Makes winning so much sweeter: no need to concede bullshit "acknowledgements" to absent profs and grant agencies and supervisors who sit the entire project out, only to inject themselves into the final credits and collect the post-victory interviews. Standard academic practice.

Great job, students!

Why wouldn't a grant agency get acknowledgements if they provided funding?

If you look at the winning pod, it is covered with logos of sponsors as acknowledgement.

It's one thing to have a line in a paper saying 'this research was funded in part by the NSF' and another thing entirely to have people talking to the media about said work.

It's not all that different from accelerators partially funding startups and associating themselves with the successes as long,as they want. I think it's arguable earned.

Are you sure? TUM is listed next to Airbus under "Main Sponsors".

I'm sure. They are officially incorporated under the umbrella WARR organization which also has the rocketry and satellite student projects of the TUM, but doesn't receive any funding either. They basically have financial compliance oversight and that's it.

Is WARR the cart in the image? Why does it have all those logos?

If that is the WARR vehicle, the GP doesn't mention not getting sponsors, just that the University didn't directly support it.

Though, I wonder where they built this and worked on it. My guess would be that they had lab space provided by the school.

There is lab space provided by university (we find it very weird that you call it school).

The main point is that the WARR teams (Hyperloop, space elevator, deep space concepts, rockets and satellites [I'm in the sat group]) are student teams. Some Ph.D students are involved, too, but the point is that we decide what we do. The teamleader is a student. The ideas are from the students.

The University, in the form of the chairs (Astronautics and Propulsion) are partners and friends, but we are in charge of what we do.

WARR is actually older than the Universities Astronautics chair.

(btw, high to all WARRians on hackernews)

In America, "school" is a generic term for any kind of educational institution

Well, but we Americans also say "where did you go to school?" meaning, in most adult contexts, what other English speakers mean when they say "where did you attend university?"

I agree it's a weird synecdoche, although, English is full of them if you look. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche#Examples

To be fair, America seems to change up a lot of conventional English, haha :P

Greetings from your friends at TUfast Driverless :)

Lab space is provided by TUM makerspace, which is a separate commercial venture, affiliated with but organizationally separate from the university.

I posted to distinguish the TUM team from for example Swissloop, who receive direct funding and R&D support from ETH.

Those are their sponsors. So I don't know if "no funding" is right. Also they directly list TUM (TU Munich) as sponsor.

http://hyperloop.warr.de/#sec_sponsor

I don't think that it's supposed to be read "no funding in general and no direct support from the university", but instead "the university offered them no funding or direct support"

The students went out and got their own sponsorship from external bodies. The university provides no money.

The logos are those of sponsors, not of the university ;)

Based on the number of logos on the vehicle. I'm sure they have sponsors.

The WARR team went out and got sponsorship on their own, not through the university.