that concrete, is porous. I'm not an expert on concrete, but wouldn't that not only make it impossible to pressurized (other than the fact that you'd have vehicles entering and exiting frequently)?

On top of that, water passes through concrete, so those tunnels would become musty as gently caress in no time.

Main Paineframe posted:

sounds about right

spacex is sucking up tons of govt funding and has at least enough money lying around that Elon can use SpaceX company money to pay for Boring Company stuff


these aren't the hyperloop tunnels, they're just his random "tunnels are the solution to traffic congestion because you can put an infinite number of roads underground" tunnels

shiksa posted:

the entire media is still covering musk with kid gloves while coming to the realization that he's already well into becoming howard hughes?

pushpins posted:

drgitlin posted:

Not all of us!

gschmidl posted:

Musk's Mongorail

Shifty Pony posted:

as for the NY 2nd ave subway - getting the machine running after it has been sitting for a decade or more is a very dicey proposal and the costs which would be incurred if it were to break down so extreme it makes sense to just use another one.

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

pfft you don't need air to cure concrete we'll just use magnets *turns back to gaming console*

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1073507274419621888

juche avocado posted:

https://twitter.com/dkwallace1217/status/1075779795890397184?s=20