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RE: Mathematically Breaking Down the Hyperloop (Math Warning) Part 1
Quick thought... if it costs lots of energy to vacuum the system, surely a lot of energy could be harnessed when it's re-pressurised? Could this be harnessed to ofset the overall cost of going back and forth?
It could to a point as long as people are okay with pressurization times to increase (because you will have to limit the air going into the tube to some extent) or else they would have to have more sites for the pressurization to happen but that also means A) more Single Point of Failure's will exist (i.e. any point that if they fail has the potential to cause the entire system to fail) and B) you will have more problems with leakage which will mean higher energy consumption. You could also have some of these points work as both an intake and have a pump and have it generate energy but you will still need to limit the air flow at those points because if they are out of sync with each other then it becomes very difficult to convert it to DC to charge a battery system, if they are going at different frequencies then it will be very difficult to have an electronics system that can handle the wide array of frequencies, and more. Basically, if the turbines aren't spinning within a specific frequency range then it has the potential to ruin the electronics.
I might be making this more confusing. Anyways they could do that to allow for energy production but it would add a lot of complexity to a system that already isn't very thought out (it would be better to have a loading bay and then the evacuated tunnel and have only the loading bay get pressurized and depressurized with an air tight seal between that and the tunnel and only when the loading bay is depressurized will the air sealed door open, however this too is very complex)
So I think the best argument that can be made about this entire situation is K.I.S.S.
Keep It Simple Stupid
I think the take-home from all these arguments is really that the system just has so many ways to fail and failure in the case of a system like this is going to be catastrophic!
Oh yeah, I mean if there is a catastrophic failure then you have almost 1 GJ of energy being released per kilometer of vacuum, so like a quarter of a ton of TNT which basically means if something catastrophic happened it would be like there was a line of dynamite the length of the tube that would go off (doesn't sound like a lot but if you are in the tube or at a loading zone then things can be violent and if there are battery arrays for the solar panels then you just increase the potential energy in those locations)
Not to mention that the sudden re-pressurization would result in the whole system gaining a whole lot of thermal energy, probably burning everyone inside.