The same thing that happens when you develop gastric issues on a 30-minute helicopter tour, as the minister in a wedding ceremony, or in a dentist's chair.
Sure, unless that bathroom is occupied by someone who had gastric issues before you did :).
The meta point: If you can't plan around a 30-minute window of no bathroom access, that biological restriction is a bigger concern than arriving at your destination quickly.
Same thing that happens if you develop unexpected gastric issues during a 30 minute plane flight, I'd imagine, since you'd spend the whole time strapped in for take-off and then landing.
Well the pod has compressor - so it literally can hit the fan :)
The only thing I really dislike so far is the battery pack in the pod. I would have wanted to see something more elegant instead. And this way we halve the weight of the pod.
For the lack of space between the tube and the carrier, is wireless electrical transfer out of the question? Or is that not feasible with the amount of electricity being dealt with here?
Wireless power transfer would likely significantly complicate the design and construction of the tube itself, which as it stands can be just a dumb hollow cylinder on a stick for the vast majority of its length.
Perhaps the redundant vacuum pumps are spaced frequently enough that the power transfer problem would be easy, but I doubt it.
sbashyal pointed out in another thread that you can't use the restroom on a commercial airline during take-off or landing either, which I thought was a great point.
Fast trains are just fast trains. Inside there isn’t much special about them compared to slower ones, except that they are usually more comfortable (softer and adjustable seats, definitely wider, at least in first class, better and more tables, more storage space for luggage, electrical outlets, sometimes crappy WiFi, a crappy restaurant, relatively roomy bathrooms that don’t even look that bad). Also, they actually tend to run much more quietly and rumble less than slower trains, so getting up and walking around is usually never a problem, except maybe when the train is driving into and out of a station and over many switches. At least that’s my experience in Germany, but the TGV isn’t so different (maybe a bit better in some ways).
The problem with the images of the Hyperloop interior is that it looks very much unlike anything you currently find in trains. It looks more like the inside of a race car – with a belt and all – and it doesn’t look like you are supposed to get up and walk around. It doesn’t seem as though there is enough space for that. Maybe that’s just some designer having an unnecessary flight of fancy (but that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the design if it’s that badly though out), maybe that’s an inherent downside of the design. Either way, not good.
In general, most of those things vary massively between classes of trains, and there's no simple low-speed/high-speed distinction. Seat width varies massively between body shell designs, softness often depends on how long since the last refurbishment more than anything else, number of tables and luggage space are often based on the target market for the class, electrical outlets are more and more common (even on commuter trains), WiFi is something I'd expect on most inter-city trains, and on-train restaurants (sadly) are dying out though have historically been common on all inter-city trains.
Smoothness is mostly due to track quality, and is a practical result of design for high-speed running.
At least in Germany WiFi sucks and is not available everywhere – and even if it is you have to be lucky and actually be in a train that supports it. In general seats are most definitely more comfortable in longer distance trains. Yeah, you can find a seat that’s less comfortable in a long distance train than in a regional train, sure, but that’s hardly the point, is it?!
And electrical outlets are getting more common, sure, but the vast majority of German regional trains does not have them and you can only be certain that there will one in a high speed train.
You said it may differ elsewhere — I was providing a more general view of what I would expect in Europe.
WiFi varies a lot from country to country — some places you're lucky to get it on any train, others it's becoming coming common on even regional trains; seats on a lot of the older ICE2 sets were really quite terrible prior to their recent refurbishment, and a lot of IC trains in Germany had far better seats; electrical outlets differ from place to place — the TGV Duplex will never have power outlets at all seats, for example, despite being a high speed train, as there simply isn't sufficient power spare to provide them, and as another example in the UK it depends far more on rolling stock age (or refurbishment date) than whether it's a long-distance train or not.
Currently you get up and go to the bathroom at the end of the car.
I've only had time to skim the full PDF, but there's something about experiencing 0.5g of acceleration - unsure if that is a constant or if that is simply right at the very beginning.
If you're going to experience 0.5g of acceleration over a prolonged period, letting passengers get up and move about is going to be a bad idea. It also doesn't look like there's enough roof to get about in that capsule. 0.5g doesn't sound like a lot until you think about it as 50% of your body weight tacked on, in a direction you're not used to having it tacked on. Pretty simple in a seat, much less simple trying to walk.
Assuming it's very smooth acceleration, it's just like standing on a 26º slope, feeling slightly heavier than normal. Healthy individuals should have no problem at all in such a situation.
> unsure if that is a constant or if that is simply right at the very beginning.
If the top speed is 700mph then you'd have 142 seconds of 0.5 g acceleration to get to top speed. How often you'd be accelerating or decelerating would depend on how many intermediate stations there are.
