News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done.

Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by sambroner on Thursday January 16, 2020 @04:36PM (#22069225)
I don't know much about tunneling speeds, but this seems much faster than Big Bertha in Seattle although for a much smaller volume (the tunnel is narrower) and (I'm assuming) less complex location.

Big Bertha - 3.5 years, ~1.75 miles, 1.5 m/yr

Boring - .15 years, .35 miles, 2.33 m/yr

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by cjhopman on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:31PM (#22069728)
Big Bertha is roughly 25x the size of boring company's tunnel borer. And, while your math it totally wrong for Big Bertha, it should be 0.5 miles/yr. But if you account for the 2 years that it wasn't running for repairs then it does end up at roughly 1.3 miles/yr.

Why not compare against a tunnel borer of the same size?

The world's fastest tunnel borer of that size was for the tunneling of the blue mountains (described here: https://www.therobbinscompany.com/the-worlds-fastest-tbm/). That was more than 25 years ago and even at it's average speed over the whole project, it was doing 1800ft 4 times faster than Boring company's "amazingly fast" borer.

A more typical example boring through very hard rock does ~700 ft per month: https://www.therobbinscompany.com/midhalton/

Or how about a larger tunnel w/ 160gal/s of water inflow doing 1600ft in a month: https://www.therobbinscompany.com/gerede-breakthrough/

If there's something special about the Boring company (unlikely) it's definitely not its boring ability. They just buy a used boring machine and they don't even have the expertise to do anything interesting with it.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by drcross on Thursday January 16, 2020 @10:10PM (#22071521)
They are currently building their first prototype. It seems correct that you would build a few tunnels using conventional equipment to gain experience before setting your sights on improving the state of the art, or is there something I'm missing?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by bluGill on Friday January 17, 2020 @12:22AM (#22072117)
You are missing something: the companies that build tunnel boring machines already have engineers who know how to make the machines looking into the problem of making their designs better. It isn't clear that there is a significant improvement available.

Rockets were a small enough niche that there were improvements possible if someone invested in them. It isn't clear if such improvements are even possible. (meaning they might be)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by Traster on Friday January 17, 2020 @08:47AM (#22074548)
Right, but existing boring machine manufacturers don't have an infinite money pile to burn through, so they can't afford to try all the things that TBC will be allowed to try simply because Silicon Valley will afford them a bottomless pit of cash (until the next recession).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by semi-extrinsic on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:03PM (#22069502)
For the Crossrail project going under London, they used 8 machines in parallel and took 3 years to dig a total of 26 miles of 20 ft diameter tunnels.

That's a little more than 1 mile/yr, an average number that includes overhead like moving the TBMs between the different boring sites. And the cutting surface area (which multiplies linear speed to give material removal rate) is (20/14)^2 = 2.04 times bigger for Crossrail than the Boring Co. machines.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by hobofan on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:26PM (#22069696)
The two projects are on such opposite ends of the spectrum that it really makes them incomparable. Big Bertha was the second biggest boring machine ever built, and also in a risky location. On top of that it was built by a company with no experience in building boring machines anywhere close to its size.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by reaperducer on Thursday January 16, 2020 @06:26PM (#22070197)
this seems much faster than Big Bertha in Seattle

Big Bertha dug under the downtown of a city with existing tunnels and utilities. The Las Vegas tunnel is mostly under parking lots with no obstructions.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by kjksf on Thursday January 16, 2020 @07:41PM (#22070704)
While I doubt that "Las Vegas tunnel is mostly under parking lots with no obstructions" is even close to represent reality, here's what Boring Company says on the subject:

> With a typical minimum depth of 30 feet, The Boring Company tunnels are well beneath most utilities, which are typically less than 10 feet below the surface. In circumstances where a utility is located deeper, the tunnel depth is increased accordingly.

From https://www.boringcompany.com/faq

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by reaperducer on Thursday January 16, 2020 @09:15PM (#22071254)
While I doubt that "Las Vegas tunnel is mostly under parking lots with no obstructions" is even close to represent reality

I've been to the site. I've seen the machines and the pit. I have no doubt about what I've seen.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by CydeWeys on Thursday January 16, 2020 @04:48PM (#22069350)
Your units are confusing me. Meters per year? Surely they're faster than that?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by jchw on Thursday January 16, 2020 @04:49PM (#22069362)
Guessing they are talking about construction time?

edit: Oops I accidentally misunderstood your questioning. Surely that must be miles per year.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by Jernik on Thursday January 16, 2020 @04:54PM (#22069424)
They used miles and years right before that, so I'm not sure how it is confusing that m/yr is miles/year
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by microtherion on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:41PM (#22069808)
"mile" is typically abbreviated as "mi".
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by OnlineGladiator on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:18PM (#22069623)
It's confusing because the way the units are represented is inconsistent.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by Dylan16807 on Friday January 17, 2020 @02:05AM (#22072509)
You find the 'yr' confusing?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by OnlineGladiator on Friday January 17, 2020 @05:51PM (#22080414)
No, they interchanged miles with m, and in a weird unintuitive way at that. m isn't even standard for miles, it's standard for meters, and just before that miles was written instead of shortened - it's not just confusing it's also terribly presented. At least yr is intuitive, nothing about m is easily understood even given the context (which is why so many other people are complaining about it).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by Dylan16807 on Friday January 17, 2020 @09:44PM (#22081858)
Okay, though that sounds like you're actually objecting for a different reason than inconsistency.

But I will note that "m" is used in the common distance-over-time unit of mph.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by CydeWeys on Thursday January 16, 2020 @11:42PM (#22071915)
That, and also m=meter, mi=mile.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by snazz on Thursday January 16, 2020 @04:50PM (#22069370)
Miles
[ Parent | on HN ]